I was just as surprised as everyone this morning when I woke up to the announcement Jack Dorsey was stepping down as Twitter's CEO. But is anyone really shocked here? Did "Twitter CEO" ever seem like a job he was fully invested in? Recent years have proven it's possible to be a successful CEO at two massive companies simultaneously (see "Tesla" and "Space X"), but in this case, I think Jack Dorsey's clear prioritization of Square hurt Twitter's product development.
Square, almost three times larger than Twitter based on market cap, is a fintech darling poised to continue at the forefront of this red-hot industry on the back of its Afterpay acquisition, success with Cash App, and movement into cryptocurrency. Twitter is, well, quite similar to what Twitter was when it launched in 2006. The announcement of its new "Twitter Blue" subscription service shows at least an effort to modernize its business model, and Spaces seems like a natural progression for the service after the success of Twitch during the pandemic. But beyond that, can you point to any significant product change Twitter has made in six or seven years, even as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok continually launch new features and renovate their platforms? I'm sure a lot of fingers could be pointed, but at the end of the day, stagnation in innovation falls on the CEO.
Perhaps being slow to innovate was a good thing for Twitter. After all, I don't think Twitter has nearly the data privacy problems that Facebook is currently sorting through; perhaps Twitter is just less a "move fast and break things" company as it is a "move slowly and only act when the model is proven" company, and this saved the company from falling into the same ethically compromised cesspool that Facebook did. In any case, Twitter is still one of the most important social media brands in the world today with a massive active user base, so I'm excited to see the direction Parag Agrawal decides to take the company.
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