One to watch: Rob Kalin, 28
Company: Etsy
Funding: $31.6 million from Jim Breyer at Accel Partners, Union Square Ventures, Hubert Burda Media, and angel investors including Caterina Fake of Flickr and Delicious’ Joshua Schachter.
Inspired by a desire to sell his own handmade furniture and by the resurgence in the crafts market, Kalin launched Etsy in July, 2005. The service is now the largest online marketplace for people to buy and sell handmade crafts. Etsy boasts 73,440 active sellers and 1 million registered members. Last year those merchants sold 1.92 million items worth a total of $26.5 million. The company is just under the breakeven point.
Advice: “I don’t think an economic slump will hurt good ideas,” Kalin says. “It might mean that mediocre or marginally useful services get weeded out, but that’s the nature of the game anyway…There’s nothing I’d advise an entrepreneur to do during a slump that I wouldn’t advise them to do during a boom. Stay hungry. and bootstrap.”