Dick Costolo, the Twitter COO tasked with making it a viable advertising medium, was named the company’s CEO yesterday, replacing co-founder Evan Williams, the man who hired him.
Costolo was hired as COO nearly a year ago and has rolled out Twitter’s first forays into commerce, including selling the data feed to search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, and new ad products such as promoted tweets, trends and, also introduced Monday, “promoted accounts.”
But it was another big Twitter initiative that spurred the change. The company has overhauled its web interface over the past several months–a huge project that required the focus of Williams over some of the more traditional CEO responsibilities.
Going forward, Williams will focus on product and vision. “As we’ve all seen with the new Twitter, when Ev [Williams] focuses on product, something amazing can happen,” Costolo said in a statement.
When Williams hired Costolo, he brought in a kindred spirit. Like Williams–who sold Blogger to Google–Costolo sold a company to Google (Feedburner) and was more interested in building Twitter as a standalone entity than selling it.
And like another Silicon Valley startup with a fast-growing service, Facebook, Costolo has tried to balance integrating brand advertising into the service without destroying it. Having tested its ads for several months, the company is now starting to syndicate them to other applications that access Twitter, such as Hootsuite.
Since Costolo joined the company, Twitter has raised two huge rounds of capital to expand and build out its advertising products, bringing total outside investment to $160 million. The move puts him in a position to guide the company–with 165 million users worldwide but just a trickle of revenue–toward an initial public offering.
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