Scaling startups

Scaling startups

Chad Dickerson, CTO / chad@etsy.com / @chaddickerson

What do we mean by being “at scale”?

The past 15 months were a major growth period for Etsy

> 1 billion page views / month

$300+ million in sales in 2010

$41.1 million in December alone

> $1000 / minute

8.5 million items in the marketplace

400,000+ active sellers

Business in over 150 countries

engineering team grew ~4x in 2010

(about 60 now)

success means growth

servers

people

legacy code and systems

But you want to stay a startup!

What makes a startup a startup?

moving fast

high impact per person

risk-taking

default: “yes, we can”

When startups become “successful”

they slow down

harder for individuals to have high impact

they become risk-averse

more: “maybe we can do that”

We didn’t want to be that way.

You shouldn’t either.

Here’s how we scaled

real, tangible mechanisms in place to stay a startup as we grew.

We’re growing but we still act like a startup!

Really??!!

(Don’t talk. Do!)

Commit to frequent deploys, and the tooling to support it.

(Kellan, Erik, and Mike will talk about this)

Deploys shouldn’t be like this:

OMG! HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS! WE’RE

DEPLOYING!!!!

. . . but more like this:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/continuous-deployment.html

(we deployed 721 times in November)

Question process at every turn.

Clay Shirky

“Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity.”

Once you add a process, it never goes away.

Bad process is about fear.

For startups:“fear is the biggest no-no”

- Brad Feld

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/fear-is-a-nono.html

Practice: do blameless post-mortems.Do blameless post-mortems.

Practice: do blameless post-mortems.Freaking out doesn’t

create helpful processes.

Peter Drucker

Drucker’s Five Deadly Business Sins (1993)

#5: “feeding problems and starving opportunities”

“All one can get by ‘problem-solving’ is damage-containment. Only opportunities

produce results and growth.”

Practice: do blameless post-mortems.Fight processes that feed problems

and starve opportunities.

Adjust your thinking about risk.

Peter Druckeragain. . . .

“People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

“People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

You make more mistakes when you’re tentative.

we had 6 change-related incidents on Etsy in all of 2010

Again, 721 deploys in one month.

And we deployed a major feature on December 1

(4th biggest traffic day in our history)

Hire for immediate impact.

New engineers deploy on first day.

. . . . before they’ve filled out their health insurance paperwork

0

17.5

35

52.5

70

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov

7 810

15

2226

32

5054

57

62

15

2023

2630

35

42

4749

5558

developers / unique deployersDevs Deployers

PMs and Support started deploying here

Those who deploy early. . . .

. . . . also deploy often.

deploys

0

200

400

600

800

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov

6133 50

126 125

184 177

359

682

589

721

Kellan will go into the how and the why!

Photo credits• http://www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/4787141853/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/yomanimus/102798907/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sercasey/514212348/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorlino/2135206018/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayscratch/4993673517/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/cozymemories/4313895482/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/allspaw/5436215259/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/divine_harvester/2119060429/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mark_wilson/279145377/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/neilsphotoalbum/727616574/

• Other photos licensed from iStockphoto