Twitter’s senior management is changing. The first step was disclosed on Twitter by consumer product leader Kayvon Beykpour, who stated that current CEO Parag Agrawal “asked me to depart after letting me know that he wanted to take the company in a different path.”
In a now-deleted tweet, Bruce Falck, the company’s general manager of revenue and head of product, stated that Agrawal had sacked him as well.
Surprisingly, Parag Agrawal himself commented to both posts on Thursday evening, congratulating the guys he’d fired and expressing praise for their efforts.
Jay Sullivan, with whom we spoke in March about Twitter’s goals to reach 100 million daily users, will now serve as both the president of product and temporary head of revenue. These developments are taking place while Elon Musk presses through with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, despite the fact that he has yet to acquire control of the firm.
“At the beginning of the epidemic in 2020, the choice was taken to spend aggressively to provide huge growth in viewership and revenue, and as a company, we could not meet intermediate milestones that enable confidence in these targets,” Agrawal said in a message to staff seen by The Verge.
“We can confirm that Kayvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck are departing Twitter,” Twitter spokesperson Adrian Zamora said in a statement to the media. Jay Sullivan has been named the new General Manager of Bluebird and the temporary General Manager of Goldbird. Except for business-critical jobs, we are stopping most hiring and backfilling as of this week. We are reducing non-labor expenditures in order to be more responsible and efficient.”
Beykpour has spearheaded the creation of many of the company’s greatest features and design modifications over the previous many years as its product leader and, most recently, GM of consumer. It’s an unexpected move: Agrawal’s executive team was overhauled just a few months ago, with the departure of Twitter’s design and engineering heads, leaving Beykpour in charge of consumer products.
Beykpour joined Twitter in 2015 when Periscope, the livestreaming firm he co-founded, was bought by the corporation. As Periscope’s livestreaming capabilities were absorbed into Twitter’s main app, Beykpour moved into the bigger firm, becoming its head of consumer product in 2018 and supervising an extremely busy era of feature launches in the years that followed. Periscope was deactivated last year.
“When all is said and done, it’s the effort that matters: We improved our ad serving, prediction, analytics, attribution, charging, API, and many more systems, considerably boosting our dependability and scalability,” Bruce Falck remarked in a thread of his own.
While Falck’s work isn’t as well-known as Beykpour’s, he’s been mentioned in connection with Twitter’s changes in how it delivers advertising and claims that the company is looking at subscriptions to minimize its reliance on ad income. It’s also worth noting that Casey Newton stated that Beykpour and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri had a casual meeting in Falck’s garden as part of the process of Instagram eventually providing image previews for its Twitter connections.