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Two more senior Twitter figures jump ship

It's been a year of headline-making exits at the underfire Twitter and another couple of big play...
Newstalk
Newstalk

11.18 21 Dec 2016


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Two more senior Twitter figure...

Two more senior Twitter figures jump ship

Newstalk
Newstalk

11.18 21 Dec 2016


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It's been a year of headline-making exits at the underfire Twitter and another couple of big players have just announced they won't be back in the office after the Christmas break.

Adam Messinger, the company's chief technology officer since March 2013, publicly called time on his half-decade at the social networking company on Tuesday evening with a short tweet:

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Chief executive Jack Dorsey (pictured) offered his gratitude to Messinger, who previously had the title of vice president of application development, in less than 140 characters...

Engineering vice president Ed Ho will now take over all of product and engineering, reporting directly to Dorsey. A company spokesperson told Recode:

"We're taking steps to streamline and flatten the organisation by elevating our engineering, product and design functions, with each area now reporting directly to Jack."

Earlier this week, vice president of product Josh McFarland confirmed that he was also leaving, this time to join Silicon Valley venture firm Greylock Partners.

In a number of tweets, McFarland explained that he had been considering a move into venture capital. Noting the help his partners gave him with his own digital ad platform TellApart, which was acquired by Twitter for $532.6 million in stock in April 2015, he said he would similarly partner with entrepreneurs on their own journeys and work to be "just as relentlessly supportive".

The two latest departures round off a tumultuous year for the company. Four senior executives – Kevin Weil, Alex Roetter and Katie Jacobs and Skip Schipper – left in January, causing shares to tumble more than 5%.

Jana Messerschmidt and Nathan Hubbard, who took care of business development and media/commerce respectively, left in May.

Then just last month, chief operating officer Adam Bain, hailed as one of the company's biggest talents, tweeted:

Both Bain and McFarland had been covering positions vacated in January.

Twitter announced in October that it would lay of 9% of its workforce and abandon video app Vine to cut costs.

Over the course of the year, Dorsey has had to face falling shares, sluggish user growth, ever-elusive profit generation, negative press over how hate speech is being dealt with on the social network, and a lack of interested parties when it tried to sell itself.


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