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Editors Note: Earlier this month Etsy revealed in its Q1 earnings report that the board is replacing Chad Dickerson, who has been CEO since 2011 and took the company public in 2015.

Josh Silverman, who joined Etsy’s board in November, will take over as CEO, while fellow board member Fred Wilson will be taking over Dickerson’s role as chairman of the board. Etsy is also losing CTO John Allspaw.

Dickerson said in a statement: “It has been an honor to lead Etsy as CEO for the past six years and the three years before that as CTO, the Board decided that it was time for new leadership to take Etsy forward and I support that decision.”

Here’s something you don’t hear in today’s unicorn “crushing it!” era of startups: “There’s something about los...

Partha Unnava is the CEO of Better Walk, a company focused on developing a new type of crutch that improves the experience of a crutch user. Partha broke his ankle and had to hobble around on crutches for six weeks, he decided to develop a better set of crutches that wouldn’t kill his armpits. I spoke to Partha about his experiences launching the venture and his journey as an entrepreneur.

Determination

Q: What are some challenges you faced when developing your venture?

I’ve faced issues from cofounders leaving the company to fluctuations in funding and flat out denials from investors. I think I’ve been through almost every single up or down you can go through when you start a company, but I learned that the only limiting factor is the inf...

In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web design tools. We built UI kits, Admin Dashboards, Templates, and Plugins. We’ve always tried to create web products that are helpful in the development process, and that we would use ourselves for building websites for clients.

From a revenue’s perspective, if we don’t take into consideration the Black Friday sales (which doubled the amount that we made in November 2016), we are grossing around $22,000 per month. Part of that goes toward paying our affiliates’ commissions, collected VAT, payment vendors’ taxes, and other expenses. We end up netting around $17,000 each month.

In this case study, I’ll share exactly how we built our products and grew our business. You’ll hear all...

Pitching your product line to a retailer? There are so many areas to cover. Do you know which three facts matter most to the decision-makers?

The greatest challenge product companies face is convincing retail buyers your brand will sell. If you want shelf placement in Target, Walmart, CVS, or ANY retailer for that matter, your retail pitch (or as I call it, the Retail Story) needs to address retailers’ key needs. And their primary need revolves around mitigating their sales risk.

The following are the 3 most effective ways to show retailers how you will mitigate their sales risk as you’re pitching your product to retailers and stores:

#1: Demonstrate Sales Potential

The best way of showing how you will mitigate sales risk is by showing the...

Continuing in Phase Three of a four-part Funding Series:

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

Phase Three - The Pitch

• Part 1 - Anatomy of a Pitch

• Part 2 - Market Size

• Part 3 - Revenue Model

• Part 4 - Operating Model

• Part 5 - Customer Definition

• Part 6 - Customer Acquisition

• Part 7 - Funding

• Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets

• Part 9 - Traction ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

Let’s dive in!

Startup Traction is your opportunity to tell investors how far you've taken the business up until this point. Just having a great idea is wonderful, but generating traction is what truly differentiates you from the pack. Especially in the early days, the only thing better than traction is more traction.

Traction Sets You Apart...

I’ve covered Max Levchin and the Web properties he’s built pretty much since I arrived in Silicon Valley in the peak of the dot com bubble. In fact, I spent hundreds of hours interviewing him for my first book, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0.” I continually try to get him on stage— despite having plumbed so many of his thoughts for so long— because he’s genuinely one of my favorite people to interview.

Not only does he have one of those iconic immigrant stories that should convince everyone why immigrants make this country stronger, but unlike so many other wealthy success stories, he’s never forgotten where he came from and what it felt like to be an outsider with nothing. Nothi...

Crowdfunding may seem like a new idea, but it actually has a long and rich history with roots going back to the 1700’s.

However, modern day crowdfunding — where people and businesses raise small amounts of money from a large group of people, usually online — has its origins in 1997.

In this infographic, we look at some of the historical movements that led to the development of crowdfunding as we know it, as well as major events over the past two decades that have shaped modern day crowdfunding.

Infographic text transcript:

1700’s: The Irish Loan Fund

The Irish Loan Fund was established by author and Irish nationalist Jonathon Swift in the early 1700’s as a way to provide loans to poor but creditworthy people in Dublin.

The Fund was succes...

We all want to do right by the people connected to our startup, but when do our sacrifices ever get paid back in kind? Or more specifically, do they?

I recently had a tough heart-to-heart with a fellow Founder where they talked about having to move on personally from the startup. They were burnt out, they had diluted all of their upside in multiple rounds of investment, and they felt "stuck."

They were stuck because they felt that if they left, they would first need to do right by all the people around them — their team, their investors, and their customers. All of these people were incredibly hard to convince to work at their startup, so the idea of "leaving them" seemed like an impossible leap.

My advice was blunt: "Do you really think an...

John Tabis was doing fine at his old job. More than fine, actually: he was Director of Corporate Brand Development at Disney.

But instead of continuing to rock the cushy corporate life, John teamed up with his friend Juan Pablo (JP) Montufar-Arroyo and launched The Bouqs, an online flower delivery company. Neither of them had very much money so they went to friends and family and pulled together $13,000 to get started.

That was four years ago. Today, they’re working with nearly $20 million in VC money — and John definitely doesn’t miss Disney.

A native Ecuadorian who grew up on a rose farm, JP witnessed firsthand the low prices, slow payment, and rampant waste that plague the traditional flower supply chain. And on the online branding side ...

Nearly every Founder feels woefully behind their friends in life.

As it happens, we picked a particularly shitty profession to ever feel "ahead" of our friends and colleagues. Most of our friends have regular jobs where they actually get paid every week, whereas we spend the entire month wondering if and how we'll get paid at all.

The problem compounds when we start to look at our successful Founder colleagues because the delta in success can be so astronomical so quickly. We start to assume that their successes become a reflection of our failures. But what we're missing in that comparison is how the benchmarks themselves are completely broken.

We Fight Ourselves

It all starts when we try to invent where we should be in life as if our pat...