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In case you missed it last week, on Tuesday May 2nd 2017 Chad Dickerson was removed as CEO of Etsy after almost 6 years in that position; he will remain in an “advisory role” until the end of May.
Chad is being replaced by Josh Silverman who is currently a board director on Etsy’s board.
Chad is also being replaced as the chairman of the Etsy board by a tech investor, Fred Wilson.
But wait… There’s more…
Etsy also announced that they will lay off approximately 8% of its total workforce which equates to about 80 positions.
Now, I don’t know this for a fact, but based on y research and according to the Bloomberg website, black & White Capital LP (who owns about 2% of Etsy) urged Etsy to explore “strategic alternatives… including a possible sale”
Here are some other quotes from Black & White’s proposals for and criticisms of Etsy:
- “…the company’s historical pattern of ill-advised spending has completely obfuscated the extremely attractive underlying marketplace business model…”
- “…we are fully prepared to take any actions we believe are necessary to protect the best interests of all Etsy shareholders…”
- and finally, Black & White Capital LP wants Etsy to better invest R&D to fix its “horrendous search functionality”, suggest similar available items, and redirect marketing expenses to drive repeat customers… and some other suggestions
So… I kept waiting for Etsy to say something publicly about all of this but they remained pretty mute on the whole topic until about Thursday or Friday.
You might have received an email form Etsy’s new CEO, if you missed, I read it verbatim in the podcast.
Takeaways:
- Don’t forget the Q&A with Josh Silverman will be this Thursday May 11th, 2017 in the Etsy Forums though no specific start and end times were given
- You can check the Etsy forums as of today (per Josh’s email) to find out how to participate
- I plan to join the Q&A session and then do a follow-up podcast episode about it so stay tuned/come back for that 🙂
Update On Etsy Q&A Pt.2
I reached out a couple of Etsy Admins and was asked to submit my request for an interview through Etsy’s media relations/PR department.
I guess the good news there is that I’m now officially considered “the media” 😉
Anyway, long story short, after exchanging multiple emails with the someone in Etsy’s media department, the response I got was essentially, “not now…”.
In the podcast episode I explain what my plan is going to be going forward…
First off, thank you so much to everyone, and I mean, every single person, who sent in a question. I don’t want your effort and time spent responding to go to waste so I will hunt down the answers to your questions, even if it means reaching out to Etsy support for each individual question.
I will create either a Q&A blog post or podcast series so please stay tuned.
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