Etsy on Going Public: the World Should Be More Like Us

​Etsy is a website where you can buy hemp bracelets and greeting cards and handmade clothes and one time someone sold an "​original fine art pure menstrual blood painting" on there, and soon you will be able to buy stock in the company because it just decided to go public.

Motherboard isn't quite a business website, but an Initial Public Offering requires privately held companies to divulge a ​treasure trove of information to the Securities and Exchanges Commission, in a document that is not unlike an online dating profile mixed with a job interview. That means it's a good time to take a look at what Etsy is, and what it wants to become.

Etsy's S-1 form, as it's known, is a mixture of financial and statistical information (it has 1.4 million total sellers; Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson pays himself $300,000 a year) and worldview. And that worldview is that Earth is not quite an Etsy world, yet, but wouldn't it be wonderful if it were?

"I believe Etsy can truly change the world when our vision is met with strong culture, a powerful team and disciplined execution," Dickerson wrote in the filing. "Today our mission is much more expansive than when Etsy began: to reimagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world."

Etsy wants more money—at least $100 million, according to the filing, but maybe more—but only in order to improve the world via an absurd thing called an "Empowerment Loop," Dickerson wrote.

"Making money matters to Etsy because our financial success creates long-term sustainability for our community," he wrote. "The more we invest in our platform, the more we enable Etsy sellers to pursue their craft and grow their businesses and the easier we make it for Etsy buyers to find unique goods. We call this Etsy's Empowerment Loop."

All kidding aside, most IPO documents are like this. But Etsy's move to become public means that the company is going to become much less Etsy-like and much more Amazon-like. One of the main reasons that Etsy is ostensibly worth so much money right now is because, in 2013, the company allowed sellers to work with manufacturers to create goods that are "handmade in spirit," if not in, well, the traditional sense of the word.

Motherboard reached out to Etsy about what the IPO might mean for its users, and a spokesperson directed us to Dickerson's letter in the filing.

In the filing, Dickerson hints that the company is probably going to make more moves to take it from being a site that caters to knitters and starving artists to one that maybe lets bigger players in the handicraft (or factory-craft) market play ball.

"Our ability to expand our ecosystem is important to the growth of our business. We spend substantial time and resources creating new offerings in order to add new constituents to our ecosystem and to open new sales channels for Etsy sellers," the company wrote. "Our efforts to expand our ecosystem could fail for many reasons, including lack of acceptance of our offerings by existing members or new constituents, our failure to market our offerings effectively to new constituents, defects or errors in our new offerings or negative publicity about us or our new offerings."

That sounds suspiciously like the company is considering or will consider allowing traditional manufacturers to sell on Etsy to compete with mom and pop craftsmen and small businesses. To be totally fair, the company repeatedly notes in the filing that, if it loses its sense of authenticity, it's probably screwed.

Etsy's IPO isn't a huge surprise—Dickerson said back in 2012 that it's "definitely the kind of company that can go public," and the company has been making money since 2009. Rob Kalin, a cofounder of the company, was pushed out amid rumors that he wanted to maintain the company's indie ethos. There's no mention of Kalin in the SEC filing.

The question Etsy must ask, then, is whether it wants to change the world to be more like it, or whether it just wants to be massively successful in the world we've already got.