Scaling startups

Scaling startupsChad Dickerson, CTO / chad@etsy.com / @chaddickerson

What do we mean by being “at scale”?

The past 15 months were amajor 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 mechanismsin 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 ONTOYOUR 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.

Freaking out doesn’tPractice: do blameless post-mortems. 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’ isdamage-containment. Only opportunities produce results and growth.”

Fight processes that feed problemsPractice: do blameless post-mortems. and starve opportunities.

Adjust your thinking about risk.

Peter Drucker again. . . .

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

“People who do take risks generallymake 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 outtheir health insurance paperwork

developers / unique deployers Devs Deployers 70 62 PMs and Support started 57 58 54 55 deploying here52.5 50 49 47 42 35 35 32 30 26 26 23 22 2017.5 15 15 10 7 8 0 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov

Those who deploy early. . . .

. . . . also deploy often.

deploys800 721 682 589600400 359 184 177200 126 125 61 50 33 0 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov

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

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Scaling startups

by Chad Dickerson

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