Twitter Names Jack Dorsey Chief Executive

I still think it&#x27;s impossible to run two companies that both require so much attention, given their stage.<p>Yes Jobs had Apple and Pixar, and Musk has Tesla and SpaceX. But both Pixar and SpaceX don&#x27;t really require day-to-day CEO attention, they follow long term plans (movies, rockets). That&#x27;s really different from Square and Twitter, which are both, in their own ways, in a kind of trouble.<p>I&#x27;d love to be proven wrong though -- so good luck, Jack!

I keep wondering if this is going to be like Marissa Mayer joining Yahoo - much fanfare, some movement, but at the end of the day she&#x27;s been unable to significantly move the needle. I just wonder if Twitter fundamentally isn&#x27;t as scalable an idea&#x2F;product as Facebook et al. It&#x27;s obviously Jack&#x27;s job to make it that - but what if the basic form of Twitter just isn&#x27;t as compelling, no matter how you change it or dress it up?

&quot;Twitter Feels Compelled to Point Out That Twitter CEO Is a Full-Time Job&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;twitter-feels-compelled-to-point-out-that-twitter-ceo-is-a-full-time-job&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;twitter-feels-compelled-to-poi...</a>

Twitter does not need to gain new users - it needs to reactivate old users. The statistic I cannot get past is that they have lost one billion users. That is a much different problem than most companies are dealing with.

Here&#x27;s his announcement on Twitter, among other details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;651003190628872192" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;651003190628872192</a>

<i>“It’s exhilarating for him,” one long-time confidante said. “He draws energy from how to think about both companies.”<p>Whether by coincidence or design, Dorsey’s comeback closely resembles the Steve Jobs Narrative — a modern myth Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hold up as a map to absolution.</i> (1)<p>I&#x27;m going with &quot;by design.&quot; His ego risks the futures of both companies, unfortunately. Surprised the Twitter board caved on allowing a part-time CEO.<p>1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;why-jack-dorsey-is-ready-to-save-twitter&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;why-jack-dorsey-is-ready-to-sav...</a>

I hope Jack realizes that Twitter is not a great tool to chat with friends &#x2F; neighborhood &#x2F; family, but an incredible tool to reach people who are away from you, social and geographical.<p>They need to focus on how easy it is to approach a movie star, your favorite player and musician you like. How easy it is to show that you like a brand or you love a new TV show. And talk about some major events that are happening around you.<p>For people who have no idea what it is, they just see it as a tool to talk to someone. And most of the time, you do not have any feedback on what you wrote. In fact, you may not have any idea how many people have read what you have written.<p>So I think if they focused on showing how Twitter is great for expanding the boundaries of what you want to talk and make easy to see feedback from people about what you have spoken, they can attract more people.

Chris Sacca would sleep very soundly tonight.<p>Jokes aside, I think Jack is the man for the job. He has proven capable in square. I hope he does the same with Twitter. The company needs to take advantages of the huge market share it has.

Slightly off-topic, but I recently interviewed at Square, and I also have some long-time contacts there. I can honestly say they have some of the most brilliant engineering minds I have encountered working there. Whether it&#x27;s a trickle-down effect from Dorsey or otherwise, they have succeeded in recruiting and retaining many extremely talented individuals.<p>I am curious if anyone has recent anecdotes in regards to the engineering talent at Twitter (aside from the talent that came in with Periscope).

Twitter has incredible value as a tool to break realtime news and events. The problem is, it buried in a veneer of fruitless and redundant tweets that nobody wants to dig through. If they can figure out how to surface the value &#x27;there&#x27;s gold in them hills!&#x27;

From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SJosephBurns&#x2F;status&#x2F;640698530038943748" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SJosephBurns&#x2F;status&#x2F;640698530038943748</a>:<p>&quot;Twitter needs a CEO who is an @elonmusk with the Street and a @pmarca in the tweets. - @zerobeta&quot;

I can&#x27;t see this working out. Dorsey probably is the best candidate for CEO of Twitter, and I think there are some very low-hanging fruit to pick when it comes to solving Twitter&#x27;s product issues (I disagree with Startup L Jackson - Twitter&#x27;s product is <i>not</i> fucking fine). The market reaction has been positive - TWTR opened up 3.15% just now.<p>However, Square is a different story altogether. Square Wallet was a damp squib, and Square&#x27;s facing competition both from established players like Intuit and more recent entrants to the market, like iZettle. Leading Square and bringing it to market seems like a full-time job to me, and I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if it&#x27;s IPO valuation takes a hit because it lacks a full-time CEO.

Stay tuned for twitter square integration. Buy with twitter should go through square.

Congrats, @jack<p>Would love to see twtr become a platform for a myriad of third-party apps. Wouldn&#x27;t it be great to place a market order by messaging @bats &quot;buy $TWTR 10,000 30.00&quot;. Or order a limo with @uber &quot;2 people in one hour to jfk airport&quot;?

I think using twitter as a platform for ordering things etc. would be something he could do to make money. They should open it up to developers and charge them for cool apps.

Who had the most significant role in getting Twitter results prominent placement in Google desktop results? That seems like a mutually beneficial development.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10305855" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10305855</a>

What I don&#x27;t understand is &quot;to scale&quot; part of an article. If you cannot sell shit to 225M people, how you gonna sell that for 1B?

I think this will be good for Twitter. Jack will be able to make big identity and design decisions over the next few years with less pushback from the employees and users than any non-founder CEO. He&#x27;s already begun by declaring that tweets will extend beyond 140 chars, and the response has been apprehension instead of outright rejection. And for Twitter to remain competitive with Facebook, even as Facebook builds Notes and live-streaming video to cater journalists, Twitter is going to need to make many of these decisions.

when twitter finally pops everybody will see the bubble. or maybe uber pops first

Twitter should buy Slack and own the workplace communications market.

People are worried that Jack will be too busy between Twitter and Square, but what they don&#x27;t know is that the dude&#x27;s been completely spaced out for the last 4 years, making the same motivational presentation about his Dad&#x27;s pizza shop to anyone that will listen. Nobody at Twitter talks to Jack anymore, even the most Senior people.

What if you created a website that no matter how hard you try, you can never make enough money to justify it&#x27;s insane valuation? You hire the guy that created it. If that fails years down the road, hire a blonde.

I&#x27;m short Twitter. The fact of the matter is it that Twitter should never have become a multibillion-dollar company. There is no barrier to entry into this space---any competent web developer could make a non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon---except network effects, and those have proved weak due to poor user experience, particularly for new users.<p>Twitter should have treated itself like a utility, and focused less on the online advertising race-to-the-bottom that it is sure to lose due to the aforementioned poor user experience and negative sentiment about the platform&#x27;s future; this announcement is only going to continue to contribute to poor impressions.<p>The other monetization directions they have played around with---namely selling access to researchers and advertisers, and certifying identities of accounts for celebrities and brands---are a much better fit for the platform, and would have sustained a fast-moving company of 50 hotshot engineers. But the constant pressure to get bigger and bigger has served Twitter poorly. I&#x27;m sad to say that I think it will be a ghost town in a few years.

I first read this as &quot;Twitter names Jack Donaghy Chief Executive&quot; and thought I was in for a good laugh. Now I&#x27;m disappointed. :&#x2F;<p>Edit: To be clear, I thought Twitter was just expressing a good sense of humor, and I was disappointed in that I was expecting something humorous but didn&#x27;t find that.