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
I think if you look down the road for Twitter, we would like to be a company - a service - that is used by billions of people around the world in every country in the world because we feel that the power of Twitter is that it brings people closer to each other, to their governments, to their heroes, etc.
Twitter is the perfect complement to television. TV has always been social. You talk to the person you're sitting next to on the couch. You talk to the people you're - you know, at work with the next day around the proverbial water cooler.
I try to spend a lot of time with people outside my direct reports. The view from the top is totally distorted. If you only spend time with your directs, you have no perspective on what's really going on.
As a leader, you need to care deeply, deeply about your people while not worrying or really even caring about what they think about you. Managing by trying to be liked is the path to ruin.
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.
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.
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.
The beauty of Twitter is that more and more people are flocking to it because it's shrinking their world.
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.
You can choose to listen to one end of the spectrum or the other on Twitter, just like you can on television. But hopefully what we've done is given a voice to that broad middle ground.
We've recognized that Twitter is the second screen for TV, and TV is more fun with Twitter. There are a bunch of ways that we can be complementary to broadcasters.
For many people, when they come to Twitter, the language is opaque. We need to push the scaffolding to the background and bring the content forward. The media, the photos, the videos.
One of the things you learn operating in the technology industry is disruptions are occurring every day.
When we think about the characteristics of Twitter that make it unique, it is all of public, real-time, conversational, and distributed. We are the only platform that is all of those at scale.