Davos 2009 - IdeasLab - Robert Kalin

So my name is Robert Kalin and I live and work in Red Hook, Brooklyn. This is the view out my office desk, some people I work with, and this is the view out my window where I see the Statue of Liberty. I like that because it puts me in this frame of mind of how I'm always looking at how people were when they were coming to the United States, this land of opportunity. So I'm going to show how lots of little things can be more powerful than big things—a larger number of small things can be more powerful than a smaller number of large things. There happens to be a children's story that illustrates this very well: the children's story of Swimmy. There's one little fish in the sea playing with all his friends; a big fish comes and eats them. He escapes, gets lost, and is looking for more of his friends, but he can't find any. He finally sees some, all hiding in the rocks, and he says, 'Come out and play,' and they won't because they're afraid. So, you can't just hide there all day; we have to think of something. What is the solution? I think the solution starts with our last names. So many people here—I'm sure—our last names come from what we actually made with our hands. This is in all languages: from 'Bookbinder' in German to someone who binds books, and my favorite is 'Fletcher,' someone who put feathers in arrows. This is something we've come so far away from that we don't even see that what we're making with our hands has anything to do with our last name or vice versa. One of the things I'm trying to do is reconnect people in that sense—your identity is what you make. It's not just 'you are what you eat,' it's 'you are what you make.' So I started a marketplace called Etsy, which is a handmade marketplace. Everything on Etsy that's sold is sold by the person who makes it, so there's no reselling. The range of goods is huge—everything from guitars to jewelry to clothing to metalsmithing. The reach of this is gigantic. In November of last year alone, over $12 million worth of handmade goods was sold on the site. The company is based in Brooklyn, and our business model is that we take a 20-cent listing fee, a three and a half percent sales fee, and we run our own in-house advertising program as well. This has all grown to the point where the biggest goal is to enable people to make their living with what they're doing. But it's really difficult to get from the tipping point beyond just doing this as a hobby to really being able to make a living—supporting a family, paying for college, paying for your kids' college. So how do you get from doing it as more of a hobby to organizing to the point where you can actually make a living? This is a crude model showing what I see as the evolution: you can have these massive companies where everything is centralized, but to get to a point where you're doing it efficiently enough, you need diversity to have resiliency. A key part of democracy is having many owners, so we need to create a system that can recover from that. The key to creating the system is education. I think the educational model out there right now has it totally backwards—the more I interact with the textbook, the lower it's valued, especially if I'm selling it back. They make these little tape tools that I can rip my comments out of the book. The more I interact with the web page, the higher it's valued, and that's not just for the sake of advertisers; it's for the sake of the amount of knowledge on the page. I see these things as two sides of a coin: Etsy itself is the marketplace, but the other side of that coin is being able to teach people how to learn enough to get to the point where they're able to make a living and to organize to that effect. Another example of how broken I think education in this country is: the cost of education keeps going up and up, even though the tools to teach in many cases keep going down. The silliest image of this is those little kids with those huge backpacks that weigh almost as much as they do going to elementary school—if anyone here has kids, I'm sure they've seen that. So how do we get from this system we have now to something more organized? I think the web is probably the most beautiful and, in some cases, very subversive tool to do this. I've been focusing all my resources on figuring out how to leverage the web to organize all these people. This is one example of how we're doing it: synchronous interaction on the web with people anywhere. My approach is really just giving people the tools they need to organize and letting them use those tools in a framework as they want to use it. This grows and grows to the point where you're actually creating self-organizing systems where if people want to set up ways to produce things locally, they can do that, and if people want to sell locally, we definitely encourage shopping local on Etsy as well. The finale of the Swimmy story: all the fish are hiding, and he says, 'Come out and play, come out and play.' They say, 'Here's my idea: if we all arrange ourselves like some giant fish and I'm the eye, then we can swim out there in the ocean and chase all the big fish away.' That's what the image is, and this is what I'm trying to build with Etsy and with education.