Jack Dorsey is one of Silicon Valley’s eccentrics. Very serious and idealistic, he firmly believes that technology can bring peace and prosperity to the world. He’s kind of a hippie libertarian, a philosophy that can be confusing at times. However, he also turned out to be a true technology visionary.
His resignation from Twitter is the second time he has left. After leaving the first co-founder of the social media giant, he founded the digital payments company Square in 2009 – which became hugely successful.
In 2015 he returned to Twitter. He managed both companies until Monday – a situation many investors did not like. Last year, Elliott Management, a prominent Twitter investor, tried to get him to choose between the two. So, naturally, they want CEOs to spend their time on Twitter and Twitter.
This partly explains why Twitter’s share price didn’t drop when its iconic leader suddenly stepped down. Investors have long believed that Twitter left money on the table – that it could generate more revenue with its large and engaged user base.
And, of course, a CEO who has a complete focus on Twitter can help.
If you compare Twitter to Google or Facebook, it’s a relative mine. Some see Dorsey as the reason for Twitter’s slow growth. A purebred on Twitter who helps grow the platform but doesn’t want monetization at the expense of user experience.
To be honest with Dorsey, he has been trying to experiment with ways to earn more income. It also announced a target of 315 million users with revenue potential by the end of 2023, doubling in the same year.
Twitter is doing a great job of adding users during the pandemic, but that goal is very ambitious. This goal will be taken over by the new CEO, Parag Agrawal. Agrawal was born in India and has developed into a competent and respected Chief Technology Officer. He is described as a secure partner and has a big task ahead of him.
Agrawal immediately got over Dorsey’s headache from monetization. Twitter is not Facebook. It contains much less information about you, and therefore the data it stores is of less value to advertisers. You can also only serve that many ads to users before they were opt-out. If your goal is high growth but also revenue growth, this can be a tricky balancing act.
Dorsey is obsessed with cryptocurrencies, especially bitcoin.
He recently created a dedicated crypto team to look at how companies accept digital assets and decentralized applications. The team should be under Agrawal’s leadership – perhaps a sign that digital currencies will play a vital role in the new CEO’s vision for the company’s growth. But Twitter has become highly political in the US, and Agrawal has inherited its moderation issues.
Democrats usually claim that the platform is not enough to weed out fake news. They also argue that the system is not good at detecting the removal of hate speech quickly.
Republicans say the platform has an anti-conservative bias – demonstrated by the decision to ban Donald Trump after the riots on Capitol Hill.