Yes, that a set of mustaches as art on the wall. It's in the spaceship room.

But the Etsy staffers are also completely serious about their work, and these two features they share in common with their customer base, who are tying to earn side money, if not pay the rent, by designing the hand bags, walking sticks and hand-made chocolates that have made Etsy famous in the artisan and sustainable business scene. As one anonymous forum poster once put it: "It's hard to take Etsy seriously; they sell hand made walking sticks and tchotchkes." To which Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson replied: "Last year, we sold 24 million of those tchotchkes through our site."

In the middle of the creative chaos we saw the desk of CTO Kellen Elliott-McCrea, a former architect at Flickr. Sitting next to him was Michael Rembetsy, director of technical operations. Their desks are no larger than anyone else's, they have no name plates or titles, but I did notice one thing.

They were standing directly in front a huge, six-flat panel display that shows up-to-the-minute metrics on site performance.