Was Etsy too good to be true?

> “The house was burning and nobody was paying attention,” Etsy board member and Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson told the New York Times.)

This feels like asking the wolf what happened after he bought access to the hen house.

An accounting we will never get, but I would love to see is just how much dysfunction and detriment venture capitalists caused their portfolio companies over the past 15 years.

Fred Wilson gets my attention because unfortunate for him, the book, Hatching Twitter shows just how much discord he sowed at Twitter [0]. He is also on record saying he doesn't regret any of it.[1]

Yes, Etsy exists within the VC system, which demands an acquisition or going public, but how many of the bad decisions throughout its hypergrowth were pushed or enabled by Wilson/USV and Etsy's other VC's?

I think it's important to understand these stories, especially in a world where venture capitalists have positioned themselves and their industry as thought leaders in the startup and growth arenas. VCs' actions are almost always behind the scenes, opaque at best, but when actually brought to light can drastically differ from their public opining.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18656827-hatching-twitte... [1] https://www.quora.com/What-does-Fred-Wilson-think-about-Hatc...