Brooklyn may be the epicenter of cool, but it is not popular with big businesses. When Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade crafts, goes public on Nasdaq, it will be one of just two publicly traded companies with headquarters in the borough, according to data compiled by Fortune.
Etsy joins a company most haven’t heard of: Dime Community Bancshares, a savings and loan holding company based in Williamsburg. Dime has been publicly traded since 1996, with a valuation of $565 million.
There hasn’t been an IPO of a Brooklyn company since 2000, according to Renaissance Capital, a manager of exchange traded funds. (The year 2000 is as far back as the company’s reliable data goes.)
It’s fitting that Etsy be Brooklyn’s most well-known representative to the public markets. The company is synonymous with the “maker movement” of hand-made goods, a trend that aligns with young, hip Brooklyn.
Observers might be tempted to assign Etsy’s IPO a symbol Brooklyn’s rising tech scene, but that would be a stretch. While Etsy, Kickstarter, and Makerbot (which sold in 2013) are based in the borough, the vast majority of New York’s notable tech startups remain headquartered in Manhattan.
The IPO will give Dickerson and Etsy a higher profile as a leader of New York’s tech scene. In recent years, a number of the city’s highest profile tech startups have faced growing pains or, in the case of Tumblr, chosen to sell rather than build out their businesses.
Wall Street will evaluate Etsy as a technology company. That’s fine—it is one. Etsy’s chief executive, Chad Dickerson, became Etsy’s CTO after working at Yahoo, and he and his colleagues have been outspoken on issues affecting the tech industry, including net neutrality and women in tech.
