MARCO BELLO/AFP via Getty Images
Jack Dorsey called an all-hands meeting at the time. The company was in the middle of a push to redesign its mobile apps, and the effort had led to anger and burnout. The company was founded in 2006 with co-founding partners, including Biz Stone and Noah Glass.
The company was prepared for a pep talk from the most eccentric of the co-founders. They got one of those. The meeting began with the lights at the headquarters going off. An acoustic guitar is playing. Everyone was encouraged to listen to the lyrics.
There is a bird singing in the dead of night.
>
Take the broken wings and learn to fly.
>
All your life.
>
You were waiting for the right time.
No one was sure what the meaning of the Beatles song was. I spoke with people who were unsure about the incident a decade later. On one hand, he was a visionary leader with a grasp of what the future holds, on the other, a distant and often inscrutable manager who was slow in making decisions.
The song ended. People debated what it meant. The company finished the race. Jack Dorsey was the company's CEO a few years later. He said that he was quitting.
Related.
Jack Dorsey was replaced as CEO by Parag Agrawal.
This moment would arrive today, but nobody thought it would happen.
In the end?
When a CEO steps down, there are two questions you want to ask. What next?
The first one should be the beginning.
On the other hand, it is a genuine surprise. This has been a banner year for the micro-blogging site. The user base is up. It shipped more individual products than any other time. It cloned the once-buzzy social audio platform, leaving it dead. After spending half a decade stuck in the mud, there was a sense that there was real traction on the social media platform. The position of the company looked secure from that perspective.
The slow growth of Twitter has long rankled investors.
I wrote that Jack was going to fight for his life. He was.
The activist investor took a 4% stake in the company and said it would replace the CEO. Paul Singer's hedge fund is one of the most feared investors in the world. I wrote here that Jack was going to fight for his life. He was as it turned out.
It seemed like Dorsey had won. The board of directors agreed to add three new board members and form a committee to review its governance and evaluate a succession plan days after the move by Elliott. I think it was a sign that the firm was satisfied with the progress of the company that Jesse Cohn stepped down from the board in June.
The catch was that there were several aggressive growth targets set by Elliott. In order to gain market share as a digital advertiser, the agreement required that the user base of the company be increased by at least 20 percent in 2020. It is not close to hitting its updated goals despite making some progress. The company wants to add 100 million more daily active users in the next year, which is a tall order for a 15-year-old company that is a household name and has already churned through much of the world's population.
The stock price has been sliding throughout the fall, and today is just a few dollars higher than it was at the time of the initial public offering. Silver Lake, the private equity firm that was part of the original plan to oust Dorsey, is still on the board.
There were no outward signs of unhappiness. It is easy to imagine two scenarios, one in which a revived fight came his way and he decided to leave before it happened, and the other in which the board told him his time was up and he should bow out gracefully.
I don't know which one is more likely, but I think it was the one that led to today's news. The fact that the news was leaked early suggests to me that someone might have changed their mind before he did.
In an email to employees, Dorsey said that he owned it. I am sad, yet happy. There are not many companies that get to this level. There aren't many people who choose their company over their own ego. We will prove this was the right move.
The decision was blessed by the company.
We are confident that both incoming Chairman Bret Taylor and incoming CEO Parag Agrawal are the right people to lead the company at this pivotal moment for the company.
The explanation is duh.
There is no evidence that Jack Dorsey wanted to be the CEO of Twitter, which is one of the reasons why he left. It is possible that he woke up recently and decided to leave.
I am told that the company's decision to build Fleets, its ephemeral product that mimicked Snapchat Stories, was not something that was in the cards for the CEO. The team launched it at the end of last year. Someone asked what he thought of the product during an all-hands meeting. One person told me that he shrugged. It is not my thing.
The Fleets team presented their progress immediately after the Q&A.
When it was decided to kill Fleets this year, some internally took to indicate that it was a good riddance.
There are a lot of stories like this. Product teams could expect a lot of time, attention, and feedback in the areas where he was most focused. Teams could not expect much feedback in areas where he was not focused. He let his people handle the rest. He refused to break the tie when teams were divided on the path forward, and it drove a lot of people crazy.
There are benefits to having a CEO who cares about a few things. Cash App for peer-to-peer payments and cryptocurrencies were pushed by Square's CEO, Jack Dorsey. Square's market cap is nearly triple that of Twitter.
The lack of focus has been a problem under Dorsey. At any given time, its top priorities have been user growth, revenue growth, and serving the public conversation. People who worked with him directly would tell me that they didn't know how engaged he was with the core product.
There is a joke that says everyone at Square thought that Jack was working more on Square than on the internet. The question of how much he was working was elide by this. One of the reasons the attack was launched was the declaration by Dorsey that he intended to spend most of 2020 in Africa, to no apparent work purpose or shareholder benefit.
He told his employees that he was too slow to make decisions. People believed him when he said that he loved the social networking site. The kind of guy who could get his employees to drink salt juice, he was charismatic. One who leaves a void is a complicated figure.
The new person.
Parag Agrawal is a 10-year veteran of the company who rose through the ranks to become its chief technical officer. Multiple people told me that "CTO" doesn't fully capture the breadth of Agrawal's contributions. He is seen by many employees as a sharp technical leader, an uncommonly long-term thinker, and intensely focused on the operational side of the company.
One person told me that Agrawal was one of the few people who could change his mind frequently.
The technical side of the social media site is very respected by the engineer who has been with it for a long time. It could help the company retain its engineering core during an organizational shift that often results in an exodus from the company.
His detractors are also present. If you are among the employees who think that Dorsey has become a liability for the company, the appointment of Agrawal may not be the clean break you were hoping for.
In any case, the company is likely to have another cultural tension. He is one of the executives who has been most focused on cryptocurrencies, and he encouraged Dorsey to explore decentralization and other related technologies. Bluesky is a project that could turn the micro-messaging service into a.decentralized protocol, as well as a pair of NFT profile pictures.
It makes sense that he would give the reins to a believer.
It makes sense that he would want to give the reins to someone who was a believer. It's important to keep an eye on how many employees will come along for the ride, and what will fall by the wayside. It depends on how hard Agrawal leans in. Early indications are that it is a high priority for him.
He will have to work on getting more users, more revenue, and a bigger share of the ad market. He will have to navigate other unrelated transitions at the company. The head of communications at the company, Kelly Sims, left last week after less than four months on the job. Sara Beykpour, who joined the company in 2012 and has recently been leading its Twitter Blue subscription product, announced recently that she is leaving the company.
She is married to Kayvon Beykpour, the head of product, who was on the short list for CEO. He is one of the longest-serving product chiefs at the company, so I will be curious to see how long he stays.
Since 2015, a full-time CEO has not been available for the company. Time will tell how Agrawal does. He is already an improvement over his predecessor.
This article is based on conversations with 13 current and former Twitter employees who requested anonymity so as to preserve their professional relationships.
