Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer Steps Down | Hacker News Reader

Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer Steps Down

nytimes.com

62 pointsdoctorshady49 comments

Here is the takeway:

"Mr. Rowghani has been selling Twitter shares heavily since May, when insiders were first allowed to sell after the company’s initial public offering in November.

Last month, he sold 300,000 shares, worth about $10 million. And this month, he sold nearly 75,000 shares worth more than $2.5 million. He remains a major stockholder, however, owning about two million shares, according to his latest regulatory filing."

This is a non-story. This is a guy that had a mountain of net-worth 'on paper' and since he is now legally able to, he's brought a portion of that net-worth into the bank.

I don't know about you, but if I had 50MM+ on paper in a single investment, I'd want to take at least a fifth of it and turn it into cash for investing elsewhere, building that dream home, going on vacation, etc.

Now, maybe he's filthy rich already, but this just strikes me as a very typical, sane 'diversify your assets' type of situation.

My personal take on this is that the company is desperate to seem confident in the future. If the executives sell stock, the employees sell, and suddenly there'd be a large-scale sell-off, I think. My guess would be that the executives are holding onto it to try to infuse some sense of stability for now, but they'll start looking for the exits shortly, and when they leave, they'll liquidate their holdings.

I think you're spot on with your analysis, but I think it hurts the image of Twitter executives holding their stock because they're confident that it'll continue to go up.

Correct. Sheryl Sandberg has been dumping stock recently as well. http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-sells-152m-of...

> Last month, he sold 300,000 shares, worth about $10 million. And this month, he sold nearly 75,000 shares worth more than $2.5 million.

A clever man.

Hmm... This does cast a shadow on Twitter's future. It's a shadow, so it does not have solid ground to back it, but it's a shadow, so it makes people nervous.

"There was, in fact, a question at a recent “tea time” — bi-weekly employee meetings with top execs — about Rowghani’s large sale of his shares. Those in attendance told me that Rowghani got up and told the audience that he was not thrilled to answer the question, but noted that he wanted the money to give to research to battle a disease that took his father’s life. It was an emotional address, said those present." http://recode.net/2014/06/11/twitter-mulling-shake-up-of-top...

I wonder why he didn't donate the shares directly, isn't that simpler for tax reasons?

how is selling his shares the takeaway and not resigning from his position?

it would seem that they mentioned the share selling because they feel that this was foreshadowing him leaving the company when he did it. it would seem that that share selling was not simple profit taking, even though I agree it would be sensible to sell shares and turn some of that 'net worth' into hard assets or reinvest it

I adore Twitter but I am afraid the company is executing poorly. Here are a few examples:

1. I receive daily emails on my main account urging me to advertise. Or more properly I don't see them because I've marked them as spam.

2. Created an account for an event that never got used. Receive two emails every single day trying to get me to engage. You would think after over a year that they'd get the message I wasn't going to use the account but the emails still come every single day.

3. Clicked on Twitter's own ad to find out more information about promoted accounts. The ad promises more information but instead an ad console loads slowly, very slowly. Is there any information as to cost? None, so I go to Google. The top link which is a blog says it will cost me $4 for each follower I gain. I click on the Twitter company link which is lower down the page and it tells me it will cost me as low as 30 cents a follower. Anyone at Twitter HQ noticing that their funnel is badly broken? I'm guessing very few small businesses are using this successfully and signing up.

Since Twitter went public the most innovative single thing on the platform was by an independent developer and that's Dave Winer's Little Pork Chop.

I am still hoping that Twitter turns itself around but the clock is ticking.

>> "1. I receive daily emails on my main account urging me to advertise. Or more properly I don't see them because I've marked them as spam."

Me too! I used their ad service once and despite telling them not to send anymore emails I get bombarded with marketing emails every single day.

Yeah, makes you wonder if they've heard of A/B testing. I will bet you the Twitter execs don't like being spammed but have no conscience about doing it to others.

You can bid whatever you want for followers. Twitter uses the same tactics as all auction-based advertisers and tries to tell you that you'll have to set prices at $4 per action to see any results, when in reality they'll happily take your 30 cents per action if that's all you're willing to give them. There's no fixed price attached to action acquisition, so for these guys it's all about what you can get someone to pay, and you get them to pay more by telling them several times that they need to pay more to see results.

I've bought ads on both Twitter and Facebook and find Facebook far more cost-effective. I find Google more cost-effective than either of them.

> It was up about 4 percent in midday trading Thursday.

It's got to be somewhat depressing to know the market thinks your presence at a company is worth almost negative $1 billion.

I was going to say that his VORP [1] was -$1b, but since they won't be replacing him, I think your original assessment is correct.

And extraordinarily depressing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player

Whats going on with Twitter? The stock is significantly down and they seem to be going through re-orgs frequently. Have they become stagnant? Its not going to go away but I don't know what else they can do to increase revenue or increase adoption.

Honestly, I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Maybe many other people feel similarly?

I read somewhere that the vast majority of Twitter accounts are bots or completely inactive.

Twitter is the new water cooler.

I don't use it, but I can see why some people do. Having said that, I really don't see how they will be profitable in the long term.

My company (like many many others) have tried advertising on Facebook, and other social networks (Twitter included).

You pay a bunch of money to them, and get almost nothing in return.

It's not nearly as effective dollar-for-dollar as using, for example, google advertising... or just investing in using Email Marketing and building a list.

(I don't see how any social networks will be profitable long term).

I think specific social networks will be profitable. Such as a doctors social network, or golfers network. I think a larger catch all network has issues as we're all talking about here.

We came to the conclusion that people (customers) don't visit social networks (of any kind) with the goal of being sold to.

They visit social networks with the intention to be social. Reading an advert, clicking on it, and buying some product is the last thing on their mind.

Why are you surprised that people didn't react to advertising on a medium they use for personal communication?

We don't go to Twitter to read ads.

Social networks are entertainment. Entertainment ads are not great for directly driving sales. No one really expects people to see a TV ad, then buy the product or service 10 seconds later. Well, Twitter is the same way. So if you try to measure its effectiveness the same way you measure a search ad, it's going to look terrible.

Twitter is good for brand marketing, which is inherently harder to measure. It's also great for reaching audiences that are heavy users of Twitter--like tech folks, "thought leaders," and reporters.

I'm with you there. Every time I've tried to engage, it felt like a million conversations that had nothing to do with me and for which I had nothing to contribute.

What is frustrating to me though: as an outsider that is not logged in to twitter, is that visiting the site almost forces you to log in before you can find anything. If you know you can go to twitter.com/search/ then fine, but you won't find that link on their home page.

For that matter, the twitter home page doesn't even tell you what it is, I guess at this point we're just supposed to know.

> For that matter, the twitter home page doesn't even tell you what it is, I guess at this point we're just supposed to know.

Well it does say "Start a conversation, explore your interests, and be in the know." so it does give some indication. But yeah I'm guessing not many people are landing on their home page having no clue what Twitter is.

I actually like twitter as a product and company much more then facebook or others in their vertical. It does one thing and it does it well, disseminating news and opinions within your "social" circle.

They don't invade your privacy or try to become your portal to the internet or do many of the other things that I don't like about facebook.

Sadly, it looks like investors and the economy feel differently.

I could honestly see a post-social-media world though where facebook dies and twitter is the sole survivor.

I think people use Twitter for different things, but for me Twitter has completely replaced RSS, IM, and news. Unlike Facebook, where none of the people I follow have relevant interests to me, on Twitter I only follow people who post things I'm interested in.

Over time, I've learned to unfollow actual news sources, but instead I follow a collection of editors (who wind up performing a very useful curation function). I'll still follow links to actual news stories, but I never go to any news web pages directly anymore.

I'm pretty good about constantly pruning my follow list, as I actually read all of my timeline. (Most people seem to have decided that that is futile, and only occasionally read their stream).

How many people are you following? How long did it take you to build a really high-quality stream?

My stream has around 60 accounts, and I also read my whole timeline. It already feels like this is approaching the maximum that I'll be willing and able to give proper attention to. I'll probably prune some of the lower quality ones out before I add any more.

I just checked, and it looks like I follow 500 people (which is actually way more than I would have guessed, and I'll admit is kind of ridiculous). Most of them aren't super high-output though, which helps.

I've had to unfollow lots of people who tweet a lot.

I've been using Twitter since 2007 (my account id number is in the 6-figures range). I feel like it took about a year or so to figure out how I wanted to use the service (and for there to be people I was interested in following), and it's only maybe the past year that I've discovered the benefit of unfollowing news accounts and following specific editors instead.

I also have pretty varied interests (I think the mix of people I follow is pretty evenly distributed between fashion people, photographers, news editors, functional programming people, infosec people, and comedians). That mix gets adjusted periodically as my interests shift (I unfollowed a lot of infosec people about a year ago as I've tried to extract myself from that community).

It's a work in progress.

>Twitter had 255 million monthly users in March, a 5 percent increase from the previous quarter. It was the second quarter of disappointing growth for the service, and Wall Street was hoping for an increase in the double digits.

Growing at a rate of 12.5 million users per quarter is slow?

Slower than they'd like.

When you're valued at $20b+ with less than $1b in revenues, good/decent growth isn't good enough.

Not a direct comparison, but when Whatsapp is adding 1 million users a day [1], 12.5 million per quarter doesn't seem like that much.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/20/technology/social/whatsapp-1...

users or people? I have multiple accounts... am I being counted multiple times? (probably).

A growth rate of 12.5 million per quarter is not likely real people. However, say it is... then it's not sustainable because at a point they will be at terminal capacity, ie. everyone who wants a twitter account will have one. Then they will start to shrink as Facebook did last quarter (fewer signups than ever before).

You're comparing signups to active users. Very different.

I'm sorry, but you can't blame a talented operations guy (among the most talented in our industry -- he led the Pixar IPO) for Twitter's failure to innovate and grow. Especially when you factor in the constant absence of the guy who is supposed to be in charge of product, who spends more of his time tending to his overhyped payments company.

The lack of a transformational acquisition probably didn't make him very happy either, as it's hard to see how Twitter's current product mix moves the needle in any meaningful capacity.

Twitter's loss.

Nitpick - Ali wasn't at Pixar @ the time of the IPO, though I'm sure he was instrumental during the Disney acquisition.

Thanks, my bad. Just annoyed that anyone thinks this about cashing out, rather than actual problems at Twitter right now.

I'm not hating; I hope Twitter figures itself out. We need a strong #2 in this space.

Jack Dorsey is not in charge of product at Twitter.

I'm curious how many of Twitter users are real and how that plays into regulatory filings. There are an awful lot of fake accounts on Twitter.

Not to say I don't like Twitter a lot. I use it everyday to follow news and conversations.

Reminds me of Forstall who dumped all his Apple stock months before being fired.

Why should they dump their stock before being fired? Is there a reason not to wait a little bit? It just looks plenty passive-aggressive.

Unless, of course they believe the stock will take a nosedive shortly after (which never happens).

absolve ties?

Yeah, Jobs did the same thing. There are plenty of people that feel they want to get that psychological tumor out of their lives after being fired and I think it's understandable even if it's not entirely rational in all cases. I'd probably do the same myself.

How long does it take to sell stock when you're an insider? Isn't there some kind of planning/disclosure process that has to occur? If so, I wonder how long this has been in the works, and how long the Board knew about it.

Spite, no longer believing in the company, not wanting a large chunk of their wealth tied up in something they no longer have much of a hand in, or just wanting their money so they can buy a bright new FU sports car and blow some cash on whatever their next idea is?

Kara Swisher reports[1] that his intent in selling stock was to raise money to donate to medical research:

There was, in fact, a question at a recent “tea time” — bi-weekly employee meetings with top execs — about Rowghani’s large sale of his shares. Those in attendance told me that Rowghani got up and told the audience that he was not thrilled to answer the question, but noted that he wanted the money to give to research to battle a disease that took his father’s life. It was an emotional address, said those present.

[1] http://recode.net/2014/06/11/twitter-mulling-shake-up-of-top...

Oh god. The SECRETS I wish I could tell everyone about Twitter!

Just tell it to HN. We promise not to tell "everyone" :) :) :) :) :)

Thank goodness Twitter is failing. They've turned their backs on developers using their API.

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