Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal fires two top executives, freezes hiring

Twitter is shaking up its top leadership. The very first go arrived as consumer solution leader Kayvon Beykpour declared on Twitter that existing CEO Parag Agrawal “asked me to go away just after letting me know that he desires to just take the team in a distinct path.”

Bruce Falck, the common manager of earnings and head of products for its enterprise side, verified in a (now deleted) tweet that he was also fired by Agrawal.

In an unforeseen convert, on Thursday evening Parag Agrawal himself responded to each threads, thanking the males he’d fired and expressing admiration for their operate.

Now Jay Sullivan, who we spoke to in March about Twitter’s programs to include 100 million day-to-day end users, will take above as equally the head of solution and interim head of profits. These moves are happening at the identical time Elon Musk moves ahead with his $44 billion buy of Twitter, whilst he hasn’t taken possession of the firm still.

In a memo to employees attained by The Verge, Agrawal wrote, “At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the conclusion was created to invest aggressively to produce big advancement in audience and earnings, and as a firm we did not strike intermediate milestones that permit self confidence in these targets.”

Twitter spokesperson Adrian Zamora confirmed the variations, expressing 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 enterprise significant roles. We are pulling back again on non-labor fees to be certain we are getting liable and successful.”

As its item leader and, most recently, GM of purchaser, Beykpour has led the enhancement of a lot of of its biggest characteristics and design improvements about the previous quite a few decades. It’s a stunning improve: Agrawal just reorganized his govt team a couple of months ago with the exit of Twitter’s layout and engineering qualified prospects, leaving Beykpour at the best of consumer products and solutions.

Beykpour has been at Twitter due to the fact 2015 following it obtained Periscope, the livestreaming business he co-launched. As Twitter folded Periscope’s livestreaming capabilities into its main application, Beykpour shifted into the greater company, getting its head of client merchandise in 2018 and overseeing an unusually effective period of aspect launches in the yrs that followed. Periscope was finally shut down last calendar year.

In a thread of his very own, Bruce Falck thanked the engineers he’d labored with and explained, “When all is reported and carried out, it’s the do the job that matters: We upgraded our advert serving, prediction, analytics, attribution, billing, API, and many additional methods, significantly increasing our dependability and scalability.”

When Falck’s do the job is a lot less obvious to people than Beykpour’s, he’s popped up in the news about Twitter’s variations in how it serves marketing and stories that it would glance into subscriptions to minimize its reliance on ad income. It is also truly worth mentioning that Casey Newton reported that Falck’s yard hosted a casual conference amongst Beykpour and Instagram head Adam Mosseri that was component of the method of Instagram eventually supporting impression previews for its inbound links on Twitter.

Update May 12th, 1:55PM ET: Included facts from the memo attained by The Verge and statements from Twitter PR.

Update May well 12th, 8:37PM ET: Added tweets from Parag Agrawal.