https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/12/23068851/twitter-product-chief-kayvon-beykpour-bruce-falck-parag-agrawal

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Filed under:

  * Tech
  * Twitter

Twitter CEO pushes out top execs, freezes hiring

New, 38 comments

'Parag asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take
the team in a different direction'

By Richard Lawler@rjcc Updated May 12, 2022, 1:56pm EDT

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[acastro_18] He was asked to leave after seven years with the
company. Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is shaking up its top leadership. The first move came as
consumer product leader Kayvon Beykpour announced on Twitter that
current CEO Parag Agrawal "asked me to leave after letting me know
that he wants to take the team in a different direction."

Bruce Falck, the general manager of revenue and head of product for
its business side, confirmed in a (now deleted) tweet that he was
also fired by Agrawal.

Now Jay Sullivan, who we spoke to in March about Twitter's plans to
add 100 million daily users, will take over as both the head of
product and interim head of revenue. These moves are occurring at the
same time Elon Musk moves forward with his $44 billion purchase of
Twitter, although he hasn't taken ownership of the company yet.

In a memo to employees obtained by The Verge, Agrawal wrote, "At the
beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the decision was made to invest
aggressively to deliver big growth in audience and revenue, and as a
company we did not hit intermediate milestones that enable confidence
in these goals."

Twitter spokesperson Adrian Zamora confirmed the changes, saying in a
statement to The Verge, "We can confirm that Kayvon Beykpour and
Bruce Falck are leaving Twitter. Jay Sullivan is the new GM of
Bluebird and interim GM of Goldbird. Effective this week, we are
pausing most hiring and backfills, except for business critical
roles. We are pulling back on non-labor costs to ensure we are being
responsible and efficient."

As its product leader and, most recently, GM of consumer, Beykpour
has led the development of many of its biggest features and design
changes over the last several years. It's a surprising change:
Agrawal just reorganized his executive team a few months ago with the
exit of Twitter's design and engineering leads, leaving Beykpour at
the top of consumer products.

    The truth is that this isn't how and when I imagined leaving
    Twitter, and this wasn't my decision. Parag asked me to leave
    after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a
    different direction.

    -- Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) May 12, 2022

Related

Kayvon Beykpour, head of consumer product, on Twitter's new product
plan

Beykpour has been at Twitter since 2015 after it acquired Periscope,
the livestreaming company he co-founded. As Twitter folded
Periscope's livestreaming features into its main app, Beykpour
shifted into the larger company, becoming its head of consumer
product in 2018 and overseeing an unusually productive period of
feature launches in the years that followed. Periscope was finally
shut down last year.

    I dedicate this Tweet to those engineers and thank you ALL for
    the opportunity to serve alongside you. It's been awesome. There
    is a lot more to do so get back to work, I can't wait to see what
    you build #TIF

    -- bruce.falck() (@boo) May 12, 2022

In a thread of his own, Bruce Falck thanked the engineers he'd worked
with and said, "When all is said and done, it's the work that
matters: We upgraded our ad serving, prediction, analytics,
attribution, billing, API, and many more systems, substantially
improving our reliability and scalability."

While Falck's work is less visible to users than Beykpour's, he's
popped up in the news about Twitter's changes in how it serves
advertising and reports that it would look into subscriptions to
reduce its reliance on ad revenue. It's also worth mentioning that
Casey Newton reported that Falck's backyard hosted a casual meeting
between Beykpour and Instagram head Adam Mosseri that was part of the
process of Instagram finally supporting image previews for its links
on Twitter.

Update May 12th, 1:55PM ET: Added details from the memo obtained by 
The Verge and statements from Twitter PR.

In This Stream

Elon Musk and the $43 billion bid: all of the updates about his
takeover of Twitter

  * Twitter CEO pushes out top execs, freezes hiring
  * Elon Musk: 'I guess I would' reverse Donald Trump's Twitter ban

View all 37 stories

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