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Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down as the company’s CEO, marking the end of an era for the company, which was formed and run by its progressive and sometimes distracted founder. Dorsey will remain a member of the Twitter board at least until next year.
The news, first reported by CNBC, was somewhat of a surprise, especially given the weather: Monday morning and the company’s Twitter holiday after Thanksgiving weekend.
In other ways, Dorsey’s resignation has long been expected. Wall Street investors criticized the Twitter co-founder for his outside interests: running another important technology company he started, Square; pursuing futuristic blockchain internet decentralization projects; and travel the world. In the last year alone, the great activist investor Elliott Management has been aggressively demanding that he resign even earlier.
Dorsey’s deputy is former Twitter technical director Parag Agraval, who has worked for the company for 10 years and is considered a trusted leader among his employees. Agraval was responsible for implementing Dorsey’s vision of building a decentralized version of social media based on blockchain technology that would allow users to choose their own algorithms.
Although it is still too early to say whether and how Twitter will work differently under Agrawal’s supervision, what we do know is that the company is losing its vision-oriented, original-minded founding leader. He may have been an absent CEO at times, but he was nonetheless respected by many in the technology industry for inventing a platform that makes the public communicate with each other on topics that are both trivial and world-changing, while maintaining a sense of for humor and eccentricity personal style.
“I want you all to know that this was my decision and I own it. It was difficult for me, of course. I love this service and company … and all of you so much. I’m really sad … but really happy, “Dorsey wrote in an email to the company on Monday he also tweeted. “There are not many companies that reach this level. And not many founders choose their company over their own ego. I know we will prove that this is the right move. ”
You can read Dorsey’s emphasis on the “founder’s ego” in his farewell note as an excavation by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the company 17 years ago and seems to have no plans to relinquish control of it. Unlike Zuckerberg, Dorsey is notorious for delegating some key decisions – such as whether or not to remove former President Donald Trump from the platform – to his staff, such as Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gade, whose team last called for a ban on Trump. Dorsey’s signature (Dorsey was reported to have traveled to French Polynesia at the time of the judgment).
Dorsey was, in a sense, an unconventional leader, and under his leadership, Twitter made things a little different. While Twitter suffers from the same hate speech, extremism and harassment that every major social media platform faces, it has managed to garner praise from members of the social media research community for offering more transparency, at least compared to competitors. about what goes viral on your platform. And the company obviously has incredible influence as a social media platform chosen for world leaders, journalists and many celebrities and news-worthy personalities.
But at the same time, it is struggling to gain consumer volume and financial success as competitors such as YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. This is partly due to the fact that Twitter, unlike some of its competitors, has taken a relatively measured approach to growing its product. For a long time, Twitter was not focused on making money; hasn’t sold ads in years. The design of the product has not changed much. In addition, it does not habitually acquire or copy its competition, as Facebook often does.
And some of Dorsey’s personal plans and interests have given outside critics more reason to push for his replacement in recent years. It is known that Dorsey wanted to leave Silicon Valley to move to Africa for at least three months in 2019 (he later rejected these plans), and in the last few years began to devote more of his time to developing a new decentralized social media ecosystem, Bluesky. In Dorsey’s tweets and public interviews over the past few years, he has spent more time talking about Bluesky, crypto, blockchain, and other related decentralized Internet ventures than developing Twitter’s core product.
Elliott Management Group made Dorsey’s divided focus at the heart of its failed attempt to oust Dorsey from the company last year.
And yet, despite these challenges, Dorsey is leaving Twitter in place with relative force compared to even a year ago. In recent months, Twitter has gained more of its products at a rapid pace beyond just advertising, introducing tools such as Twitter Blue, a paid subscription version of the platform. And the company’s profits over the past few quarters have been relatively strong.
“Jack says he chooses the company over his own ego, but I think that’s as good as it is for the company – and he’s leaving so he can say the stock is up,” said a former Twitter CEO. before Recode. The source also said that Dorsey trusts the new CEO Agraval, who has so far fulfilled his vision. “A change of leadership always causes engineers to freak out… so putting a CTO in place keeps engineers calm and keeps the stable, iterative product direction that Jack was watching.”
Dorsey retired as CEO of Twitter once before, after being pushed off his board in 2008, only to return in the style of Steve Jobs in 2015. However, it seems less likely that he will return a second time.
We still don’t know much about the change of leadership on Twitter. In the coming weeks, we should expect to learn more about the circumstances surrounding Dorsey’s departure and how the company may change at Agrawal.
But what is clearest now is that Dorsey’s release is another example of a trend in other major technology companies. As my colleague Peter Kafka wrote earlier this year, when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he would step down as CEO, Big Tech has become so big that it no longer needs its demigod start-up founders. at the head. Bezos, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page have handed over their companies to trusted managers with lesser personalities – and these companies are still doing well financially.
An exception to this is Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the technology founder, who seems to have no plans to retire, although he and his company are constantly mired in scandals. Unlike Dorsey, Zuckerberg has been rewarded by Wall Street for his relentless focus on increasing his company’s profits. And also, unlike Dorsey, Zuckerberg managed to negotiate unilateral control of his board from the beginning.
Dorsey could still be in the lead if he had more power over the Twitter board or if the company grew on a huge scale like Facebook.
But instead, Twitter will enter a new era – without an eccentric leader with a magical beard who trolls Congress and speaks poetically about the future of the decentralized network. Dorsey’s years may not have been the most focused, but they are memorable.
Peter Kafka contributed to the reporting of this article.
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