Here's A Brutal Quote About Twitter CEO Dick Costolo From A VC Who Owns Shares In Twitter
In their story, there's a pretty brutal quote about CEO Dick Costolo from Brian O'Malley, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners, which owns Twitter shares.
Frier and Stone say that Graf's biggest challenge may be working with CEO Dick Costolo. They note that Twitter has gone through some executive drama this year with COO Ali Rowghani leaving the company this year over product.
O'Malley puts the blame for executive trouble at Twitter squarely on Costolo, saying, "If someone's gotten divorced once, you really don't know who's to blame ... But if someone's gotten divorced five times, there may be a pattern there."
It's an unusually frank, on-the-record statement from a VC. It also seems a little unfair, since we don't really know everything that's happening inside Twitter that led to the ouster of Rowghani, and other executives. Rowghani was supposed to be leading product, and clearly didn't do a great job of taking Twitter's product to the next level to make it a mainstream success.
In terms of what Graf is doing at Twitter, it sounds like he hasn't done much to change product at Twitter, yet. He's mostly worked on reorganizing the product team, and he's killed some side projects to get people focused. Graf only joined a few months ago, so we expect to see changes in the coming months.