The board of directors of Twitter announced the company engaged the services of Spencer Stuart, a leading global executive search firm to help find a new, permanent chief executive officer.
Twitter’s Board said Spencer Stuart will assist its search committee in a thorough process to evaluate internal and external candidates for the CEO position. The company’s current CEO, Dick Costolo would step down from his position on July 1. The Board appointed Jack Dorsey as interim CEO while the search committee is seeking for the next executive who will assume the position permanently.
In a statement, Peter Currie, lead independent director and chairman of the search committee at Twitter said, “The Board has the utmost confidence in the strong management team Dick has assembled and in Jack Dorsey’s ability to lead the company on an interim basis while we identify a permanent CEO.”
Twitter is looking for a bold thinker & proven leader
Currie added that Twitter is looking for a bold thinker and proven leader with the ability to help the company fully capitalize on its unique platform for the benefits of users, advertisers, and employees, and to maximize value for shareholders.
Technology observers suggested that the strongest potential internal candidates to serve as CEO include Twitter’s chief of revenue, Adam Bain, Anthony Noto, chief financial officer, and its interim CEO Dorsey. He originally invented the tweet.
There were also speculations that some of the potential external candidates to serve as Twitter CEO include Emily White, the former chief operating officer of Snapchat, Mike McCue, chief executive of Flipboard and Sukhinder Singh, chief executive of Joyous, a video commerce company.
Twitter is confident with its product roadmap
According to Currie, they are “confident with Twitter’s product roadmap and excited by the current pipeline. We also believe much more can be done to realize Twitter’s enormous unmet long-term potential.”
Twitter released some product changes to make its platform more accessible to new users since the company announced Costolo’s resignation. The microblogging company is aggressively improving its products and services amid pressure from shareholders to implement more actions to increase the number of its monthly users.
Based on Wall Street’s preferred measure, Twitter has 302 monthly active users, which is significantly lower that the 1.4 billion active users of Facebook. Instagram, the photo and video sharing platform owned by the social network giant even beat Twitter in terms of user growth. In December last year, Instagram reached more than 300 million active users. Twitter warned that its user growth is slowing this quarter.
Twitter decided to remove the 140 character limit for Direct Messages. The microblogging company also revealed that it is working on the so-called Project Lighting—a team of journalists is organizing a section of its platform to direct users to content. The company is also testing new ways for users to find places and products on its platform.
