Will Twitter’s midlife crisis bring a fancy new CEO?
The pressure is on Twitter’s interim CEO, Jack Dorsey ahead of the company’s earning reports. Many are wondering whether Dorsey’s is fully committed to his role after his other company, Square, reportedly filed for an IPO confidentially. We talk with Will Oremus, Senior Tech Writer at Slate, about Jack Dorsey and the once and future challenges of the company.
Click the media player above to hear host Ben Johnson in conversation with Will Oremus.
“I think this is a rare case where a new CEO might actually have a chance to make a difference,” says Oremus, due to the fact that the company is in a transitional period. “In startup years, Twitter’s kind of having a midlife crisis. It went through the big early boom years. It started to mature and make money, but now it really has to grow into something much bigger if it’s going to satisfy investors.”
The dual challenges facing Twitter are to grow advertising and users, says Oremus — Falling short of expectations after its IPO that Twitter would be the next Facebook, the company is now wanting to focus more on reach than number of active tweeters.
In light of this shift, Oremus points to Twitter’s new initiative, Project Lightening, as a potential opportunity to pivot Twitter from a ubiquitous social media site to more of a media platform. Project Lightening allows users to “to follow events and then you’ll see tweets curated by human editors with the help of software so you won’t have to be a pro Twitter user to log in and see what’s going on.”
With anxious investors, a revolving door of CEOs, and a need to re-think Twitter’s role in the digital media sphere, Oremus says, “the Twitter board really wants someone who can put his whole life into this role.”
While Oremus says the challenge of ousting Dorsey is that he is such a popular figure within the company, Twitter has to do some serious soul searching to overcome the ghosts of Twitter past and re-position itself for a new Twitter future.
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