My talk at Etsy's SXSW Microconference, "Moving Fast at Scale." http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/03/01/moving-fast-at-scale-sxsw/ For companion talks (this was one of four), see http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/03/19/moving-fast-at-scale-slides-and-reprise/

1. Scaling startups
Chad Dickerson, CTO / chad@etsy.com / @chaddickerson

2. What do we mean by being
“at scale”?

3. The past 15 months were a
major growth period for Etsy

4. > 1 billion page views / month

5. $300+ million in sales in 2010
$41.1 million in December alone

6. > $1000 / minute

7. 8.5 million items in the marketplace

8. 400,000+ active sellers

9. Business in over 150 countries

10. engineering team grew
~4x in 2010
(about 60 now)

11. success means growth

12. servers

13. people

14. legacy code and systems

15. But you want to stay a startup!

16. What makes a startup a startup?

17. moving fast

18. high impact per person

19. risk-taking

20. default: “yes, we can”

21. When startups become “successful”

22. they slow down

23. harder for individuals
to have high impact

24. they become risk-averse

25. more: “maybe we can do that”

26. We didn’t want to be that way.

27. You shouldn’t either.

28. Here’s how we scaled

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

30. We’re growing but we still
act like a startup!
Really??!!

32. (Don’t talk. Do!)

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

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

35. Deploys shouldn’t be like this:

36. OMG! HOLD ONTO
YOUR HATS! WE’RE
DEPLOYING!!!!

37. . . . but more like this:

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

39. (we deployed 721 times in November)

40. Question process at every turn.

41. Clay Shirky

42. “Process is an embedded reaction
to prior stupidity.”

43. Once you add a process, it never goes away.

45. Bad process is about fear.

46. For startups:
“fear is the biggest no-no”
- Brad Feld
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/fear-is-a-nono.html

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

48. Freaking out doesn’t
Practice: do blameless post-mortems.
create helpful processes.

49. Peter Drucker

50. Drucker’s Five Deadly Business Sins (1993)

51. #5: “feeding problems and starving opportunities”

52. “All one can get by ‘problem-solving’ is
damage-containment. Only opportunities
produce results and growth.”

53. Fight processes that feed problems
Practice: do blameless post-mortems.
and starve opportunities.

54. Adjust your thinking about risk.

55. Peter Drucker
again. . . .

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

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

58. You make more mistakes
when you’re tentative.

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

60. Again, 721 deploys in one month.

61. And we deployed a major
feature on December 1

62. (4th biggest traffic day in our history)

63. Hire for immediate impact.

64. New engineers deploy on first day.

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

66. developers / unique deployers
Devs Deployers
70
62
PMs and Support started 57 58
54 55
deploying here
52.5 50 49
47
42
35
35 32
30
26 26
23 22
20
17.5 15 15
10
7 8
0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov

67. Those who deploy early. . . .

68. . . . . also deploy often.

69. deploys
800
721
682
589
600
400 359
184 177
200
126 125
61 50
33
0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov

70. Kellan will go into the
how and the why!

71. 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