DORSEY BACK AT TWITTER
SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter has named Jack Dorsey, one of the company’s co-founders and the first person to run the Internet service, as its fourth chief executive.
Dorsey, 38, is also the chief executive and chairman of Square, a mobile payments company that is preparing for an initial public offering of stock later this year.
Despite initial concerns, big investors in both companies have grown comfortable with the idea of Dorsey juggling both jobs.
On Monday, Dorsey tweeted: “We are naming @adambain COO of Twitter, we’re working to change the composition of our Board, and I will serve as CEO of Twitter and Square!”
Dorsey has pushed a faster pace of product improvement while serving as interim chief since Dick Costolo, the company’s chief executive for about five years, stepped down on July 1.
On Wednesday, for example, the social media company extended the option of including a “buy” button in tweets to millions of merchants, including major retailers like Best Buy.
This week, Dorsey and other executives are also expected to preview for advertisers a new video product and a feature that will show top tweets by subject, code-named Project Lightning.
Dorsey, who is also the chairman of Twitter’s board, faces the difficult task of figuring out how to attract new users to the company’s namesake social network while continuing to improve its advertising products. Twitter had an average of 316 million monthly users in the second quarter, a number that has been largely flat for some time.
Despite some changes to make the service easier for newcomers to understand, Twitter still lags other social networks like Facebook and Instagram and major messaging platforms like WhatsApp in popularity. It has also been slow to capitalise on the public’s enormous demand for video, although its new Periscope app has established a strong position in live streaming.
Twitter’s challenges have unnerved investors, who were counting on it to match the rapid growth of its early days. Costolo, who became Twitter’s chief executive in 2010, stepped down after largely failing to meet Wall Street’s expectations after the company’s initial public offering of stock in November 2013.
Adam Bain, the company’s president of global revenue and partnerships, who was widely con- sidered to be in the running for the chief executive job, will become chief operating officer.
Twitter has struggled to convey to ordinary people why they should regularly use the service, which carries roughly half a billion messages a day. The service is largely useless unless you take time to choose relevant accounts to follow, but without obvious uses for it, no one will invest the time to set it up properly.
Dorsey founded Square, the commerce and payments company, with a small group of friends and entrepreneurs after being pushed out as Twitter’s chairman.