This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Sooooo...it's that time of the year again. SXSW (a.k.a. Spring Break for Geeks) is right around the corner, running March 8 to 12 in Austin, Texas. And you know what that means: Parties, parties 'n more parties!! :) So, once again, we're putting together what we hope will be THE definitive guide to all this year's SXSW Interactive parties. We'll be updating this list regularly, so check back often. And email me if you're organizing an event or a party.

Of course, I'll be at SXSW ... attending all (or as many as humanly possible) of the amazing parties, mixers, networking events, lounges, panels, keynotes, BBQs, nuclear taco nights, concerts, happy hours, karaokes, food trucks, block parties and what-have-you.

So if you can't make it down to Austin this year but still wanna get the word out about your amazing startup / company / firm / service / app / project, you can do so. How, you ask? Well, by sponsoring my Red Tie of course, and covering it in your company's awesome logo stickers and giving me your company's elevator pitch. If you're interested, shoot me an email at gary@garysguide.com for more details.

In the meantime, here's my blog post / highlights from last year's SXSW to give you a little taste of what to expect.

FYI, next week is probably the most exclusive hackathon of the year. Google's Project Glass will be holding a two-day hackathon (February 1 to 2) in New York City that'll allow developers to get an early look at Glass so they can start developing for the platform. Google engineers will be on site to help at any point in the process, and developers will have the opportunity to show off what they’ve been working on.

So, how to score an invite: Your guess is as good as mine! If you were one of the smart ones who shelled out $1,500 for the early access to Google Glass you're on the list. Or you could try pinging Googler Aygul Zagidullina and hope you get lucky! Well, for those of you who don't make it, here's a pic of Sergey Brin sporting his Google Glasses on the subway.

In other news, the NYC EDC is partnering with the Lawrence Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College to create Competition THRIVE, and they're seeking original, innovative strategies and programs that help immigrant entrepreneurs succeed in business. In Round 1, $25,000 will be awarded to five semi-finalists to pilot their program and create a business plan. And in Round 2, $100,000 will be awarded to one grand prize winner to further scale their program. Submission period is February 1 to March 7. For more information, check out the website or email competitionthrive@baruch.cuny.edu.

On January 30, my buddy Haithem is organizing the Lemonade Heroes Yacht Party. It's gonna be a crazy night of dancing, drinking, mixing and mingling--on a yacht.
You'll be getting photographed on a red carpet, and you'll have a shot at an audition for an entrepreneurship TV series and book.

More stuff you don't wanna miss this week: AppNexus Speaker Series (with Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg) on the 23rd, PandoMonthly Presents (with Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson) on the 24th and Amusemi's 1 Year Anniversary Party+Dinner on the 26th.

Last week my buddy Charlie Todd & the folks at Improv Everywhere organized their twelfth Annual No Pants Subway Ride. Over 4,000 participants showed up. Here's the recap and video. And my friends Jen and Allison are back with another hilarious edition of Blogologues, playing this week on the 24th, 25th and 26th at Under St Marks (and yes, there will be giveaways!).

And now let's see what's going down in the Alley this week...

DUMBO Improvement District Annual Meeting
All members of the DUMBO community are invited to hear the latest on hurricane recovery efforts and learn what's in store for the neighborhood in 2013. The coveted DUMBO "Magic Feather" awards will be given to Rachel Haot (New York's chief digital officer), Susan Feldman (artistic director, St. Ann's Warehouse) and Jerry Hultin (president, NYU-Poly).
Tuesday (Jan. 22), 5 p.m. @ Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main Street

Next Top Makers: The Business of Design
Join the creators of New York’s Next Top Makers for an evening of education, guidance, and networking. Hear from IDEO storytelling gurus why good design doesn’t always speak for itself, and learn about the role of a designer in a world of 3D printers.
Tuesday (Jan. 22), 7 p.m. @ 3DEA Pop-Up Store @ Eventi Hotel, 835 6th Avenue

The Future of Education #1: New Models for 21st Century Learning
Panelists include Brad Hargreaves (founding partner, General Assembly), Kane Sarhan (cofounder, Enstitute), Juliette LaMontagne (founder & director, Breaker) and Abigail Besdin (head of Skillshare's education team).
Wednesday (Jan. 23), 6:30 p.m. @ Centre For Social Innovation Pop-Up Space, 601 W. 26th Street, #360

AppNexus Speaker Series
Brian O'Kelley (CEO, AppNexus) will host a fireside chat with Jason Goldberg (CEO, Fab.com) and Jared Cluff (VP Marketing, Fab.com).
Wednesday (Jan. 23), 6:30 p.m. @ AppNexus, 28 W. 23rd Street

How to Build Great Communities: Lets Collaborate!
With Sheila Karaszewski (community manager, Airbnb), Tony Bacigalupo (cofounder, New Work City), Andrew Wagner (director & editor-in-chief, Krrb) and James Wahba (cofounder, Projective Space). Moderated by Melissa Young (founder, Let's Collaborate!)
Wednesday (Jan. 23), 7 p.m. @ Projective Space L.E.S., 72 Allen Street

#ArtsTech 4 Year Anniversary Party!
Open Bar with 3 Pernod Absinthe cocktails from 7-8 pm. Variety of grilled panini appetizers. Photobooth by Styleblaster. Tunes by DJ Winslow Porter. Video art by Sabrina Ratte, Mr. Div, Yoshi Sodeoka and Andreas Nicholas Fischer
Wednesday (Jan. 23), 7 p.m. @ The Counting Room, 44 Berry Street, Brooklyn

PandoMonthly Presents
A fireside chat with Chad Dickerson (CEO, Etsy)
Thursday (Jan. 24), 6 p.m. @ Projective L.E.S., 72 Allen Street

dd:COLLECTIVE - The Changing Retail Environment (Presented by Digital DUMBO)
Featured speakers include Philippe von Borries (Co-Founder, Refinery29), Keith George (General Manager, Gilt Man by Gilt Groupe) and Claire Mazur (Co-Founder, Of a Kind).
Thursday (Jan 24), 6:30 p.m. @ Huge, 45 Main St , Ste 220, Brooklyn

Dinner, Cupcakes, Wine & Technology!
Introducing the inaugural NJ Tech Gals meetup!
Thursday (Jan 24), 7 p.m. @ Hoboken Business Center, 50 Harrison Street (2nd Fl), Hoboken

Nike+ Accelerator (powered by TechStars) Recruiting Tour
Join the team from Nike and TechStars to hear about the Nike+ Accelerator. Some local quantified self demos. And the team from Nike will be bringing along some SWAG, including some Nike+ FuelBands!
Thursday (Jan 24), 7 p.m. @ TechStars NYC HQ , 36 Cooper Square, 6th Fl.

Power Breakfast
With Susan Feldman (cofounder, One Kings Lane)
Friday (Jan. 25), 8 a.m. @ Fordham Graduate School of Business, 113 W. 60th Street, 12th Fl.

NYC Mobile Startup Weekend
Where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and buddying entrepreneurs gather together to share ideas, form teams and spend the weekend building and launching a startup.
Friday (Jan. 25), 6 p.m. @ WeWork Soho Lounge, 154 Grand Street

2013 Brooklyn Inventgenuity Festival: Digital By Hand
A popular annual winter celebration of making things for kids and their parents. With public projects and workshops led by Beam Center’s faculty of artists, engineers and big thinkers. This year’s theme: Digital by Hand.
Saturday (Jan. 26), 11 a.m. @ The Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen Street

Amusemi 1 Year Anniversary Party + Dinner
Celebrate the anniversary of our first startup dining event. Register for Amusemi to get on the guest list.
Saturday (Jan. 26), 7 p.m. @ TBD

More events on the horizon...
TEDxBroadway: Industry leaders envision the future of Broadway on Jan. 28 @ New World Stages
NYC Gaming January: Demo Night on Jan. 29 @ Microsoft
Brooklyn Tech Meetup with Victoria Brown on Jan. 29 @ Feil Hall, Brooklyn Law School
Lemonade Heroes Yacht Party featuring a chance to Audition for a TV Series! on Jan. 30 @ Hornblower Inifinity
Entrepreneurship in the Beer Industry on Jan. 30 @ Professor Thoms
dd:SOCIAL - 4 Year Anniversary & dd:A-LIST Crowdfunding Launch on Jan. 31 @ The DUMBO Loft
Business Insider Presents: Social Commerce Summit on Feb. 06 @ Pier 60
UX Design and User Experience Optimization Trends on Feb. 06 @ Anchin
Hearst Fashion Hackathon 2013 on Feb. 09 @ Hearst
Social Media Week NY 2013 on Feb. 18 @ Metropolitan Pavilion
AIPAC Technology Division: Launch Event w/Dan Senor on Feb. 27 @ Bloomberg Tower

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! ;)

Mr. Dickerson. (Twitter.com)

Worst nightmare for workday Skype gossipers: It appears until very recently there was a vulnerability that made it possible for anyone who knows your email to hijack your account. UPDATED: Skype says it's been resolved. [TNW]

Do you fret about the amount of info you've shared with Facebook? Think for a minute about your Google Search history taken as a whole, and you'll have a panic attack.  [Buzzfeed]

As we head into the holidays, an update from Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson reveals that the community is now 20 million users strong and did more than $700 million in sales in 2012. By the end of the year, total all-time marketplace sales will surpass 100 million products. The company is also doing a holiday popup shop in Soho this year--right next to Dior. Fancy! [Etsy]

Are startups funded in the early-stage investing boom starting to run out of money? [Business Insider]

Judging from this video about the Jawbone UP, wearable computing requires a whole lot of trial and error in the design process. [Fuse Project]

(Photo: AspiringSocialite.com)

It appears New York's tech scene will finally have its own calling card--a glossy, cinematic affair shot by Annie Leibovitz. The celebrated photographer cordoned off the cobblestone streets of Soho yesterday to direct a photo shoot for an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair.

Let Silicon Valley have its tacky tiger-monkeyblowouts, we'll take the Conde Nast's version of Social Register, thank you very much.

A tipster first alerted us to the shoot from Dennis Crowley's Instagram, where the Foursquare founder posed in an ash-colored blazer with Ms. Leibovitz.

But paparazzi who snuck onto the shoot also spied a number of other notable figures including Michael Bloomberg, College Humor cofounder and Notional CEO Ricky Van Veen (with grown-up hair), socialite and Moda Operandi founder Lauren Santo Domingo--looking stylish and pregnant in a cream-colored trench coat, albeit sans her secretly departed fashion director--as well as Union Square Ventures's Fred Wilson, Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson, and Tumblr founder David Karp, perched atop a vintage motorcycle with his bulldog Clark, alongside Arianna Huffington in the sidecar.

The imagery is pretty evocative, but perhaps not the way Ms. Lebovitz intended. It's hard not to picture them all wedged into that sidecar, driving around Soho, boats against the unmonetizable current.

However, this isn't Vanity Fair's first trip to Silicon Alley. In October, the influencers's Bible interviewed chief digital officer Rachel Sterne. And last year, both its "New Establishment" and "Next Establishment" lists were peppered with familiar names, including Gilt Groupe's Kevin Ryan, Business Insider hyperbolist Henry Blodget, as well as Mr. Karp and LearnVest's Alexa Von Tobel.

Since we're rounding the corner on August, the timing seems a little late to shoot the September issue,  so your guess is as good as ours as to the accompanying text. Perhaps it's that Mayor Bloomberg as Tech Savior profile he's been hoping for since Lehman Brothers toppled down Wall Street.

Mr. Dickerson. (Twitter.com)

Etsy founder Rob Kalin used to be fond of referencing Etsy's future IPO. But lately, the crafty Dumbo-based marketplace, which says it has been in the black since 2009, has eased up on the rhetoric. After the latest raise, CEO Chad Dickerson intimated that funding from any new sources was not on the immediate horizon. "The funding also ensures that the company has the operating funds to last for many years so that the Etsy community is in a position to succeed for a very long time," he wrote.

Etsy, Etsy's friends, and Etsy's former employees maintain that its investors haven't and don't pressure the company for an exit. But considering Etsy is almost seven years old and has raised more than $90 million total, a public offering seems inevitable. The company's designation as a B Corporation, which means it must undergo outside review to maintain a certification of best practices, also seemed to be a preemptive guard against the corruption that comes from scaling. The Wall Street Journal managed to elicit comment on this point from Mr. Dickerson during an interview about Etsy's expansion into Australia, its fourth-largest market for buyers.

"Etsy’s definitely the kind of company that can go public. We’ve been breakeven since 2009 and our revenues are really strong," Mr. Dickerson said. However, he hedged, "I think it’s important to remain an independent, private company as long as we can in order to be able make better long-term decisions." Down NYSE, down Nasdaq.

Mr. Dickerson (flickr.com/eschipul)

DIY-ers, you may now begin crocheting celebratory pillows and other yarn finery: E-commerce site Etsy, also known as Amazon for Twee People, announced today that it has raised a $40 million Series F round from investors, including Union Square Ventures and Accel Partners.

In a lengthy blog post, Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson strayed from the typical tech funding announcement, instead choosing to first focus on Etsy's growth and continued commitment to making the world a better place through business. The DUMBO-based startup has scored a B Corporation certification, which "gives [them] a framework to measure Etsy’s success against rigorous values and responsible practices as [they] scale as a company."

The B Corporation certification is basically a commitment to doing good by doing well, which is a smart PR move, considering Etsy's artisan demographic.

Mr. Dickerson also writes that this $40M capital injection will help "grow Etsy into an economic force all around the world... we want to provide more products and services to help sellers succeed and build their businesses on the Etsy platform."

Perhaps it can also go towards helping to solve that wedding redesign flap.

Mr. Tate

After years of reading Ryan Tate's piercing coverage on the free time and foibles of Silicon Valley's demigods at Gawker, Betabeat finally had the pleasure of making his acquaintance the other night. Spoiler alert: He might be the nicest dude in tech blogging, despite what the press releases regurgitation factories would have you think. Mr. Tate's former pen pal Steve Jobs probably put it best: "He's no dummy."

We also had a chance to peruse his new book "The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business," which takes its title and subject matter from Google's much-admired practice of letting employees spent a fifth of their work week building whatever they want to. Like, say, multi-billion dollar revenue streams like AdSense or lifelines like Gmail.

But "The 20% Doctrine" goes beyond GOOG to examine how the idea of allowing free space to fool around led to innovative features and new ventures at Flickr, Odeo (perhaps you've heard of a little service called Twttr?), Jupiter Research (ahem, Dodgeball), the Huffington Post, and even in celebuchef Thomas Keller's empire and at Bronx of Academy of Letters. Mr. Tate talks to a number of familiar names like Caterina Fake, Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit, and Google Reader creator Chris Wetherell.

The stickiest part of New York techies will likely be chapters tracing the history of hackathons, which crossed over into the mainstream at the Yahoo Hack Day when Beck came out to play for the coders and someone hotboxed the phone booths. (Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson, who used to head up Yahoo's developer networks, wrote the book's foreward.) We talked to Mr. Tate about goofing off in the era of gChat, when 20 percent doesn't work, how to make hackathons more productive, and why, contrary to conventional Startupland wisdom, you maybe shouldn't quit your day job just yet.

Before Gawker, you wrote for Business 2.0 and other more straight-laced publications. Did the Gawker connection make it difficult to get people on the record?
When Caterina Fake wrote me back she said she had done some additional research on me and that I seemed like a good guy. I got the impression that I need a little extra vetting. It really helped to have Chad [Dickerson] because he was one of my very first interviews and he was really generous with his time. I never did get to talk to Marissa [Mayer]. But it pushed me to find people like Chris [Wetherell], which brought a little more diversity to it, because he had an experience that wasn’t quite as positive. At the Huffington Post, some of the people I talked to ran it up the flagpole to try to get Arianna or Roy Sekoff and the response that came back was, you know, cold day in hell or over my dead body or something like that. For the most part, I think people were refreshed to be able to talk about something concrete and constructive.

You mentioned the emotional resonance of 20 percent time. For example, how hard Evan Williams tried to recreate the constraints from his early days after Odeo got derailed by copious funding. It seemed like the common thread was nostalgia for the early-stage experience.
People seem to either get bought into these large companies or they grow their companies into something large and significant and they want to sort of rekindle that early energy. It’s like they bump up against the inherent flaws in having a successful large company. They want to try to find some kind of shortcut back. Then the question becomes: Can they really see it to the point where it’s not just a nostalgia exercise? AdSense is Google’s no. 2 revenue line. But then if you look at a lot of the 20 percent projects that came after that they didn’t get the company to the bottom line growth that they need. They seem to be in the process of reconciling the dream of creating a startup-like atmosphere with reality. With a startup you can either drop that startup or iterate or pivot or just quit and move onto the next one. But Google doesn’t really have that option.

What’s Google’s current stance on it?
I’ve heard repeatedly that it is harder to do 20 percent now at Google. Chris, the Google Reader guy, made this point really well that it’s always been a fuzzy policy: You can do it, but how? What are the costs to you in terms of your bonus or what is the cost to you in terms of your career at Google? When do you start hitting a wall against actually deploying stuff?

Who is doing 20 percent time better than Google?
What I found in talking to other companies, especially at Atlassian and a few others, is that it seems to be quite possible to put filters and gating mechanisms in place. It’s not a complete free-for-all. Because you have to have a successful project at [Atlassian’s] Hack Day to get 20 percent days and once you’ve done a few weeks of 20 percent time, you have to get a peer or like four engineers to sign off on it.

Your book also gets into the perils of showboating. At the hackathons I’ve been to, it often seems like developers look for hacks that will crack each other up during the demos.
There’s a danger of hackdays degenerating into just showboating. I think Daniel Raffel nailed it later in the Hack Day chapter when he said, there has to be some prospect of creating an actual product otherwise you’re just gonna get engineers trying to impress each other. At Yahoo’s there were judges that were top executives, but there was no systematic process where those executives are taking the best project and turning them into product. There was no official pipeline. They had a non-technical CEO for a long time, Terry Semel, that the engineers did not connect with, so Hack Day lifted morale, but there were products that could have been very successful.

Like what?
You know how on Google Maps, you can drag the line to change the direction of getting from point A to point B? Like I want to take this freeway instead of that one, you can just drag it on the map. Well, I was told a guy had it at Hack Day at least a year if not years before that and it just never went anywhere. Then Google got all these accolades when they implemented it.

It seems like the other factor is that hackathons have gotten more corporate. You see a lot of sponsorship these days.
I think that’s the risk with any new business, that it will get adopted by the wrong companies in the wrong ways. They’re just totally not going to get it and they’re going to try to do a goofy imitation of it. That has probably happened with virtually every management technique that startups have pioneered so I’m sure there are companies that are giving out stock options that really shouldn’t be giving out stock options because their employees don’t care. Agile development is infamous for this. People say it has a lot of strong points, but it’s completely degenerated into consultants selling something as agile and managers using it to beat engineers over the head.

Who are the “wrong companies” to try something like this?
I had a whole chapter on Nullsoft, which was kind of an early way in which this went wrong. Nullsoft created Winamp, which was one of the first popular mp3 players. It was created by this guy Justin Frankel, who was very young and his company got bought by AOL for around $200 million. He got rich very quickly, but they said okay we’re gonna pull you into AOL, but you’ll be autonomous. We’ll give you your own office in SF. You guys can create whatever you want. They kind of let them play, which sounds like a great idea but then [AOL] got bought by Time Warner. So while they’re still closing the merger, Nullsoft starts churning out these tools that can be used for piracy, like Gnutella which was a very early peer-to-peer network. They created this thing called Waste, which was a way for creating darknets, so like private sharing networks. They also created this thing that took the ads out of AOL Messenger and replaced them with things developers thought were cool.

All of these projects were completely running against what you would want to do at a media company, but they were technologically very cool. When I interviewed Frankel, he thinks something could have come of them commercially, but if you’re doing that stuff in a media company [laughs] it’s not necessarily gonna work. If you’re not a startup and you’ve got to answer to the boss and sometimes the bosses are going to be boneheads.

Did you use the 20 percent time method to write the book?
Absolutely. I did this on Fridays. I was at Gawker Monday through Thursday. It actually made me more productive on Fridays to have this book to work on. Certainly by the end it was pretty tiring. It took me two years, and the original plan was nine months. I’ve been at Gawker four years, so I’ve spent over half my time at Gawker on a four-day week schedule, which is really nice of them let me do that!

Isn’t advocating more free time at work kind of dangerous when gChat, or say, spending time in the comment section of gossip blogs has already vastly diminished productivity levels?
Isn’t this going to distract people even more? I think that’s a totally valid concern. According to my own reporting, it seems like 20 percent time and similar programs is a way to recapture some of that time people might have spent goofing off on gChat or taking long lunches on Fridays. It’s a way to take time when people might be distracted from work and give them something else to do that’s at least potentially productive. From what I can tell, the bigger danger is overworking. Highly-motivated people, they’re not slacking off on their main stuff because they want to continue to be successful in their companies. It turns out they’re doing 120 percent of what they were doing before and 40 percent of the 120 is given to the project.

Management must be pleased!
I’ve been asked: Is this a way to trick employees into doing more work?

You frame setting up some kind of 20 percent program as a way to experiment and innovate while keeping your day job. That goes against what we’ve been hearing from Wall Street refugees and Startupland in general.
If you can bring yourself to do a startup and quit your job you absolutely should because that means you’re highly highly motivated to pursue your idea and you understand the risks and you’re willing to forgot that income. This is still not widespread enough where companies have [this kind of program]. It’s just a low risk way of approaching the idea. It’s good for ideas where you’re not as certain of success. Because with startups there’s a higher bar. That should be a grandslam idea in your head. This is a great way to get your training wheels. Be a serial entrepreneur without actually going to do all these startups. By the time you go to quit, it’s like okay now you’ve got these experiences under your belt.

It’s just interesting how many startup people in New York unequivocally advocate for quitting your job.
It’s a selection bias. But it’s really not as scary as you would think, to quit your job and do something like that . . . from what I’ve read on Hacker News.

A painting of Galiano Island, where Mr. Bryant will be working, for sale on Etsy. (etsy.com)

Avi Bryant, a well-known developer who most recently worked at Twitter, just announced he's joining Etsy to head up a mysterious new project that will help Etsy's shops become "more economically viable despite being tiny."

But while Mr. Bryant will be moving out of San Francisco, he won't be settling down in Fort Greene or Astoria. Instead, he's moving to the gorgeous Galiano Island in British Columbia. The freedom to work remotely was a major factor in his decision to join Etsy, he said.

"My wife and I have the incredible luck to have the right to live and work in any of the US, Canada, and the EU; it would be a shame not to take advantage of that," Mr. Bryant wrote on his personal blog. "That Etsy is letting me do this, not just as an individual contributor, but as a manager, and not just for myself, but for my entire team, is exceptional and, in my opinion, far-sighted."

Mr. Bryant's home in Galiano is a hefty drive away from the nearest city, Vancouver, and attracts creative types "who can do their work in relative solitude, but still plug into the larger economy around them." Mr. Bryant hints that, "It’s a fitting place from which to start this project."

Hey, Etsy is based in Dumbo, which is also on the water and attracts filmmakers, artists and technologists--although it's not quite as isolated as this pretty Canadian isle sounds.

But what Mr. Bryant really wants is freedom:

San Francisco is an amazing place, as is New York, but these are not the only amazing places in the world. Should we decide to spend half the year in Canada, half the year in Hawaii, and then a year in France to start my kids on a second language, I want to be able to do that without feeling like I’m compromising my work or my career by doing so.

Look at Etsy, where CEO Chad Dickerson is a famous proponent of 20 percent time, being all progressive. It's likely a function of Mr. Bryant's extraordinary resume that he's able to ask for such flexibility. Etsy needs some employees in the office so they can have lunch together, after all. Like a real family.

“With engineering well in hand and a strong partner in Adam Freed (our COO), it’s time for me to focus my attention on other aspects of the business. I’m stepping into the role of CEO at Etsy, and I’m looking forward to working with all of the teams at Etsy to move faster as we scale while staying true to our values.”

When Mr. Dickerson first started, Etsy was just a 60 person start-up. Now the company employs 200 people and posted revenues of $40 million (on sales of $400 million) last year. Mr. Dickerson wrote that his focus will be the Etsy network,  “I’m going to prioritize the needs of the Etsy community in the broadest sense — Etsy’s sellers, how we work with each other within the company, our local communities, and everyone whose lives we touch.”

The last time Mr. Kalin played musical chairs at the top was in July of 2008 when he NPR exec Maria Thomas took his spot. He resumed the CEO role in December, 2009 after Ms. Thomas left the company. But this time it sounds more permanent. On A VC, Fred Wilson wrote what sounds very much like a last goodbye.

"Rob is so very much that founder who cares intensely. He has given so much to the company over the years and he just completed a product roadmap that provides a guidepost for what Etsy will become in the coming years. As Rob transitions out once again, I want to personally thank him for all of this and more. Etsy is his creation and will always be.”

With word of Etsy's once "hush-hush" new outpost in Hudson now confirmed, Mr. Dickerson will have the vagaries of a new office to contend with. Locals says Mr. Kalin confirmed by email earlier this year that Etsy will indeed be moving into n The Cannonball Factory on Columbia Street and plans to hire 50 new staffers.