Dick Costolo
Dick Costolo
Dick Costolowas the CEO of Twitter from 2010 to 2015; he also served as the COO before becoming CEO. He took over as CEO from Evan Williams in October 2010. On June 11, 2015, it was announced that Costolo would step down as CEO on July 1, 2015 and would be replaced by Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey on an interim basis until the Board of Directors could find a replacement. On August 8, 2015, The New York Times...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth10 September 1963
CountryUnited States of America
One of the things that amazes me about Twitter is the way it utterly eradicates artificial barriers to communication. Things like status, geopolitics and so on keep people from talking to one another. Those go away in Twitter. You see exchanges that would never happen anywhere else.
One of the great things about Silicon Valley is, irrespective of how competitive you might be with another company or how closely you might be working with that company, there's a great sort of give and take, and camaraderie from - between - some of the executives in the valley and some of the other investors in the valley.
When you're doing what you love to do, you become resilient. You create a habit of taking chances on yourself. If you do what's expected of you, and things go poorly, you will look to external sources for what to do next, because that will be your habit. You will be standing there frozen. If you are just filling a role, you will be blindsided.
The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters - a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They're not all celebrities. There's 'CNN Breaking News.' And the 'New York Times.' And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren't really that known outside that world.
One of the things that I think I do well as a CEO is that I'm present. When I'm with my employees, I'm there in the moment.
What I implore you to do is believe that if you make courageous choices and bet on yourself and put yourself out there that you will have an impact as a result of what you do, and you don't need to know now what that will be, or how that will happen, because nobody ever does.
People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care.
Not only can you not plan the impact you're going to have, you often won't recognize it when you're having it.
The way you build trust with your people is by being forthright and clear with them from day one. You may think people are fooled when you tell them what they want to hear. They are not fooled.
Authenticity is absolutely the key to a great tweet.
Apple is our mentor, Facebook is our enemy.
When youre doing what you love to do, you become resilient. You create a habit of taking chances on yourself. If you do whats expected of you, and things go poorly, you will look to external sources for what to do next, because that will be your habit. You will be standing there frozen. If you are just filling a role, you will be blindsided.
When I was your age, we didn't have the Internet in our pants. We didn't even have the Internet not in our pants. That's how bad it was.
Believe that if you make courageous choices, and bet on yourself, then you will have an impact.