Twitter co-founder returns to the company he started

Oct 5, 2015 15:52 GMT  ·  By

Jack Dorsey, current CEO of Square, a mobile payments platform, and former CEO and co-founder of Twitter, was renamed to the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with the company he founded back in 2006.

The announcement came today, on Twitter (where did you expect?), and was the result of a 3-month-old search carried out by a Search Committee, which included Peter Currie (former Netscape CFO), Peter Fenton (General Partner at Benchmark), and Evan Williams (Blogger & Twitter founder).

While some rumors had Anthony Noto, Twitter's current CFO, as the main candidate to get the job, during the CEO search, Jack Dorsey, who also served as interim CEO, proved to be a more suitable candidate for a job he knew how to do better than anyone else.

Dick Costolo, who announced at the start of June he would be stepping down as CEO from July 1, has also left the Twitter Board of Directors with the recent announcement.

Evan Williams: I honestly didn’t think we’d land on Jack

In a statement on his personal blog, Evan Williams, Medium CEO, former Blogger & Twitter founder, and former Twitter CEO himself, said, "It’s a cliche to say tech companies need to be founder-led, just because most great ones are. [...] His connection to its [Twitter's] roots informs a depth of vision and authenticity of voice, which I’ve been excited to hear."

Williams also goes on to say that they closely looked at the problem of Dorsey running two highly successful companies at once, which was a problem and a conflict of interests, but the search committee decided to give it a shot.

At the time of this article, Twitter shares were only 1% up, which is indicative of the lack of interest the company has been getting from both users and Wall Street investors.