Twitter appoints new COO and CFO in executive shuffle

Social network also sees exit of VP of Growth

The top ranks at Twitter have seen a massive shake-up, as Ali Rowghani has been named as the social network’s new Chief Operating Officer and Mike Gupta has been hired as the new Chief Financial Officer, and VP of Growth Othman Laraki announced he would be leaving.

CEO Dick Costolo announced the news of Rowghani and Gupta’s new positions on his Twitter page Wednesday night.

Rowghani was, until now, CFO at Twitterm the position being taken over by Gupta. Prior to that he served as CFO at Pixar Animation Studios from 2002 to 2010.

According to his updated LinkedIn profile, Gupta served as VP Corporate Finance & Treasurer at Twitter for two months prior to taking on his new role. Before that he spent a year and a half as SVP Finance & Treasurer at Zynga, before leaving in November, one of the many, many other executives to abandon the once powerful social game company. Gupta also spent eight years as Chief Treasury Officer at Yahoo, from 2003 to 2011.

Rowghani’s LinkedIn page has not been updated, but both Rowghani and Gupta have updated their Twitter profiles to reflect their new positions.

Funny enough, Gupta does not seem to be much of a Twitter guy, as his profile only has three tweets... all of them sent out Wednesday. 

I'm not saying that to work at Twitter you actually have to use the service, but it might help. Or at least it couldn't hurt!

Not all of Twitter's executive news today involved people moving up in the company as Othman Laraki, VP of Growth at Twitter, also made news Wednesday night when he sent out a tweet announcing that he would be leaving the company.

Laraki, whose job it was, as his title suggests, to grow the number of users on Twitter is at least leaving on a high note: the company announced earlier this week that it had passed the 200 million active member mark.

There is no word on what Laraki's next career move will be.

These changes are just the latest to Twitter's executive ranks this year, as the social network made a a habit of poaching Google employees this year.

In October, Twitter lured away Google Executive Matt Derella as its new director of agency business development. 

Derella had been Google’s agency relations chief, where he handled the search engine’s relationship with Publicis, the world’s third largest holding companies by revenue. At Twitter, Derella is responsible for establishing relationships at other ad holding companies.

In April director of global communications Gabriel Stricker announced he was joining Twitter, and in June it was VP of global online sales Richard Alfonsi who left Google to join the social network.

Vator contacted Twitter for a statement on the news of Rowghani and Gupta’s new placements within the company, but Twitter had no further comment to make beyond Costolo’s tweet.

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