As Etsy CEO, CTO ousted amid stock crash, employees come out to praise them

Etsy announced last night its CEO and Chairman of the Board Chad Dickerson and its CTO John Allspaw are out, after Brooklyn’s largest tech company missed first quarter earnings estimates.

The crafts marketplace platform fell short of analysts revenue growth estimates, which came in at 18 percent. Etsy’s stock price fell nearly ten percent overnight.

Josh Silverman, a member of the board, and the former CEO of Skype, will replace Dickerson as CEO. Fred Wilson, the cofounder of Union Square Ventures and an early investor in Etsy, will take over as chairman of the board. The company also announced it will be laying off around 8 percent of its employees.

Praise of Dickerson and Allswpaw flooded Twitter last night, as former employees spoke up about the man who used to be their boss.

Forever my CEO, @chaddickerson. Thanks for being the awesome person that you are. Hopefully we can chat sometime over the next few weeks.

— Mike C. (@MC_Proper) May 3, 2017

Mike Campbell is a senior risk operations agent at Etsy.

https://twitter.com/gianelli/status/859754692989124613

Gabrielle Gianelli is a data project manager at Etsy.

https://twitter.com/moishel/status/859584011676639232

Moishe Lettvin worked as an engineer at Etsy for three years and is now with Slack.

Incredibly proud to have worked for the vision of @chaddickerson and @allspaw at Etsy. Great software can be human and thoughtful.

— 50 Shades of Yeh (@Samantha_Yeh) May 3, 2017

Samanatha Yeh works in marketing at Etsy.

It wasn’t just former employees. Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures put in a good word for Dickerson’s leadership.

https://twitter.com/ceonyc/status/859549122021515264

Andy Baio, who was early at Kickstarter, added this:

Gah, this sucks. My heart goes out to @chaddickerson, @allspaw, and Etsy friends. Nine years of pioneering work. https://t.co/NKBEWc0zqT

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) May 2, 2017

Dickerson has not announced what he’ll do next. He will act as a consultant to Etsy through the end of the month, the company said. But when Dan Frommer, the editor-in-chief of Recode said that he’d read the Chad Dickerson book, the ousted CEO had this to say:

https://twitter.com/chaddickerson/status/859731663567421441