Chad Dickerson

Was there a handover period, or did he stay on for a while once you took over?

In July, the board asked me to be chief executive and I was chief executive at that point forward.

Since then there’s been some big milestones with $40 million investment in May this year and a $688 million valuation. What has that investment meant for Etsy as a company?

The valuation is unverified, by the way – we don’t comment on valuation. The money just went into the bank literally a matter of weeks ago but what the investment means for Etsy is that we were able to invest a lot more deeply internationally.

One of the reasons I’m here in Australia is just to demonstrate the beginning of our investment here. We have two people on the ground, we’ve opened the Melbourne showroom, and I think the $40 million in the investment allows us to think about doing that for the rest of the world. So not just having staff on the ground in Australia, but having staff on the ground in many other markets.

Etsy’s basically beating the market at the moment with eCommerce growing at 18% and it’s achieving almost 70%. What’s the secret behind that?

I think that when you’re spending your money and you’re looking for a more authentic experience, and a more meaningful experience when you’re buying something, Etsy really represents that. So when you’re buying something on Etsy, you’re buying from a person you can have a relationship with.

It’s very much like the way you think about a farmer’s market. You can buy at a farmer’s market or you can buy from a supermarket if you’re buying produce or vegetables. And the experience of buying at a farmer’s market is more satisfying because of the personal interaction.

So I think we’re bringing that sense of person interaction and commerce as a sort of relationship building activity to the web. So it’s more fun to buy something on Etsy than to buy something on a traditional eCommerce site because you can have a relationship with the person that you’re buying from.

I think one of the most amazing things is – and this isn’t really a requirement for Etsy but I think it speaks to the culture of Etsy – when you buy something on Etsy, the packaging that you get is always so much nicer and more thoughtful.

You can just feel the care and craftsmanship that was put into not just the item that you buy, but also the packaging. So it not only is more special because someone made it for you, but also the experience of opening it, you feel like you really are getting something from a real person who took a lot of care in putting it together.

Etsy does some interesting things culture wise. I understand Etsy has someone cooking lunch a couple of days a week, and gives employees money to spend on Etsy to create their workplace. Can you tell us about that?

Etsy is a values-based company and Etsy as a company wants to change the world, make the world more personal, make commerce more meaningful. That really starts with change from within, and becoming the company that we want the rest of the world to be like.

So we do have the lunches twice a week called Eatsy. What Eatsy is really about, aside from bringing employees together to have a really nice meal twice a week, is we also talk about where the foods come from and what farmers made it and that sort of thing. So there’s a lot of thought and awareness around what type of food we’re having.

We also recently became a certified b-corporation. B-corporations are a new movement in the States right now, and it stands for benefit corporation. The idea is that benefit corporations believe that you can use the power of business for social and environmental good.

We announced with our funding that we have become a certified b-corp, which means that we went through a third-party evaluation from a non-profit organisation called b-lab in New York. We had to go through this really detailed third-party assessment of our business practices, and you have to score a certain level. They look at how you communicate to your company and your customers; they look at how you treat your workers; they look at how you serve your community; and they look at environmental practices.

We went through that assessment and passed, and we became a certified b-corp along with Patagonia, which is probably the most well-known company. We really care a lot about the values we talk about, changing the economy. We really think that those values start at home, and we want to run a company that contains and reinforces the values that we’re trying to spread out into the world. So those values are incredibly important to us.

I understand that after being made chief executive you’ve also instituted a company policy of not blaming people, or having a blame-free analysis of things that go wrong.

So I think that the principles around things like Eatsy, the meals, and b-corp, is all about transparency. Because with Eatsy it’s about knowing about where the food came from and with b-corp it’s transparency in how the business operates and communication. So we have what we call blameless post-mortems – things go wrong in business and then you have a meeting, this post-mortem meeting.

You really want to analyse what happened, and we really believe that if you conduct those meetings and those processes without pointing fingers and blaming other people it actually leads to greater transparency into what went wrong. Really, John Allspaw, our head of tech operations, has been the biggest proponent of this, but we’ve all worked in companies where there have been blame cultures, and we’ve all seen what has happened when people get blamed, and people stop sharing information because they don’t want to get implicated.

So we’ve made that a policy inside the company and what we’ve found is that by not blaming people for mistakes I think we make fewer mistakes. And when we do make mistakes, we actually learn about what caused the mistakes and how to improve it the next time. So that’s super important to us.