Twitter CEO Dick Costolo sat down with Emily Chang on Bloomberg West’s new 10 am PT program today, where he discussed his management style, his relationship with Jack Dorsey, competition with Facebook and the possibility of an IPO.
Costolo said, “I think Jack [Dorsey] would agree in this case, that I’m much more an extrovert and he’s much more of an introvert. But the two of us have a great relationship and I think we’ve found the right way to work together and make sure we’re spending a lot of time together.” He also said, “Our user growth drives everything…All of the benefits of the business and growing the business and extending the platform are derived from that.”
Costolo on his management style:
“I guess if I had to summarize my management style — it would be — present. I try to make sure that I understand what all the various teams are working on. I think have a strong understanding of who the great individual contributors in the company are across organizations. I spend a lot of time with individual teams trying to understand what’s preventing them from being moving faster, what’s preventing them from getting things done that they want go get done, and then helping remove road blocks from those kinds of things. I pride myself on spending a great deal of time in meetings and just one-on-one conversations with individual contributors –as opposed to my direct reports– in service to having context for what’s going on in the company and then being able to help people understand everything that I understand.”
On the management class he teaches at Twitter:
“It actually started when one of my engineers–a couple of years ago–approached me and said, ‘Hey, I just switched teams and my former manager had one-on-one meetings with me every week. And my new manager doesn’t believe in one-on-ones. So what should we be doing? What’s the right way to do this at Twitter?’ Funny thing is, once it was one of those examples where you hear this and then you start seeing examples across the company of the inconsistent ways people are managing based on either the success biases they brought from the company they came from, where we all did it that way. Or they were just promoted to manager here and, ‘I’m doing it the way my manager did before, not because it’s necessarily right or wrong.’ So, I set about creating this course, and it’s a six-hour course now, that is essentially how I want you to manage at Twitter and what I believe is important and how I want you to lead.”
On whether Twitter’s organizational chart still needs to be untangled:
“I don’t think of it that way. I feel like we’re constantly looking to clarify the organization as we grow. So, as you expand and you’re in hypergrowth, you’re obviously adding to the organization in lots of different ways and you start to have these additional complexities of you’ve got an international organization now. So, you may have– a matrixed organization where– the head of an international office– is not the person who the communications in– person in that office reports to directly, but they’re all sort of matrixed into the head of that office. And as you grow and start to build things like international regions, et cetera, I think you’re constantly looking to clarify the organization and simplify the organization.”
On his relationship with Jack Dorsey:
“Jack is one of the most forthright communicators I’ve ever had the good fortunate to work with. And, in fact, I have been in a meeting with him where there was a particularly difficult piece of news to be communicated which he handled simply and elegantly you know in a high-tension environment. I think Jack would agree in this case, that I’m much more an extrovert and he’s much more of an introvert. But the two of us have a great relationship and I think we’ve found the right way to work together and make sure we’re spending a lot of time together.”
On the importance of 1 billion users:
“Our user growth drives everything. As I think about the service and what we’re trying to accomplish and why we have to achieve what we have to achieve, it’s entirely in service to reach every person on the planet. All of the benefits of the business and growing the business and extending the platform are derived from that.”
On competition with Facebook:
“We have a really clear notion of where we want to go as a company and with the product. In fact I should say ‘products’ now as we’ve got– Vine in the market as well. We’ve acquired Crashalytics and other things that we’re doing. So, we have a very specific, clear, and shared understanding of where we’re taking those things. And I think it’s fair to say that we don’t let other companies’ decisions affect the way we think about where we’re going. Obviously, you have to understand the competitive landscape and know what other people are doing in the space so that you can be thoughtful about whether you need to move faster on something or prioritize this over that in a particular quarter. But in the general scheme of things, in the overall vision of where we’re going, we don’t let those other things change our notion of what we’re trying to be.”
On the potential of a Twitter IPO:
“I’ll tell you this. And I know it’s going to sound like a broken record. But, we feel like we’re building the global town square. And when we talk about we just had an all-hands meeting this morning and we talked about the fact that we’re building this global town square. And we see every day more and more examples from around the world of how Twitter is changing the way people live, how they communicate and how we interact in real time in public in a direct multidirectional, unfiltered, conversational way. And as long as we deliver the kinds of capabilities in the product that fulfill that obligation to building the global town square, all the other things that we want to do as a business will take care of themselves. We are solely focused on building this global town square. And all the benefits of the business and the way we think about growing the business will fall from that.”
On his birthday wish for Twitter:
“My Birthday wish for Twitter is that we will look back on seven as, ‘Wow. Remember when we were only seven and the company was just getting started?’ That’s my wish for the company.”
On what it’s like to be the CEO of Twitter:
“I have the best job in the world. I couldn’t be happier. There is nothing else I’d rather be doing.”
Interview courtesy BLOOMBERG WEST