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Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal fires two top executives, halting hiring

 

Twitter shakes its top leadership. The first step was as a Consumer Product Leader This was announced by Kayvon Beykpour on Twitter that current CEO Parag Agrawal “asked me to leave after telling me he wants to take the team in a different direction.”

Bruce Falck, General Manager of Revenue and Head of Product for the business side, confirmed in a (now deleted) tweet that he was also fired by Agrawal.

In an unexpected twist, on Thursday night, Parag Agrawal himself answered to both Threads thanked the men he had fired and expressed his admiration for their work.

Now Jay Sullivan, who we spoke to in March about Twitter’s plans to add 100 million new users a day, is taking over as both product lead and interim revenue head. These moves come at the same time that Elon Musk is moving forward with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, though he has not yet acquired the company.

In a memo to employees received from The edgeAgrawal wrote, “At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, a decision was made to invest aggressively to achieve large audience and revenue growth, and as a company we have not achieved any intermediate milestones that enable confidence in those goals. “

Twitter spokesman Adrian Zamora confirmed the changes in a statement The edge, “We can confirm that Kayvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck are leaving Twitter. Jay Sullivan is the new GM of Bluebird and interim GM of Goldbird. Beginning this week, we are pausing most hiring and refills, with the exception of mission-critical positions. We are reducing non-wage labor costs to ensure we operate responsibly and efficiently.”

As the consumer’s product leader and most recently GM, Beykpour has spearheaded the development of many of its biggest features and design changes over the past several years. It’s a surprising change: Agrawal reorganized its executive team just a few months ago with the departure of Twitter’s design and engineering leads, leaving Beykpour at the forefront of consumer products.

Beykpour has been with Twitter since 2015 after acquiring Periscope, the live streaming company he co-founded. When Twitter integrated Periscope’s live streaming capabilities into its main app, Beykpour transitioned into the larger company, becoming head of consumer products in 2018 and overseeing an unusually productive period of feature launches in the years that followed. Periscope shut down for good last year.

In own threadBruce Falck thanked the engineers he worked with, saying, “Ultimately, it’s the work that counts: we’ve significantly improved our ad serving, prediction, analytics, attribution, billing, API and many more systems, improving our reliability and scalability.”

While Falck’s work is less visible to users than Beykpour’s, he has been in the news about Twitter’s changes in how it serves ads, reporting that it would be looking at subscriptions to reduce its reliance on ad revenue. It’s also worth noting that Casey Newton reported that a casual meeting between Beykpour and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri took place in Falck’s backyard, which was part of the process of Instagram finally supporting image previews for its links on Twitter.

Update May 12, 1:55 p.m. ET: Added details from memo received from The edge and statements from Twitter PR.

Update May 12, 8:37 p.m. ET: Added tweets from Parag Agrawal.

 

Source: theverge

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