
Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Williams - aditya
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo/
======
pclark
[http://www.quora.com/How-much-credibility-is-there-to-the-
re...](http://www.quora.com/How-much-credibility-is-there-to-the-report-that-
Dick-Costolo-is-being-groomed-to-take-over-as-Twitters-CEO)

~~~
ivankirigin

      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

------
DanielRibeiro
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_

------
adityakothadiya
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.

~~~
lrm242
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.

~~~
adityakothadiya
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."

------
jonknee
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."

~~~
yesimahuman
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.

~~~
andre3k1
Digg has 70+ employees? Interesting. Doesn't Reddit have less than 10? Someone
please fact check that for me.

~~~
kloncks
Reddit has 6. Digg has 60+.

~~~
elai
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.

~~~
WalterGR
_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>

------
seldo
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.

~~~
staunch
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.

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

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

~~~
ErrantX
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.

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

~~~
seldo
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?

~~~
points
Once wave takes off of course!

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

------
jw84
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.

