Member Blogs

Observations from Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea's Maker Faire presentation 9/18/11

• Community markets have bidirectional information flow, a diverse marketplace with increased capacity, and grassroots economics ("Markets are conversations").
• Handmade is characterized by creative inefficiency, as opposed to the current model where production is automated, uniform, and price-focused.
• Teams have 30% more sales than individuals. This reminded me of how scientific collaborations and shared authorship lead to increased publishing rates.

I asked Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea how he thought the shift in markets and production would unfold as we move from a manufacturing economy toward community markets and open source, and from information scarcity toward information abundance. He said that overall, it was taking longer than they expected. He has noticed, however, that sellers who share more about their processes tend do better than sellers who don't (lift in sales).