Twitter declined to make Costolo available for comment, citing the pre-IPO quiet period. He understands building out the business but also the product, strategy, vision.” “He’s not this hired gun to run the company. “The founders consider Dick a co-founder, that’s how deep the connection is,” said Bijan Sabet, an investor at Spark Capital and a Twitter board member from 2008 to 2011. A one-time comic actor who cut his teeth in business at Andersen Consulting before starting several companies, Costolo may never be as closely associated with Twitter as Mark Zuckerberg is with Facebook, yet he is arguably just as important. Yet Twitter’s quick transformation from an undisciplined, money-losing startup into a digital media powerhouse took every bit of whip-cracking that Costolo could muster, along with a rapid series of product and personnel decisions that proved effective even as they disappointed some of the service’s early enthusiasts.Ĭostolo was a comparative late-comer at Twitter, joining the company three years after it’s 2006 launch, but the company increasingly bears his imprint as it hurtles towards the IPO: deliberate in decision-making but aggressive in execution, savvy in its public relations and yet laser-focused on financial results.Ĭostolo has not flinched in pruning and reshaping his management team, while Twitter, the company, has been ruthless in cutting off the smaller companies that were once a part of its orbit. The offering is expected to value Twitter at up to $15 billion and make its early investors, including Costolo, very wealthy indeed. The company is now on the verge of fulfilling the opportunity Costolo foresaw as it prepares for the most highly anticipated initial public offering since Facebook’s debut last May. “It was kind of crazy because we were all on break, but that attitude was exactly what we needed at Twitter.” There’s no time to rest because we have a massive opportunity in front of us,” recalled Anamitra Banerji, who headed the team that built Twitter’s first advertising product. “It was an email that said, ‘We have to move really, really fast. SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Around midnight on Christmas Eve of 2009, a handful of employees at Twitter received an unconventional holiday greeting from Dick Costolo, then the chief operating officer.
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