About nine-years-ago, Jack Dorsey helped create Twitter. Though others, like Richard Costolo who served as the company’s CEO between 2011 and 2015, Dorsey’s role at Twitter has varied through they years. When Costolo announced his resignation as head of Twitter, in June 2015, Dorsey stepped in and assumed the role of interim CEO.
On Oct. 5, 2015, after four months of operation under Dorsey, Twitter officially announced that he would be take over the role of CEO in a permanent position.
According to Twitter’s SEC form 8-K, however, “there are currently no plans to provide Mr. Dorsey with direct compensation for his role as [CEO].” This is possibly because Dorsey is balancing his new position with his role as CEO of Square, the payment transaction company he co-founded in 2009. Square is planning a stock market launch in the fourth quarter of 2015, and Dorsey has no plans of leaving his second brainchild.
Along with the announcement of Dorsey taking the helm of Twitter, Adam Bain was appointed the COO of the company on Oct. 5, 2015. Bain previously worked as Twitter’s president of global revenue and partnerships for the past five years, and was also in the running to become the CEO. In addition, Twitter poached Omid Kordestani, a senior advisor at Google, for a role in the company. On Oct. 15, 2015, Kordestani was appointed the chairman of the board at Twitter. Kordestani’s roles will include dealing with the board, as well as recruiting and advising executives.
Twitter has more than 500 million users, with approximately 316 million active users per month. Compared to Facebook’s 1.4 billion monthly active users, this number is rather small. Considering this information, it is no secret that Twitter has a serious growth issue. At its essence, Twitter is a company built around sending 140 character messages. Unfortunately, it has not grown much beyond that.
In an effort to turn profits, Twitter announced that it would be cutting up to 336 jobs from its offices worldwide, on Oct. 12, 2015. This number accounts for approximately eight per cent of the company’s employees. Twitter had about 4,200 employees at the end of June, which is surprising for a company with such a specific product. What is more surprising is that the company had 2,000 employees at the end of the second quarter of 2013. Clearly, the growth in the number of employees in the last two years was not reflected in the growth of its user base. The layoffs will impact multiple departments of the company, including engineering and media teams.
According to anonymous insiders, Twitter also stopped plans to expand their San Francisco offices, as part of the downsizing endeavour. On Oct. 13, 2015, Dorsey tweeted that he had “made some tough but necessary decisions that enable Twitter to move with greater focus and reinvest in [their] growth.”
Dorsey has returned to Twitter in its time of need. The company is in dire straits as it faces intense competition from other services such as Facebook, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. Recently, the company’s stock prices have been falling, at one point dropping below the IPO price of $26. However, with Dorsey’s appointment as CEO Twitter’s stock prices rose slightly, before dropping a little bit after news of the imminent layoffs was released.
On the day of his appointment as permanent CEO, Dorsey also tweeted that his “focus is to build teams that move fast, and learn faster.” It seems that Dorsey is determined to streamline product development at Twitter, and cut costs in the process. His other tweet on the same day claims that, “Twitter is the most powerful communications tool of our time.” With belief in his product, his goal is to make Twitter more accessible to the casual user and lower the barrier of entry into the Twitter-verse. Hopefully, Dorsey’s plans will provide the company some impetus for growth.