Quotes from Caterina Fake

Vacations are good, and I come back energized, with the whiff of Hawaiian Tropic in the air and 2,000 messages in my Inbox.

I work really hard. My daughter asks me what I do, and it's mostly calls, emails, and meetings. We have our office in Hayes Valley, a nice part of town, because we're all about place being important.

One of the issues we face here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a sense that the people all around us are as conversant in startup and tech culture as we are. But we need to remember, and remind ourselves repeatedly, that we're a small minority in a larger population.

The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry.

Dream, struggle, create, prevail. Be daring. Be brave. Be loving. Be compassionate. Be strong. Be brilliant. Be beautiful.

When you have a failed pitch, you meet many more venture capitalists than you really want to.

I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist, or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all.

A lot of the reason I wanted to become an entrepreneur and avoid working for others is that you get to create the world you want to live in and the company you want to work for, and I've loved that. It's a part of entrepreneurship that women should really embrace.

Etsy is fundamentally a creative community. On eBay, or Amazon for that matter, practically anyone can sell practically anything. On Etsy, you can only sell handmade goods, vintage goods over 20 years old, and craft supplies for making.

I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. A fan of Jorge Luis Borges, I found a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark - perfect strangers - whom I connected to online and immediately became enthralled by the idea of virtual communities.

Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.