Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Williams

Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by seldo on Monday October 04, 2010 @03:03PM (#1756861)

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.

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by staunch on Monday October 04, 2010 @03:21PM (#1756943)

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.

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by teej on Monday October 04, 2010 @04:47PM (#1757358)

>> 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...

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by points on Monday October 04, 2010 @06:16PM (#1757736)

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

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by points on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @04:20AM (#1759006)

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

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by ErrantX on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @07:18AM (#1759280)

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.

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by points on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @09:05AM (#1759495)

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

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by seldo on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @03:19PM (#1761024)

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?

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by points on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @05:36PM (#1761596)

Once wave takes off of course!

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by skbohra123 on Monday October 04, 2010 @03:23PM (#1756956)

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.

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by macrael on Monday October 04, 2010 @03:51PM (#1757078)

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

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by rcoder on Monday October 04, 2010 @04:21PM (#1757233)

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.

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Re:Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Will... by jsm386 on Monday October 04, 2010 @04:42PM (#1757329)

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.'

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