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I have no particular beef with Dorsey but I think this would make sense. He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake

I have no particular beef with Dorsey but I think this would make sense. He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors? I can't find a source right now but I remember at the time Fleets were launched (Twitter's since-removed version of Stories) that the feature was pushed heavily by investors rather than anyone inside the company. If that's true then the next CEO could be a true disaster. EDIT: ah, there we are: https://pxlnv.com/linklog/twitter-fleets-elliott-management/ https://pxlnv.com/linklog/twitter-fleets-elliott-management/, and a deeper read on Elliot Management: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-doomsday-investor https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do...

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense. It was also maddening to watch him shift to a 3rd focus of promoting cryptocurrency and his own cryptocurrency investments. Hanging on to the CEO role of both Twitter and Square put him in a great position to push both companies toward more cryptocurrency integration, but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.
- b112 5y ago
  but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform. The point of platforms is not to benefit the users, otherwise, every successful platform has failed. The type of synergy you are describing, is what builds value for the only people which count... shareholders.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform. Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).
  - nscalf 5y ago
    This is a pretty uninformed take. There are all sorts of projects made in crypto: collectibles, music, art, gaming, loans, mortgages, debit cards with rewards, social media, wifi networks, anti-fraud, food security, etc. And many projects have a large donation component to them.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      All of which don't "benefit anyone but the people that invented it and the savvy traders trying to make a buck". He got it right the first time, and you are just falling for the dishonest rationalisations of crypto scammers.
      - nscalf 5y ago
        Products don’t benefit the user? Honestly, what is your stance here? It seems like your stance is “crypto bad”. Yes, people who made a product benefited, as did investors. How is that dishonest? Audius has 5m monthly users, please explain why 5 million people use something they get no benefit from.
        InitialLastName 5y ago
        Looking at the Audius website, I see no reason that service needs blockchain to function, which brings us to the final function of blockchain: Blockchain as a marketing gimmick.
    - boringg 5y ago
      Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders. The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most. Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases. In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
- sporkland 5y ago
  Would you critique Musk in a similar way? Honest question, because it's eerie how you could swap Dorsey for Musk and the statements would still apply but seem much less true.
  - itsoktocry 5y ago
    >Would you critique Musk in a similar way? Absolutely. Musk's companies manage to get stuff done, but are any of them particularly "well run"?
    - meepmorp 5y ago
      SpaceX, largely due to Gwynne Shotwell.
  - gonehome 5y ago
    Yeah, musk is the perfect counter example. In the brief time he left Tesla in someone else’s hands the other CEO almost killed it. I'm also skeptical of Jack's claim about founder led companies. When you're the exec handing things over you'd have to make some comment like that to show your trust is entirely behind the new person. I don't really buy it though. Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? Maybe I'm forgetting the history.
    - madamelic 5y ago
      > Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? He was a founder...ish. From reading his Wikipedia, it seems like it was an x.com / PayPal situation. He joined their company to help them with the idea then when they spun Twitter out, he became CEO. From digging in a bit deeper, the lineage of Twitter seems fascinating. It seems like it was the result of the companies of the co-founders putting together that created something even better than their own parts.
    - sporkland 5y ago
      There's a whole book, "Hatching Twitter" about the sordid founding of Twitter and how Dorsey and Noah Glass were the main originators of the concept at oOdeo, then Ev eventually fired them and removed them from the history. Only to have Dorsey come back later and remove him. Seems like a bunch of people had a hand in creating it in various ways.
- alksjdalkj 5y ago
  >> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. > I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense. If I remember correctly he was originally going to step away from Twitter to focus on Square, but then Twitter couldn't find a replacement and basically begged him to stay.
- mise_en_place 5y ago
  More charitably, he may have been suckered by the crypto Ponzi. Many intelligent people have.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> activist investors Is Twitter the way it is because of activist investors, or just capitalists (in the literal, neutral sense of the term) who know that certain crowds are easily manipulated?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Invictus0 5y ago
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do... Stunning article. Everyone has a bit of dirt on them I suppose, and it's more important than ever to safeguard one's privacy.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  404?
  - Invictus0 5y ago
    Oops, I copied it wrong from the parent. Sorry!
brightball 5y ago
Hate Elliott. They are doing everything they can to cause problems with Duke Power as well.
syshum 5y ago
>>puppet of activist investors? Seems more likely that Jack has been the puppet of activist employee's not investors. Hopefully Twitter will hire someone to have a back bone in the face of the activist employee's that want twitter to be a political echo-chamber / safe space
- Covzire 5y ago
  Highly doubtful as long as they stay in SV. Barring some major backlash I don't think any major company will ever operate there again without making the whole company political.
  - syshum 5y ago
    Well given the ever increasing crime, taxes, costs and lowering of living standards hopefully we will start either seeing companies leave SV, or SV ceasing having any competitive advantage as companies realize their talent pool is not infact limited to SV and there are plenty of high talented people that have no interest in living in SV
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - astrange 5y ago
      If you want to criticize SV you should avoid complaining about "high taxes" since it reveals you don't actually know anything. The people who live here and complain about that are talking their book, they universally pay like $3000/year property tax on $3 million mansions and don't want Prop13 repealed.
handrous 5y ago
I've noticed that lots of C-suite and owner/CEO startup people have like three to five active business roles on their Linkedins. A fun case of "rules for thee, but not for me" when it comes to anti-moonlighting clauses and such. I can't "give it my all" if I take some weekend gigs, but you can hold two C-suite positions, be on two boards, plus have an "advisory" role with some startup? It's a lot like drug testing for front-line folks while the C-suite are exempt (and would fall apart if denied their various chemical habits).
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing that Executives at companies provide vanishingly little day to day value to companies. I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company, and essentially a fall guy position so the board can avoid accountability.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Well yeah, but it's not like any company values its CEO for the good office-desk job they do - as opposed to most other positions. And companies certainly do recognize that not everyone has to sit at a desk - all the expensive consultants...
    - wayoutthere 5y ago
      If it’s like most of my clients, omitting consultants from the seating chart just means you lose your conference rooms all day, every day until the consultants are gone.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > provide vanishingly little day to day value to companies As it should be if the executive isn’t micromanaging. If a crisis erupts and they’re nowhere to be found, on the other hand, that’s a problem.
  - setgree 5y ago
sdfghderwg 5y ago
> He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. Elon Musk
- garmaine 5y ago
  He tends to focus on one or the other at a time though.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    I'm sure he only focuses when things are really wrong. It must be awful to be fixing Tesla problems when SpaceX is humming along. Then switch to SpaceX when it's falling apart while Tesla is back on its feet. It's like a perpetual grass-is-greener problem regardless of which side of the fence you're on. edit: a month or two ago there was this huge increase in SpaceX development all of a sudden that has since dwindled. I wonder if that was Musk working on SpaceX but now back at Tesla? of course i could be way off base too ( FAA thorn in SpaceX's side etc )
    - garmaine 5y ago
      Further testing at SpaceX is basically on hold until the FAA completes their review of the orbital launch facility, which they have promised to do by the end of December. Plenty of ground testing going on, albeit with less publicity.
- stepanhruda 5y ago
  I remember him saying he plans to step down as Tesla CEO eventually
enos_feedler 5y ago
Ned Segal?
1024core 5y ago
> I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: Jack explicitly says that Parag Agrawal (current CTO) is replacing him. https://twitter.com/paraga?lang=en https://twitter.com/paraga?lang=en
jonas21 5y ago
He will be replaced by Parag Agrawal. In the image in the tweet, Jack says: > Parag started here as an engineer who cared deeply about our work and now he's our CEO... Parag will be able to channel this energy best because he's lived it and knows what it takes.
Kye 5y ago
One of the only episodes of Joe Rogan I ever listened to (#1258) was the interview with Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde. Vijaya Gadde would make a good CEO. She seems to have a clear, balanced, and well-informed perspective on both Twitter as a whole and the many micro-communities within.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  It will be a female. The BOD know that Twitter will always be nothing more than a place social influencers will go to sell product, and selling product to females is a goldmine.
likpok 5y ago
I've always thought it weird that Jack was a part-time CEO, but there are certainly CEOs that have at least as large of a "thing to manage", even if they aren't technically two companies. Facebook is a giant VR company and three-four giant social networking companies. Google runs phone infrastructure, search, self driving cars. Amazon is a giant retail outlet plus a giant cloud services company. Is running both a social media company and a fintech firm that different, even though they aren't grouped under a single corporate owner?
soheil 5y ago
Honestly I’m ok with a hedge fund backed Twitter. Look what it has become with Dorsey at the helm. It was a cute platform to induce change in backward countries 10 years ago, but now it’s a cesspool of every ideologue imaginable. The more sensational and toxic someone is the more successful they become on Twitter, generally speaking. If the goal was to make money primarily I don’t see how brands would put up with that. I write off Twitter as a failed experiment, but nevertheless a great lesson in the nature of human beings and mob behavior. Edit: typo + speaking as an ex-Twitter engineer circa 2011
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- splitstud 5y ago
  A platform to induce change was the highpoint?
amai 5y ago
„no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is“ Elon Musk would disagree.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense. It was also maddening to watch him shift to a 3rd focus of promoting cryptocurrency and his own cryptocurrency investments. Hanging on to the CEO role of both Twitter and Square put him in a great position to push both companies toward more cryptocurrency integration, but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.

b112 5y ago
but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform. The point of platforms is not to benefit the users, otherwise, every successful platform has failed. The type of synergy you are describing, is what builds value for the only people which count... shareholders.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform. Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).
- nscalf 5y ago
  This is a pretty uninformed take. There are all sorts of projects made in crypto: collectibles, music, art, gaming, loans, mortgages, debit cards with rewards, social media, wifi networks, anti-fraud, food security, etc. And many projects have a large donation component to them.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    All of which don't "benefit anyone but the people that invented it and the savvy traders trying to make a buck". He got it right the first time, and you are just falling for the dishonest rationalisations of crypto scammers.
    - nscalf 5y ago
      Products don’t benefit the user? Honestly, what is your stance here? It seems like your stance is “crypto bad”. Yes, people who made a product benefited, as did investors. How is that dishonest? Audius has 5m monthly users, please explain why 5 million people use something they get no benefit from.
      - InitialLastName 5y ago
        Looking at the Audius website, I see no reason that service needs blockchain to function, which brings us to the final function of blockchain: Blockchain as a marketing gimmick.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders. The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most. Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases. In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
sporkland 5y ago
Would you critique Musk in a similar way? Honest question, because it's eerie how you could swap Dorsey for Musk and the statements would still apply but seem much less true.
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  >Would you critique Musk in a similar way? Absolutely. Musk's companies manage to get stuff done, but are any of them particularly "well run"?
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    SpaceX, largely due to Gwynne Shotwell.
- gonehome 5y ago
  Yeah, musk is the perfect counter example. In the brief time he left Tesla in someone else’s hands the other CEO almost killed it. I'm also skeptical of Jack's claim about founder led companies. When you're the exec handing things over you'd have to make some comment like that to show your trust is entirely behind the new person. I don't really buy it though. Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? Maybe I'm forgetting the history.
  - madamelic 5y ago
    > Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? He was a founder...ish. From reading his Wikipedia, it seems like it was an x.com / PayPal situation. He joined their company to help them with the idea then when they spun Twitter out, he became CEO. From digging in a bit deeper, the lineage of Twitter seems fascinating. It seems like it was the result of the companies of the co-founders putting together that created something even better than their own parts.
  - sporkland 5y ago
    There's a whole book, "Hatching Twitter" about the sordid founding of Twitter and how Dorsey and Noah Glass were the main originators of the concept at oOdeo, then Ev eventually fired them and removed them from the history. Only to have Dorsey come back later and remove him. Seems like a bunch of people had a hand in creating it in various ways.
alksjdalkj 5y ago
>> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. > I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense. If I remember correctly he was originally going to step away from Twitter to focus on Square, but then Twitter couldn't find a replacement and basically begged him to stay.
mise_en_place 5y ago
More charitably, he may have been suckered by the crypto Ponzi. Many intelligent people have.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> activist investors Is Twitter the way it is because of activist investors, or just capitalists (in the literal, neutral sense of the term) who know that certain crowds are easily manipulated?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Invictus0 5y ago

> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do... Stunning article. Everyone has a bit of dirt on them I suppose, and it's more important than ever to safeguard one's privacy.

Stratoscope 5y ago
404?
- Invictus0 5y ago
  Oops, I copied it wrong from the parent. Sorry!

brightball 5y ago

Hate Elliott. They are doing everything they can to cause problems with Duke Power as well.

syshum 5y ago

>>puppet of activist investors? Seems more likely that Jack has been the puppet of activist employee's not investors. Hopefully Twitter will hire someone to have a back bone in the face of the activist employee's that want twitter to be a political echo-chamber / safe space

Covzire 5y ago
Highly doubtful as long as they stay in SV. Barring some major backlash I don't think any major company will ever operate there again without making the whole company political.
- syshum 5y ago
  Well given the ever increasing crime, taxes, costs and lowering of living standards hopefully we will start either seeing companies leave SV, or SV ceasing having any competitive advantage as companies realize their talent pool is not infact limited to SV and there are plenty of high talented people that have no interest in living in SV
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - astrange 5y ago
    If you want to criticize SV you should avoid complaining about "high taxes" since it reveals you don't actually know anything. The people who live here and complain about that are talking their book, they universally pay like $3000/year property tax on $3 million mansions and don't want Prop13 repealed.

handrous 5y ago

I've noticed that lots of C-suite and owner/CEO startup people have like three to five active business roles on their Linkedins. A fun case of "rules for thee, but not for me" when it comes to anti-moonlighting clauses and such. I can't "give it my all" if I take some weekend gigs, but you can hold two C-suite positions, be on two boards, plus have an "advisory" role with some startup? It's a lot like drug testing for front-line folks while the C-suite are exempt (and would fall apart if denied their various chemical habits).

bluefirebrand 5y ago
Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing that Executives at companies provide vanishingly little day to day value to companies. I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company, and essentially a fall guy position so the board can avoid accountability.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Well yeah, but it's not like any company values its CEO for the good office-desk job they do - as opposed to most other positions. And companies certainly do recognize that not everyone has to sit at a desk - all the expensive consultants...
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    If it’s like most of my clients, omitting consultants from the seating chart just means you lose your conference rooms all day, every day until the consultants are gone.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > provide vanishingly little day to day value to companies As it should be if the executive isn’t micromanaging. If a crisis erupts and they’re nowhere to be found, on the other hand, that’s a problem.
- setgree 5y ago

sdfghderwg 5y ago

> He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. Elon Musk

garmaine 5y ago
He tends to focus on one or the other at a time though.
- chasd00 5y ago
  I'm sure he only focuses when things are really wrong. It must be awful to be fixing Tesla problems when SpaceX is humming along. Then switch to SpaceX when it's falling apart while Tesla is back on its feet. It's like a perpetual grass-is-greener problem regardless of which side of the fence you're on. edit: a month or two ago there was this huge increase in SpaceX development all of a sudden that has since dwindled. I wonder if that was Musk working on SpaceX but now back at Tesla? of course i could be way off base too ( FAA thorn in SpaceX's side etc )
  - garmaine 5y ago
    Further testing at SpaceX is basically on hold until the FAA completes their review of the orbital launch facility, which they have promised to do by the end of December. Plenty of ground testing going on, albeit with less publicity.
stepanhruda 5y ago
I remember him saying he plans to step down as Tesla CEO eventually

enos_feedler 5y ago

Ned Segal?

1024core 5y ago

> I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: Jack explicitly says that Parag Agrawal (current CTO) is replacing him. https://twitter.com/paraga?lang=en https://twitter.com/paraga?lang=en

jonas21 5y ago

He will be replaced by Parag Agrawal. In the image in the tweet, Jack says: > Parag started here as an engineer who cared deeply about our work and now he's our CEO... Parag will be able to channel this energy best because he's lived it and knows what it takes.

Kye 5y ago

One of the only episodes of Joe Rogan I ever listened to (#1258) was the interview with Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde. Vijaya Gadde would make a good CEO. She seems to have a clear, balanced, and well-informed perspective on both Twitter as a whole and the many micro-communities within.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
It will be a female. The BOD know that Twitter will always be nothing more than a place social influencers will go to sell product, and selling product to females is a goldmine.

likpok 5y ago

I've always thought it weird that Jack was a part-time CEO, but there are certainly CEOs that have at least as large of a "thing to manage", even if they aren't technically two companies. Facebook is a giant VR company and three-four giant social networking companies. Google runs phone infrastructure, search, self driving cars. Amazon is a giant retail outlet plus a giant cloud services company. Is running both a social media company and a fintech firm that different, even though they aren't grouped under a single corporate owner?

soheil 5y ago

Honestly I’m ok with a hedge fund backed Twitter. Look what it has become with Dorsey at the helm. It was a cute platform to induce change in backward countries 10 years ago, but now it’s a cesspool of every ideologue imaginable. The more sensational and toxic someone is the more successful they become on Twitter, generally speaking. If the goal was to make money primarily I don’t see how brands would put up with that. I write off Twitter as a failed experiment, but nevertheless a great lesson in the nature of human beings and mob behavior. Edit: typo + speaking as an ex-Twitter engineer circa 2011

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
splitstud 5y ago
A platform to induce change was the highpoint?

amai 5y ago

„no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is“ Elon Musk would disagree.