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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

>> 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...

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

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

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.

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

I believe your information is out of date.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?

Once wave takes off of course!

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.

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

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.

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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