Etsy, the little engine that could, passed the million items sold milestone sometime this week.
The founders launched the Etsy service just over two years ago. That’s one million items sold in the Etsy marketplace in two years. It’s not McDonald’s territory yet, but then again Etsy’s not a mass produced thing.
Congratulations to the entire Etsy universe, buyers, sellers, and team Etsy!
It’s time to take some time off.
It’s been a busy summer and it’s not slowing down.
But I am going to slow down for the next week.
In Greece with my family.
Like all my vacations, I’ll be blogging the highlights.
And twittering.
And flickering.
I hope to get at least one photo as amazing as this one.
Twitter just announced the financing we did with them.
My post explaining why we are so excited about this investment is on the Union Square Ventures blog.
The photo decorating this post is called "Twittering Machine" and it was done by Paul Klee in 1922.
I guess Klee really was a visionary.
I certainly have become a twittering machine and I am really enjoying it.
How did I not know about this guy?
Last week a Ycombinator team came to see us at Union Square Ventures and they gave us a mixed CD. What a treasure trove that CD has been. And no that’s not the way to get Union Square Ventures to fund your company. But it sure was nice. It had Camera Obscura on it which I blogged last week. And it had Black Cab from Jens Lekman off the Oh You’re So Silent Jens record.
This record is a compilation of three EPs. And apparently its the last record Jens is ever going to release. Not sure what that means. Is he done recording music? Or is he just going to put out singles?
The closest thing to this record that I’ve come across is 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields. If you like that record, I can confidently say you’ll like Jens.
This song, called Pocketful Of Money, has Johnny Cash singing on it. Maybe its a sample? Or maybe he recorded this before he died? Who knows. But it’s great.
I am going to do some audio posts on this blog for the next month. If you all like them, I might keep doing them. Let me know what you think.
The reason I am doing them is HP is running a campaign on this blog and others in the Federated Media stable and they want to promote audio blogging. Here’s John Battelle’s first voice post.
Anyway, here’s my first voice post.
Shilling for our portfolio again, but I think this is interesting.
Wesabe has done two things in the past week that are worth paying attention to.
1 – they released a full API that effectively means your bank now as an API
2 – they released a firefox uploader that really is a game changer in getting your financial information onto the web
Co-founder Marc Hedlund has a great post on O’Reilly’s Radar explaining why all this matters.
I really like the hand AOL is playing in the Internet display advertising business. And the card they just pulled (TACODA) is going to really strengthen their hand.
Brad has his take on the TACODA transaction on the Union Square Ventures blog. Brad and Dave Morgan started TACODA several years before we started Union Square Ventures and TACODA had a lot to do with why we started the partnership and how we think about investing. So it’s a great outcome for us, Dave, Curt, and the entire company. But Brad says all that in his post. So please give it a read.
Dave Winer is using the FeedBurner/Google transaction to make some good points about the value of open versus closed and hopefully Google will listen to Dave and others who want to make sure that feeds remain an open ecosystem. That’s all good.
But I really have a problem with the headline Dave’s using, "Why FeedBurner is Trouble". I don’t really think that’s the way to make friends and influence people. Which is what blogging is all about.
I have made some tweaks to the way the search field on this blog works. I’ve been using Lijit for the search box for a while now and I like it.
According to Lijit, I get about 50 searches a day on this blog. That’s enough usage to try to get it working right.
So first, I moved the search box above the fold on the right sidebar (at least above my fold). That’s been nagging me for a while.
Second, I added back the search term cloud. It’s interesting to me what people search on. Maybe it is to you too.
Third, I added re-search to my archive/permalink pages. When you come to this blog via google or any search engine, you’ll see the re-search box at the top of the archive page with some additional links. Since about 40% of the traffic to this blog is search driven, I think that should be helpful. I’d be curious to hear what people think.
Paul Graham does some equity math for entrepreneurs trying to figure out if the dilution from a VC deal or an equity grant to an employee is worth it.
As usual, it’s a good read.
