Etsy gets $5M to stay in boro it said it'd never leave
Thornton McEnery
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday morning that Etsy is getting $5 million from New York State to stay in Brooklyn, a pretty nice sum for a company whose CEO publicly acknowledged just weeks ago that it "could only exist in Brooklyn."
"A company like Etsy could only exist in Brooklyn," Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson said during an April 23 appearance at a Brooklyn Tech Triangle symposium. "Almost all of our employees live in Brooklyn and our Manhattan employees are treated with scorn."
Etsy, which was founded in Brooklyn in 2005, plans to add more than 340 jobs by 2019 (a figure that does not include the employees brought in two weeks ago under terms of its acquisition of Grand St., another local e-commerce site). To accommodate that growth, Etsy has signed an agreement to become the anchor tenant in a 200,000-square-foot space at the new Dumbo Heights complex just blocks away from its current location in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. Crain's reported the move last week.
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140513/TECHNOLOGY/140519968