Twitter's xecutive exodus claimed another victim on Wednesday. The company has already losts is COO, its engineering SVP and its VP of Consumer Product, and got a new CFO as well.
The lastest one to leave is Vivian Schilling, the former NBC news executive who came on board as Twitter's first head of news in October of last year.
She made the announcement that she was stepping down from her position in a series of tweets on Wednesday:
1/3 Stepping down from Twitter so new global media lead @katies can reorganize as she sees fit. Wish everyone at twitter nothing but best.
— Vivian Schiller (@vivian) October 8, 2014
2/3 Many thanks to @chloes and @rowghani for convincing me to come work at Twitter. It was a fascinating experience.
— Vivian Schiller (@vivian) October 8, 2014
3/3 And mostly, thanks to all the great journalists and newsrooms I collaborated with. Your innovation & creativity is an inspiration.
— Vivian Schiller (@vivian) October 8, 2014
As you can see, no clear reason was given for Schiller's departure, though she does say in the first tweet that it will allow Katie Jacobs Stanton, Twitter's VP of Global Media, to "reorganize" the company.
In a memo from Stanton, which was written to Twitter employees (and obtained by ReCode), she talked about some of that ongoing restructuring that Schiller mentioned, and how that may have affected Schiller's position within the company.
"As we continue to streamline the global media team and become more operationally efficient, we have decided to merge our news, gov & elections teams in North America. These teams have always worked in close partnership and we believe the new leadership structure will allow for even better synergy and best practice sharing among these important partners. As part of this transition, Vivian Schiller has decided to step down from her role," Stanton wrote.
"I want to thank Vivian for all she has done at Twitter this year. Her knowledge and experience in the field of journalism and her respect among industry peers have been instrumental in to our work and reputation with news organizations."
Schiller's replacement has already been picked out as well: Adam Sharp, who was formerly Head of Government and Elections at Twitter. He will now be the head of Global Chair of News & Gov, which combines both global vertical calls.
Prior to joining Twitter, Schiller was the president and CEO of National Public Radio, as well as senior vice president and chief digital officer for NBC News
Twitter executives
Schilling's departure is just the latest shuffling of the Twitter executive deck.
Since going public last year, Twitter has not been in the best of shape. The company has seen its stock price drop as a result of slowing user growth. At the same time, it has also seen many of its higher-ups either leave the company, or move positions.
Back in January, former VP of Consumer Product, Michael Sippey, was moved into an advisory position. And last month, engineering SVP Chris Fry departed the company.
The company also lost two key figures: first, it was COO Ali Rowghani who resigned. He was then followed out the door by Chloe Sladden, its VP of Media.
Rowghani's duties were split between two other executives: Adam Bain, who had been head of revenue at the company, was given the addition title of head of business development. And Gabriel Stricker, who had been vice president of marketing and communications, was put in charge of overseeing the entire media team at Twitter.
Most recently it was announced that Chief Financial Officer Mike Gupta was changing his role within the company to Senior Vice President of Strategic Investments. He was replaced by Anthony Noto, who was previously the Managing Director in the Technology, Media and Telecom Investment Banking Group at Goldman, Sachs. Prior to that he was CFO of the National Football League.
Twitter could not reached for further comment on Schiller's resignation.
(Image source: zdnet.com)
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
