Fortune

Etsy could bring a little bit of Brooklyn hipster to the public market this year

Etsy, the online seller of handmade crafts and vintage goods, is planning to go public as soon as this quarter with plans to raise $300 million, sources told Bloomberg News.

If the Brooklyn-based site rakes in that amount of cash, it would be the biggest New York tech IPO since 1999. The last time a New York-based tech company garnered that kind of a valuation was the dot-com boom when high valuations benefited listings from TD Waterhouse Group and Barnesandnoble.com, the e-commerce spinoff of the bookstore chain.

Etsy was started by painter and carpenter Rob Kalin in 2005. The multi-talented artist was looking for a way to sell his hand-built goods and started the online exchange. The company now has nearly 26 million items listed on its site–anything from vintage champagne coups to handmade dog collars.

Etsy, which has been valued at more than $1 billion, brings in its profits by charging sellers 20 cents to list products and then takes another 3.5% commission from each item sold. It also generates revenue from advertising and payment procession. In 2013, the site reported $1.35 billion in gross merchandise sales, according to its website.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are working with Etsy on its IPO, and the company is likely to file a prospectus this month with more financial details, sources told Bloomberg.

An Etsy spokeswoman declined to comment.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.

The two-seater, made of plastic components and able to go 25 miles per hour, was printed created at an auto show in Detroit

Local Motors, a tech company based in Phoenix, Ariz., may have given us our first glimpse of the future of automobile manufacturing.

This week at the Detroit auto show, the company 3D-printed a car called the Strati. The two-seater is made of plastic components and can go up to 25 miles per hour.

The car — which Local plans to sell later this year — takes about 44 hours to print, and is then outfitted with an electric car battery, motor and suspension from French automaker Renault, according to the Associated Press. Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers told the AP the Strati is the first of three vehicles he plans to sell. The Strati will cost between $18,000 and $30,000, he added.

Local Motors plans to create a microfactory at the National Harbor, a shopping and entertainment area in Maryland. The microfactory — a center where cars are designed, manufactured and sold — will be like “Build-a-Bear mashed up with Ikea mashed up with Formula 1,” said Rogers.

The factory isn’t yet open because of the need for local zoning law changes, according to the Washington Post. The Post also notes that the Strati is not yet highway-legal.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.

Emily Hughes may not have placed first at the Olympics like her big sis Sarah, but she’s quickly on the rise in Silicon Valley

Nine years ago, Emily Hughes was at the 2006 Olympic games in Turin, Italy, skating before millions of TV viewers. Today, Hughes is in the trenches at Google working on Google Fiber, the company’s ambitious ultra-high-speed Internet initiative.

This 25-year-old former Olympian joined Google as a business analyst in November, and it was her love of competition – and an extraordinary tolerance for risk-taking and failure – that helped her land the job.

“I think in sports in general, there’s a lot of transferable skills that you can bring to the workplace,” says Hughes, who moved from Great Neck, N.Y., to San Francisco to begin her new gig at Google’s Mountain View offices. “In skating, every day, you fall and you have to get up. And falling is a pretty obvious failure. I’ve definitely learned from everything I’ve failed at.”

As you may recall from the 2002 Winter Olympics, Emily Hughes is the younger sister of Sarah Hughes, the world champion skater who copped the Gold in 2002.

“I remember, I was 12 or 13 when Sarah won,” Emily says. “Every day, I saw her go to the rink, I saw her train and I thought, ‘I think I could do that too.’”

But the road to fame was a lot harder for Emily than it was for her older sister. In 2001, at age 12, she competed in the U.S. Figure Skating Championship, but then a couple of years later, Emily failed to make the U.S. team. In 2006, she was the first alternate to the Winter Olympics, and after Michelle Kwan withdrew due to a groin injury, she was named to the team. But she finished seventh overall.

Amidst injuries and illnesses, her ambition never waned. Hughes went on to Harvard, and in her junior year, she decided to take a semester off to train for the 2010 Olympics. She failed to qualify.

“When I didn’t make the Olympic team, yes, that was a failure in a sense, but there were so many other things that I’ve accomplished because of it,” she says. For example, she had more time to join organizations such as Harvard’s “Women in Business” club and take on leadership positions on campus.

Her setbacks, she admits, also forced her to think to herself: “What is the bigger picture?”

After Harvard, Hughes worked at Deloitte Consulting and the International Olympic Committee, but she never found her true calling. Then last year, a friend who worked at Google told her about life at the Internet giant, and Hughes was intrigued. Google Fiber delivers broadband service at 100 times what Internet users are accustomed to. The service first launched in Kansas City, Mo., in 2012 and now operates in Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, as well.

“Every time I talked to her, she just raved about Google’s culture and her work,” Emily says, referring to her friend. “Before that, I hadn’t really thought about working at Google. I used Google every day, but it wasn’t something that I ever thought, ‘Oh I could go work there.’”

Her friend passed on some information about Google Fiber, and she applied. Clearing a first-round interview, Hughes went through six hours of on-site back-to-back interviews, with only a lunch break– not unlike the times she used to scramble to find time for lunch in a jam-packed training day.

Certainly, Hughes possesses the most critical quality that Google seeks in its employees. “The No. 1 thing that you look for is passion,” says Jonathan Rosenberg, who wrote the best-selling How Google Works with Google chairman Eric Schmidt. “You want the kind of person who is constantly learning.” Google’s career website notes that the company looks for people who can show they’ve “flexed different muscles in different situations in order to mobilize a team.”

Flexing different muscles — well, Hughes is a pro at that. “With skating, constantly being corrected and told how to do something differently has helped me take constructive feedback better,” she says.

Hughes is simply the latest in a lineup of former Olympians working at Google. The company claims to employ at least 10. Athletes, in general, appeal to the Googlers who do the hiring because a sports background teaches you to handle criticism and adapt.

Game Theory Group CEO Vincent McCaffrey, who helps companies recruit student-athletes, doesn’t know the Hughes sisters, but he theorizes: “I would imagine Emily and Sarah have probably received a ton of feedback in their life — some of it very direct and even harsh. Employers want to hire young people who are able to take constructive criticism well.”

Global services firm EY has studied the link between sports and leadership in the C-suite. In a 2014 global survey of 400 female executives, EY found that 52% played sports at the university level. Those women, like Emily and Sarah Hughes, honed their time management skills while juggling schoolwork and training — an excellent path to consistent overachievement.

Indeed, growing up in Great Neck, Emily and her five siblings (Rebecca, David, Matthew, Sarah and the youngest girl, Taylor) were all overachievers. All six participated in figure skating or ice hockey.

Emily and Sarah credit their father for getting them into skating. John Hughes is a Toronto-born lawyer who played hockey for Cornell University and was drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Emily recalls her mom, Amy, lining up all six kids in age order (Emily is second-youngest) and tying their skates at the community ice rink. Emily and Sarah, who started skating when they were about three years old, are different in personality — Sarah is gregarious with a big presence, while Emily is reserved and quietly personable — but as children, they were both “competitive in our own way,” as Emily puts it.

When 12-year-old Emily stood in the stands and cheered on her big sister for a Gold medal in Salt Lake City, she knew she wanted her own shot to skate on Olympic ice. “After that, I was like, ‘I want to be an Olympian too,” she recalls, adding, “A little bit easier said than done.”

Randy Appell, her chemistry and biology teacher at Great Neck High School, recalls teenage Emily dealing with her high-stress position. “The fact that her older sister had already won the Olympic Gold must’ve put an extreme amount of pressure on her. She may have felt it, but she never let it show.”

Sarah’s Olympic stardom landed her on the cover of TIME Magazine, and when Emily was heading to Turin four years later, she was cast as America’s great hope —another Hughes champion-in-the-making.

Her seventh-place finish at the Olympics that year was disappointing, but it was not the thing that would define Emily Hughes. She had other assets — her brain and her passion to succeed — to fall back on. She remembers her dad always emphasizing that she is a “student-athlete” and that “student” always comes first. Her parents never gave her or Sarah breaks on studying, even when they were training five hours a day. And given the choice to enroll in the regular chemistry class or an honors course, Appell recalls, Emily insisted she take the advanced class.

“I always brought my books everywhere,” she says. “I was going to every competition lugging this backpack around, or you know, doing homework in the car on the way to the rink. It was always important to keep my grades up.”

As for Sarah, who is now 29, she found a new path from the Olympics too. She’s executive vice president of business development at the Kingsbridge Ice Center, a $350 million project to build the world’s largest ice skating complex in the Bronx.

Both sisters refuse to have one-dimensional careers.“I was always impressed by how tough Emily was when we were younger,” Sarah says. “She would kill herself working, working, working, but somehow, she always found some time to have fun.”

“To accomplish big meaningful things,” Sarah adds, “you need to be focused but allow enough distractions to make it a fun and worthwhile journey.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

A seawater desalination plant under construction near San Diego will be the nation’s largest when complete

After three years of drought, California’s reservoirs are filled with more mud than water. Many farmers can’t irrigate their fields and have no choice but to leave them fallow.

As insurance against future droughts, San Diego is turning to a vast and largely untapped body of water for help: the Pacific Ocean. A huge desalination plant is under construction just outside the city that is expected to provide 7% of the arid region’s water needs.

“Desalination isn’t dependent on rainfall or snowpack,” says Peter MacLaggan, a senior vice president with Poseidon Resources, the company that is developing the plant in Carlsbad, Calif. “Traditional sources have been cheap and plentiful, and that’s not necessarily the case anymore.”

Desalinization is an old technology used widely in the Middle East that is getting new attention in the United States because of innovation and lower costs. With growing populations and increasingly scarce water, more than 15 California coastal cities are considering the ocean as an alternative to fickle Mother Nature.

But desalination is still far more expensive than damming rivers and pumping ground water. Furthermore, critics worry about the environmental consequences and argue that water conservation is a much cheaper option.

When complete, the $1 billion Carlsbad desalination plant will be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, providing up to 50 million gallons of water daily to San Diego County and its more than 3 million residents. Seawater sucked up from an offshore pipe will be blasted through a series of membranes that have microscopic holes to help filter out the salt, sand and algae.

Construction, delayed for years by lawsuits, is expected to be completed by late 2015 or early 2016. Ultimately, the water produced by the plant will be “bottled water quality,” MacLaggan says.

Over the years, desalination plants have had a mixed track record. A number of cities that tapped seawater during droughts later closed the plants after the rains returned, because of the high costs.

Just up the coast, Santa Barbara, Calif. built a $34 million desalination plant in early 1990s amid a water shortage, but then closed it a few years later. With the latest drought, city officials are considering paying millions of dollars more for refurbishments so they can restart the plant.

Meanwhile, several Australian cities spent billions of dollars over the past decade for seawater treatment plants. However, many of them were put on idle to save money after the droughts ended.

“We end up spending a lot of money and getting very little water,” says Conner Everts, executive director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance, who opposes desalination plants because of their cost and their potential impact on the environment. “Don’t think of the ocean as an endless reservoir, but a fragile ecosystem.”

In particular, Everts complains about desalination plants discharging briny waste into the sea that he says could kill marine life. San Diego’s plant, for example, will suck up two gallons of seawater for every gallon of potable water it produces. The excess, which is 20% more salty that typical seawater after being diluted, will be pumped back out into the surf. The plant’s operators insist the discharge will be safe for sea life.

Opponents filed more than a dozen lawsuits to block the plant’s construction based on environmental and other concerns. But the plant’s supporters ultimately prevailed in court.

San Diego officials pushed for the desalination plant following a serious drought across much of the West. With few rivers and an average of only 10 inches of rain annually, the San Diego region is particular vulnerable to water shortages.

Officials agreed to a 30-year deal to buy desalinated water from the plant’s developers for $2,014 to $2,257 per acre foot, about the equivalent of what a family of five uses in a year. The cost is nearly double traditional sources. County residents will ending up paying an extra $4 to $7 in their monthly water bills, on average.

Over time, improvements in technology are supposed to drive down costs of desalination. Pumps, membranes used in the plants are becoming increasingly efficient and durable, for example. Whether the costs will ever fall in line with traditional water sources is a subject of much debate. For his part, MacLaggan predicted that the costs will reach parity by 2025.

But Everts says water conservation and recycling waste water are much cheaper alternatives that should get a lot more attention. Encouraging home owners to rip out their water-guzzling lawns and install more efficient toilets are just some of the options.

“Desalination is a sexy technology that sounds like a great idea,” Everts says. “But it distracts us from putting resources to other things that could help us right now.”

In any case, Mother Nature may be coming to the rescue. California’s rainy season has got off to a good start with a series of strong storms. But the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the most important barometer, is still low. Moreover, a few wet months alone can’t offset years of drought.

MacLaggan, with the Carlsbad plant’s developer, agrees that more conservation is necessary along with other strategies like treating wastewater so that it is clean enough to drink. “We need to do all these things,” he says, adding that desalination should be part of the solution because conservation won’t be enough to offset the growing population and the region’s lack of rain. “This is a drought-proof supply.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Together, Exxon Mobil and Chevron has shaved more than $95 billion from their combined market value since last summer

It has been a pretty rough six-month stretch for the energy industry. Crude oil prices have fallen about 55% since the middle of last summer, resulting in some of the world’s largest energy companies losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value.

The price of crude oil has been relatively flat over the past two days, but it still sits below $50 per barrel — the lowest point in about 5 and 1/2 years — thanks to a global supply glut exacerbated by the ongoing U.S. shale boom as well as decreased oil consumption in Asia and Europe.

As oil prices have steadily declined, so too have the share prices of many large energy companies. Out of 24 oil, gas and coal producers in the Fortune 500, 22 saw their stock price decline between the beginning of July 2014 and Wednesday’s close. In total, the 24 companies lost more than $263 billion in market value combined, according to data from FactSet Research Systems. (A company’s market value is found by multiplying its share price by the number of its shares outstanding.)

Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the two largest U.S. energy companies, accounted for more than $95 billion of that figure as the two have seen their respective market values decrease by 11.7% and 17.9% in just over six months.

In terms of total lost market value, ConocoPhillips and Occidental Petroleum finished behind Exxon and Chevron, with more than $20 billion shaved off each of their respective market caps during the period — a 26% decline.

Only two of the qualifying companies on the Fortune 500 list actually improved over the past six months: Marathon Petroleum and Tesoro, both of which are oil refiners who benefit from lower crude prices.

Meanwhile, even coal producers have not been immune to the energy sell-off, as both Peabody Energy and Cliffs Natural Resources have seen their market values drop by more than half since July. And, Halliburton’s 44% stock dip since last summer is one example of how ancillary companies in the energy industry have been hit hard as well.

What’s more, the energy industry’s woes are likely far from over. While the broader stock market has rebounded sharply over the past two days, oil prices have yet to show significant improvement. In fact, some analysts see prices hitting $40 per barrel at some point in 2015 as oversupply in the global oil market shows little sign of abating.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.

December marked the 11th straight month of payroll increases above 200,000

U.S. job growth remained brisk in December, with employers adding 252,000 jobs to their payrolls after November’s outsized increase. The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 5.6% from November’s 5.8%.

December marked the 11th straight month of payroll increases above 200,000, the longest stretch since 1994. With a revised 353,000 jump in November, and October’s count also revised higher, the economy created 50,000 more jobs than previously reported in the prior two months.

“The U.S. is sort of an island of relative strength in a pretty choppy global sea. People are worried the problems abroad could afflict the U.S., but our domestic fundamentals are pretty sound and should outweigh that,” said Josh Feinman, chief global economist at Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management in New York.

December’s gains capped a strong year for hiring. With another job creation number over 200,000, employment gains for 2014 at around 3 million — the largest since 1999.

A five cent drop in average hourly earnings after rising six cents in November, took some shine off the report.

Wage growth has been frustratingly tepid and economists believe the Federal Reserve will be hesitant to pull the trigger on raising interest rates without a significant increase in labor costs.

The U.S. central bank has kept its short-term interest rate near zero since December 2008. It has not raised interest rates since 2006, but recently signaled it was moving closer to hiking, even if inflation remains below the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. Most economists expect the first rate increase in June.

But an acceleration in wage gains is in the cards as the labor market continues to tighten.

That, together with lower gasoline prices are expected to provide a tail wind to consumer spending this year.

“As the labor market moves closer to full employment … we are likely to see firms increase wages. We have already started to see some of that,” said Sam Bullard, a senior economist at Wells Fargo in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Most of the measures tracked by Fed Chair Janet Yellen to gauge the amount of slack in the labor market have pointed to tightening conditions and would be again under scrutiny.

A broad measure of joblessness that includes people who want to work but have given up searching and those working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment is at six-year lows, the labor force appears to have stabilized, while the ranks of the long-term unemployed are also shrinking.

—Reuters contributed to this report

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

After a rough start to the year, the stock market has rebounded for two straight days

The U.S. stock market continued its sharp rebound Thursday following a second day of gains in Europe.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up more than 300 points at one point, or 2%, turning positive for the year. All 30 companies on the index were up in early trading, putting the Dow Jones on pace for its second straight day of gains after rising 213 points on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite also continued their own surges one day after they each halted five-day losing streaks. The S&P 500 was recently up 30 points, or 1.5% and the Nasdaq gained 75 points, or 1.6%.

While the euro continues to lose value against the U.S. dollar, European markets surged again on Thursday as pressure mounts for the European Central Bank to introduce new stimulus measures to invigorate the region’s economy. Both London’s FTSE 100 and Germany’s DAX jumped more than 2% in trading for the day as investors bet on the prospect of a government bond-buying program from the ECB.

The European gains provided a further boost to U.S. stocks, which were also bolstered by Wednesday’s minutes release from the mid-December meeting of the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC). The Fed gave no indication that it would change plans to be “patient” when it comes to interest rate hikes that are likely to come sometime later in 2015.

The latest market rally comes after a rough start to 2015 as stocks were dragged down by sinking oil prices and concerns over the European economy. The price of crude oil inched higher on Thursday, but prices still remain under $50 per barrel — a 5 and 1/2 year low.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Insurance companies use the CLUE report to determine how much you’ll pay for your insurance on your home and car. Here’s what you need to know

Professor Plum in The Library with The Candlestick. Perhaps like many of you, that’s what I think of when someone mentions the word Clue. Turns out there’s another iteration – of which only 8% of Americans are familiar with, according to a new survey by InsuranceQuotes.com. And this one could be costing you money.

It’s called a CLUE report. The letters stand for Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange and it’s a database, owned by LexisNexis, that stores seven years worth of data on both your homeowners and car insurance claims. A claims history is pretty much the holy grail when it comes to insurance premiums. The report notes that filing a homeowners insurance claim increases the average premium by 38% and an auto claim by an average of 9%. If this all sounds and feels a lot like credit reports did, say, 20 years ago, you’re onto something. Here’s what you need to know.

How does the database work? “If an insurance company is part of this database, they’ll contribute loss history for their customers,” explains Laura Adams, senior analyst for InsuranceQuotes.com. “Then in turn they can use and analyze information from the database when they’re looking at a new customer or looking at renewal rate if you’re an existing customer.” Or, looking to see if they want to insure or renew you at all.

Are homes and autos treated similarly? Not exactly. Your homeowners report tracks claims that you as an individual make (under the heading “Claims History for Subject”), but also claims on the property itself (under the heading “Claims History for Risk) – both over 7 years. Your auto report just tracks you as an individual. Complicating matters, you are the only person who can pull a report on property that you own. If you’re buying a home, however, you’d be smart to look at claims the prior homeowner has filed on the property. Lexis seems to get this, so they’ve recently rolled out a separate Home Seller’s Disclosure Report. It blanks out personal details on the seller. Ask for one.

Can I manage my CLUE report like I manage my credit report? You can – and should – try. The most important thing to understand is that claims you discuss with an agent but never file – called ‘”inquiries” — count, too.

“If I just call my agent and ask a question about coverage, for example: ‘I have this problem, would it be covered?’ they’re going to mark that down. It goes on file as an inquiry even if you never make the claim,” explains Amy Danise, Editorial Director of Insure.com. “One probably won’t make a difference, but if you have multiple, even if you’ve never filed, it can. You have to be careful.” Be particularly careful about inquiring about water damage (a note that privacyrights.org seconds!) What to do instead is to try not to call. Have your policy on hand and try to understand your coverage by reading about it. The declarations page will have your deductible in case you forget what it is, and the exclusions can tell you if you wouldn’t have been covered anyway. “The best line of defense is knowing what your policy is, reading it and understanding it. Don’t call for random things without bothering to look,” she says.

How do I get my report? You’re entitled to a copy of your CLUE report once a year, gratis, under the same 2003 amendment to the Fair Credit Reporting Act that forced the three big credit bureaus to establish and fund annualcreditreport.com (where you can, and should, be pulling three free credit reports a year). You can order it at www.PersonalReports.LexisNexis.com. The data tracked includes the dates of any losses, the types of loss claimed and the amount paid by the insurance company. As with a credit report, you’re also entitled to dispute errors and add a personal statement to your file.

What if I find there is no CLUE report on me? Don’t panic. There is no list of which insurance companies participate in CLUE. Some choose not to participate. If you are the customer of one of those, you don’t have a CLUE report.

Arielle O’Shea contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Data are the latest indicator that the U.S. labor market is performing well

Job cuts announced by U.S.-based employers last year were 5% fewer than in 2013 and the lowest annual total since 1997, the latest indicator that the U.S. labor market is performing well.

Overall, employers announced job cuts totaling 483,171 in 2014, down from 509,051 cuts announced the prior year, according to a report by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“Layoffs aren’t simply at pre-recession levels; they are at pre-2001-recession levels,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of the firm. “This bodes well for job seekers, who will not only find more employment opportunities in 2015, but will enjoy increased job security once they are in those new positions.”

Challenger’s report pointed out that while the economy and employment has grown in 2014, no job is ever truly secure as the nation still averaged about 40,000 planned job cuts per month. That’s because companies restructure their operations, announce cost-cutting moves or cut jobs when mergers and acquisitions are completed.

Notably, the tech sector, a relatively strong performer in the economy, saw the heaviest downsizing last year. That sector announced 59,528 planned layoffs. Challenger said that was a 69% increase from a year ago. Much of that downsizing was due to plans announced by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft to each cut thousands of jobs. With both of their traditional businesses heavily tied to the PC world, the companies are pivoting to compete as the tech market moves to mobile devices where other rivals are stronger.

Job cuts in the retail sector declined by 11% in 2014 but the industry still ranked second. The third-ranked health care sector also posted fewer layoffs in 2014, Challenger said. Meanwhile, the largest increases in job cuts occurred among employers in the entertainment industry and electronics, where job cuts in 2014 more than doubled for both.

“We expect downsizing to remain subdued in 2015, as a growing number of employers turn their attention toward job creation,” Challenger said.

The biggest potential threat? Falling oil prices, which could result in higher job cuts in one of 2014’s star performers: the energy sector. Energy related layoffs only totaled 14,262 last year. In a nod to that possible soft spot, Challenger pointed to an announcement earlier this week that U.S. Steel would be laying off 756 employees due to soft demand related to weak oil prices.

“Lower prices mean less money for research, exploration and new drilling operations,” Challenger said. “However, the slowdown in oil-related industries may be more than offset by the extra dollars in consumers’ pockets as they shell out less money for gas and heating oil. The money not spent at the pump can be used for consumer goods, travel, home improvement, and dining out. Furthermore, continued low gas prices could spur an increase in SUV sales. All of these are going to have an immediate and positive impact on the job market and hiring.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com