Truth about Etsy
The unfortunate truth about Etsy is that they lied big time. In 2023 they actually let go of 25% of their staff. 11% official layoffs and additional 14% in “performance” reasons aka pip.
"PIP layoffs" have always been a thing
Etsy is having financial issues so . . . Them are the breaks
Etsy was having financial issues before 2020. They got saved by the pandemic and now are facing reality.
They seem to be moving all their engineering to Mexico.
Amazon the same and Google to Poland. What a cheap corps hope they all bankrupt
Thanks for sharing. As an employee, I confirm that this is true. A lot of people disappeared during 2023, and another 11% got fired the day before the Christmas holiday.
I believe it. where’d you get the 14% from tho? 👀
It is unfortunate for the people impacted. But the issue is entirely fixable. The core business is doing just fine (look at eBay for comparison which is 12+ years older). eBay GMV is ~90B, $60B+ excluding autos. Even if you cut that in half to account for things Etsy won’t sell by policy like iPhones or consumer electronics, that’s 2.5x today’s GMV. That’s a huge amount of headroom to capture and grow the business. The problem is exceptionally poor capital allocation judgement by management - depop, elo7, etc for which they loaded up on debt ($2B+) via corp notes that come due in 2026. They took a $1B impairment charge on this M&A in 2022, which took an otherwise very positive EBITDA negative. The CEO has also sold $238M (>50%) worth of the 4M options he was granted in 2017. There is so much upside in doing obvious things to grow the platform, they just need competent business thinking.
Too bad they keep hiring bad leadership from Amex. I swear half the company’s leadership is now from Amex and a lot of them seem very incompetent. You also can’t run Etsy like Amex, it is just alienating buyers and sellers. They’ve really changed the culture over the last few years. I’m hoping executives will be ousted later in 2024, although downside with that is likely another round of layoffs. It’d be great if the next layoffs were upper leadership as they can’t layoff others because who would be left to do the actual work?
Yes but guess why? The COO was previously CEO’s chief of staff at Amex — valuing loyalty and following orders over competency.
Issue is fixable, but not with this leadership.
Ok, TC? Covid revenue on wane so cuts