Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Williams | Hacker News Reader

Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Williams

techcrunch.com

114 pointsaditya29 comments

http://www.quora.com/How-much-credibility-is-there-to-the-re...

  Chris was referring to the "being groomed" part of this rumor as being dogshit.
  We all know Costolo has no hair with which to be groomed anyways.

Funny

Interesting tweet from the new CEO (a RT from @avibryant, http://twitter.com/#!/dickc/status/3962807808), likely to be a joke at the time (Sep 13, 2009): First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow. Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power

This makes me admire Mark Zuckerberg more as he is heading such a big empire at such a small age! Facebook for sure had lot more challenges than Twitter for their Privacy issues and many new releases. Mark stood strong in all those incidents, and didn't give up. I remember his talk from StarupSchool, and how he was so supportive of Mark Picnus's advice on why founders need to be CEOs of their company.

Why the down votes here? It is pretty damn amazing that not only has Zuckerberg maintained control but he has also been smart enough to bring in talent to help him, personally, scale. It would have been easy for Mark to simply say, "Eh, I need to hire a CEO", or for him to listen to the countless investors and advisors that are almost certainly hinting to him that he should do so.

Why did Ev step down? No one really knows. It, almost certainly, is not because doing so will enable him to now focus on product. As CEO it is quite easy for him to delegate nearly all of those responsibilities he wishes to ignore to Dick. No, giving Dick the title of CEO almost undoubtably has beneath it many more subtle reasons, some of which might simply be that Ev convinced himself he needed to do this for personal reasons. We'll never know, but IMO the "so I can focus on XXX" reason is never the real reason.

Exactly, that was the point. Even Mark Zuckerberg primarily focuses on Product and Platform, whereas COO Sheryl Sandberg focuses on other Biz Dev things.

(From: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03face.html)

"Ms. Sandberg has focused on building the business, expanding internationally, cultivating relationships with large advertisers and putting her polish on things like communications and public policy. That has freed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on what he likes best: the Facebook Web site and its platform."

I totally agree with you on this. Its been remarkable how Mark is handling one of the best companies on planted today. I have been working in startups for more then a decade, and i know how difficult it is to run the show with ups and downs almost everyday. Hope Mark will write a book about how he managed the show.

The tidbit I found most interesting was that Twitter claims 300 employees. That's at least twice the size I thought they were:

"In fact, there are 300 people working at Twitter today—compared to about 20 when I took the CEO job two years ago."

I wonder what the break down of technical/sales/etc. people is.

I was shocked, and I believe rightfully so, that digg even had 70+ employees. It just seems wasteful to me.

Then again I don't know what work they have to do behind the scenes.

Digg has 70+ employees? Interesting. Doesn't Reddit have less than 10? Someone please fact check that for me.

Reddit has 6. Digg has 60+.

Quality over Quantity.

I went with my bosses to visit one of our competitors a few weeks ago; they invited us for a tour. The CEO of the competitor believed that employee count was a direct indicator of the strength of a business. He bragged about having a staff 3x my company's, but the fact is that based on sales data, we're far more efficient, doing a percentage of their sales larger than the ratio of staff sizes.

Reddit was 4 until recently. They did say they felt like they couldn't really go forward anywhere with that kind of staff although. I don't know if the new 2 hires are enough.

Reddit was 4 until recently... I don't know if the new 2 hires are enough.

Actually Reddit has been at least 5 for some time. The 2 "new hires" were announced retroactively.

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/08/welcome-alex-and-lia.html

Yowza. This surprises me. I thought Ev was interested in running the company and building a legacy, but this looks more like a plan for a big exit.

I don't see how it foretells any plans to exit. Perhaps Ev just doesn't have the desire to be CEO of a 300+ person company. It's quite possible Costolo was hired as COO as a way of transitioning him into the CEO spot if he did well. That would certainly seem like a pretty smart strategy.

>> It's quite possible Costolo was hired as COO as a way of transitioning him into the CEO spot if he did well.

I'm quite sure this is what happened. Here's a detailed breakdown from Shervin Pishevar on how SGN did practically the same thing.

http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Shervin-Pishevar-is-out...

OTOH, Having 300+ people at some silly little micro blogging fad with very little revenue, doesn't seem like a pretty smart strategy.

So you downmodders think 300 employees is a reasonable number for a yet to be proved no business model startup? Wow.

Their quarterly revenue is, I believe, estimated somewhere in the region of $X million.

I suspect you got so many downvotes, though, because of the dismissive tone of your comment.

Their revenue is from 1, or at best 2 'customers', who could stop being 'customers' at the drop of a hat.

I believe your information is out of date. In addition to the two major data customers in Google and Microsoft (rumoured to be in the region of $25m/year) it also has advertisers who pay for promoted tweets and promoted hashtags. As for the "at the drop of a hat", of course they could, but why would they?

Once wave takes off of course!

Actually this may prove more fruitful in the line of Google and MS. I think Google guys did the great thing by choosing a third person as CEO. This gives them more time to think on strategies and decisions.

What does a CEO do besides think on company wide strategies?

Recruitment, monetization, and investor relationships are all part of a CEO's core responsibilities, and totally unrelated to building products or attracting users. If Ev wants to focus on those activities, it seems totally reasonable to hand over the CEO role to someone else.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo/

'New Twitter was definitely a trigger for this,' Williams told me. 'Conveniently, I took over the CEO role just about two years ago - and brought Dick in just about a year ago. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a product guy, and New Twitter seems to work out well,' he continued. 'New Twitter was a moment of clarity for all of us here,' Costolo added. '[With this change] Ev can once again focus on product.'

"profitable" was mentioned a few times in there. Would be interesting if this means a bigger focus on making money for Twitter.

It's good this coincided with me ordering some care from the care factory. HP hiring a no-name for CEO was more interesting. These things don't impact hackers on a day to day. Let's float up the revenue sharing tidbit and discuss that.

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