Davos Interviews: Etsy Founder Robert Kalin

My husband is spamming me with too many links! I cannot keep up...

For your listening pleasure:

Actually, I just listened to the Davos talk and it is much more interesting than the techcrunch interview particulary because Michael Arrington aggressively corners Kalin at the conference and asks fairly silly questions.

After listening to Kalin's Davos talk, I am interested to find that Leo Lionni's Swimmy model is a model for the online world and our future.

Continuing my series of interviews with interesting personalities at the World Economic Forum at Davos: Here’s a 6 minute talk with Etsy founder Robert Kalin on the state of his four year old business. Robert Scoble helps with the interview.

28 year old Kalin, who coincidentally looks a lot like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, talks about how he’s grown the person-to-person ecommerce business despite competing directly with eBay. Etsy focuses on hand made items, and has a rabidly passionate community of buyers and sellers (also, 97% of Etsy users are women). Kalin also eats his own dog food - most of his clothing was purchased from the site, he says in the interview.

$100 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in 2008. The company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, Kalin told me.

We first covered Etsy in late 2005. Since then the company has raised over $30 million in financing, and counts Jim Breyer as a board member (he’s also on the board of Walmart, Facebook and Marvel).

The full transcript is below:
via techcrunch:
Davos Interviews: Etsy Founder Robert Kalin

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