Fred Wilson- Thinking About Etsy In The San Telmo Markets

Here is a link to an entry on Fred Wilson's blog.

In case you don't remember, he is a member of Etsy's Board of Directors.

Here is an excerpt from the blog entry:

But Etsy is not yet as vibrant and diverse an experience as San Telmo. Most people don't go to Etsy to 'stroll" or 'hang out'. Some do and the things they like to do other than shop are favoriting items and curating lists and treasuries.

The people that do use Etsy in this way are starting to have a San Telmo like experience.

What Etsy needs to do next is make this kind of 'strolling' experience work for everyone. We need to bump into our friends on Etsy and we need to make new ones there.

It would be great if we could sing and dance and eat and drink on Etsy too. But somethings don't make it onto the web as easy as others. Etsy will have to find experiences, like Zynga did with Farmville and its other games, that can replace eating, drinking, singing, and dancing. And I am confident they will.

While the web will never replace the real world experience of strolling through a bustling marketplace on sunday afternoon, it offers something else: scale.

There are more tractors sold in Farmville every day than are sold in the US every year. And so the artists and merchants who camp out in San Telmo on sundays can set up a shop on Etsy and be in business 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  These artists and merchants can sell to tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people someday.

And getting to that kind of scale, as Facebook has shown us, requires putting people front and center in the experience. Rob Kalin, founder and now CEO of Etsy, prefers the words 'social commerce' over e-commerce for a reason. The emphasis is on social. Commerce is the result. An afternoon in San Telmo makes that point crystal clear.

Etsyville anyone?  Vintage Wars?  Bouncing Beads?