Etsy, the handmade goods online marketplace, has appointed its CTO Chad Dickerson (pictured here) as CEO. He replaces founder Rob Kalin, who stepped back into the top leadership role in late 2009.

Kalin is again transitioning out of the day-to-day management at the New York-based start-up.

In a blog post about it, Dickerson wrote, in part:

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.

Before we talk about the future, I wanted to say a heartfelt thanks to Rob Kalin. Rob started Etsy. It was his idea. Hiring me was his idea. We all owe him a huge debt for starting the company that we all love, and I owe him a huge personal debt for bringing me to Etsy. Thanks, Rob.

As CEO, I’m going to focus the entire company on moving faster and and more purposefully, learning by doing, iterating, and taking risks. That’s a long way of saying we’re going to get things done. 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. It’s a big responsibility that I take very seriously.

Etsy added former Google exec Freed in mid-2010.

Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson also addressed the management change on his blog, A VC:

“Transitions are never easy on the people involved and the company that goes through them. But they are inevitable in any company’s evolution. Some of them work out well and others not as much.”

Google+ fills a void between public and private, it serves what is likely to be an older demo less interested in hooking up or hipstering out and more interested in the social utility it provides.

A VC Fred Wilson, in a later part of the same post on social networking companies.

In any case, I hope Google+ succeeds. Given the blog posts saying this will kill Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc, you might wonder why I feel that way. Well first, I don’t think competitors kill companies and services. I think the vast majority of “deaths” are self inflicted.

– A VC Fred Wilson, on the newest entrant into social networking game.

BoomTown has always enjoyed–although I have not always agreed with–the ruminations of Fred Wilson in his must-read blog, A VC.

Today, the New York venture investor–heard of Foursquare, Twitter?–penned one that was flatly on point, simply titled “Chasing Returns” about a potential crisis in start-up funding.

It was all due to a new class of investors too focused on chasing returns, noted Wilson, “and some of them do not understand what they are investing in.”

Rut-roh.

Perhaps dumb moneybags are not the greatest worry of our time–but dumber justifications of questionable success certainly should be, which Wilson also called out recently in an article in the New York Observer about the bubbly start-up scene there.

Said Wilson:

“It’s not all going great. You know, companies are failing. A couple of high-flying entrepreneurs came crashing to the ground recently. Justin Shaffer of Hot Potato and Sam Lessin of Drop.io–both of those companies essentially failed. Both of them ended up ‘selling’ their businesses to Facebook, but those were really just–Facebook wanted to hire those people, and they wrapped it up in a ‘sale.’ But those companies were unsuccessful. They failed. So there is failure out there–like, right in front of us. We can see it.”

Many quickly cried foul after Wilson’s remarks, but many more secretly shook their heads in agreement at the reality distortion field around entrepreneurs.

This has happened a lot lately in Silicon Valley, of course–as evidenced by a series of just-in-time saves of once high-flying start-ups (Slide being bought by Google comes to mind) sold as wins.

Indeed, painting failure as another form of success is one of the favorite and endearing canards of tech, showing an ability to bounce back from any negative and pivot into a new direction.

But most pivoting, as Loren Feldman of 1938 Media recently pointed out, is just another word for covering up misdirection.

Perhaps misdirection–as it should be in any world that thrives on innovation and entrepreneurial instincts–is all well and good, but it is only that way as long as it is identified as such when it occurs.

So, good for Wilson for truth-in-labeling when it comes to start-ups, investing and chasing returns these days.

After the much anticipated news yesterday that Foursquare would finally grab a big piece of change from the powerful Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz–$20 million simoleons, in fact–BoomTown was much entertained by two very different blog post that went up about the deal.

The first was by one of the hot social location start-up’s early VCs, well-known New York investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Partners.

In a post on his blog A VC, titled “Some Thoughts on Foursquare,” Wilson disagreed with my assessment that the deal to fund the company–which included acquisition interest from Yahoo (YHOO) and Facebook–was “a very long and decidedly strange funding journey” and that it came “after a series of missteps and switchbacks over what’s next for Foursquare.”

His essential argument about what he thinks of as criticism on my part: Wrong!

Wrote Wilson:

“The conversations with potential acquirers were very beneficial to the founders and the company in many ways. It helped them to understand what the risks of going it alone were versus the risks of selling….And it allowed the founders to develop close working relationships with some of the most important Internet companies who can not only be acquirers but also distribution partners and monetization partners.”

Okay, I’ll bite. It’s all been a terrific learning experience for Foursquare’s young management team, especially its CEO, Dennis Crowley. Like college but without the tests and, instead of forking it out, you get handed a big pile of money at the end!

Plus you meet all these nice people along the way, who–even if they don’t scoop you up in a big acquisition hug today–are now super good pals who might also hand you a pile of money tomorrow.

Maybe so, but that does not mean they didn’t wince at the process they got drawn into.

Actually, from numerous interviews with all the players involved, even those who like Crowley and think there is something innovative at Foursquare, pretty much everyone thought the whole process a tad sloppy, a bit arrogant, a lot noisy and, perhaps most of all, gave everyone a little too much time to consider the many competitive challenges the company faced.

Does that matter? Probably not, as everyone in the Internet business is very much used to VCs and others treating entrepreneurs as delicate hothouse flowers who must be revered, coddled and indulged in their noble quest to bring us all kinds of cool stuff, such as the ability to check in from my garage.

And, of course, some of them deserve that attention and petting up and down, transforming into digital geese laying golden eggs for all.

But some definitely do not. Because for every Facebook, there is a plethora of not so successful companies that get quickly and copiously feted and then hit the inevitable wall.

Slide, run by an extraordinarily gifted entrepreneur, Max Levchin, is a good case in point. After its $50 million funding in early 2008, the company was valued at $550 million and seemed ready to take over the widget universe.

It was, if you recall, very hot.

But things cooled and Slide has since regrouped. It is now plugging away at the tough part of building its social entertainment business into a real business.

Perhaps not as hot, where the real heat is.

And, that’s the underlying point Microsoft (MSFT) Director of Social Engagements Mark Drapeau seemed to be making in his post, “It’s About Trust: Thoughts on Location-Based Services, Especially FourSquare.”

His premise: Who knows yet who is going to succeed in the geo-location space.

Wrote Drapeau:

“I don’t necessarily see why FourSquare or Gowalla or even Facebook will necessarily be the market leader. People generally speak of these three as if they’re predetermined….Deploying the app and making it cool isn’t the real challenge. Building trust among the user base is.”

While you can easily dismiss any complaint from a Microsoft dude–who even admitted to a frustrating experience of trying to reach Crowley to do a small deal–you still cannot ignore the simple idea that these fundings are all crapshoots a lot of the time.

Which is why I do agree with Wilson in a way about his bromide about taking time to deliberate big decisions:

“So the moral of this story, if you will, is don’t let conventional wisdom force you into making decisions you don’t need to make and you aren’t ready to make, particularly about very big decisions that you will be living with the rest of your life.”

Indeed, but let’s perhaps take it one step further:

Don’t let Silicon Valley conventional wisdom force you into making mountains out of molehills too early, particularly very big mountains that you will be waiting to form for the rest of your life.

BoomTown gets guff about a lot of stuff, but no one is more passionate than those who wanted us to make our comment system better.

And they were right.

So while we never move fast enough, even for ourselves, tonight we have launched a new comments tool to improve the user experience on AllThingsD.com.

It lets you do cool things, such as log in using Facebook Connect, comment easily from a mobile phone and comment via email.

The tool we chose is called Disqus, and it’s used pretty widely on the Web (see Fred Wilson’s site, A VC, for a good example).

In fact, you might already have a Disqus profile that you use on other sites.

But, because we know how annoying change can be, we were able to port over all of the old comments from our site to the new system, although there might be a glitch or two (which we will fix!).

In addition, those who have already signed up as commenters on ATD can continue to comment as they always have always without further sign-ups.

We hope the change makes it more fun (and interesting) for you to comment and interact with us and with one other.

Please let us know if you have any problems at all and we will get to them asap!

Let the feedback begin!