Chad Dickerson, a long time Yahoo exec and the head of their Brickhouse special projects group, is leaving the company to become the CTO of Etsy, a a website that allows users to buy and sell handmade items. Mike Folgner, the former GM of Yahoo Video, will take Dickerson’s place at the head of Brickhouse.
We first covered Brooklyn-based Etsy, which has a cult-like following, back in 2005. Since then the company has raised over $30 million in venture capital. The most recent Comscore stats show nearly 2 million monthly visitors and 83 million page views worldwide.
This is a blow to Yahoo on par with the loss of Bradley Horowitz, Dickerson’s former boss, earlier this year. Dickerson ran Yahoo’s developer platform and oversaw their various internal and external Hack Days.
Dickerson joins the ranks of departed Yahoo execs, which gets larger every week. He wrote a long post on his personal blog about his reasons for leaving, but he doesn’t say the one thing that is on every Yahoo’ers mind: they crave leadership, and they aren’t getting it.
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I bet jason was messing around with the wordpress app for the iPhone. I just got a feed from techcrunch that was something like !title!. The same thing happened to me when I saved a draft on my site using the new iPhone wordpress app last night.
Just FYI, the latest item in the TechCrunch feed is called “!$title$!”, and links here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/title/
Very cool, congrats to Etsy! Haven’t actually bought anything from their site but love browsing on it.
@bob cobb - I saw the same and was wondering what had happened, thanks for clearing it up.
congrats to Etsy and what a demotion for Chad!
This is not even comparable to Horowitz leaving. Dickerson actually did stuff.
Three years is a “long time” executive?
Yes, in this business, 3 years is a long time. Quibble with the fact if you want…
Yahoo should buy Etsy, and then consolidate all of its small business stuff together, and actually build the world’s largest selling place for all small businesses. They struggle to be found (google just doesn’t cut it for that) and Etsy has shown that this model can work. I don’t know why they keep wanting to take on everyone else - yahoo should focus on what it’s good at. Audience, page views, and turn that into their advantage. They can compete somewhat with Amazon but it’s still a different enough niche and tons and tons of companies would thrive off this.
Can you imagine the money Yahoo is saving not have to pay these salaries? I think the investors should be very pleased at this cost savings trend at Yahoo. Wang and the grunts, no manager aloud.
sr. director is executive?
Any startups out there have a great opportunity to capitalize on all the execs leaving yahoo…
Jeff
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
How so? Most startups have no need for dead weight.
Etsy is awesome and they have Bre Pettis too. F, T, W.
Shouldn’t the story really simply become, “Who is actually staying at Yahoo?”
Folgner is one of the best guys around town. I’ve always enjoyed doing business with him. No doubt he will help to make this a smooth transition.
With the success of Etsy.com and a treat to ebay auction, i would not be surprise if one day ebay.com will buy the company for alot of $$$$.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
A search of my instant message logs shows tons of Etsy links just this year. People I know are all over that site looking at things… I’m not sure how much is converted to sales but it is very slick.
It’s like a crafty-ish version of Zazzle.
Etsy is reaching a niche market and filling the void left by Ebay, as they continued to raise listing prices. In the midst of a resurgence in the handmade/DIY movement, they’ve created this devoted following by listening to their user base of artist/crafters when areas of improvement are brought to their attention. Glad to see they’re getting more people on board.
Another overrated nobody leaves Yahoo.. good for Yahoo!
he’s definitely overrated. also, please learn that sr. director != exec.
I see the Yahoo! PR flacks remain active here on TechCrunch.
Chad is in fact one of the guys who “actually did stuff” and anyone familiar with the people and the business knows this.
The Yahoo! brain drain continues on its inevitable path.
I don’t blame Dickerson for leaving Yahoo. Etsy is hot - anyone can set up shop in minutes. Many Moms use the site to sell homemade goods and people want those personal touches. Yahoo is lagging.