Twitter may be facing the end of its days as a public company, but that has not stopped it from shaking its top management. Ahead of the takeover by Elon Musk, the popular micro-blogging site has decided to fire two of its top managers and put a freeze on recruitments.
Kayvon Beykpour, consumer product leader at the company, and Bruce Falck, head of revenue product, are the ones who have been shown the door. Jay Sullivan, former Facebook director, will take over as both the head of product and interim head of revenue as the company is working to find a permanent successor for Falck.
Both departures were confirmed by Twitter. In an internal memo sent to employees, Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal said that these changes, among others, were “difficult” but “right for Twitter and its future.”
The reasons behind this decision seem to include the failure of the company to hit the intermediate milestones despite making aggressive investments to grow its audience and revenue. Add to that the impact on its results by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the upcoming takeover, and you get an idea why Agarwal says that they “need to continue to be intentional” about its teams, hiring, and costs.
Interestingly, it seems that Beykpour, who is currently on paternity leave, is not leaving Twitter of his own accord, rather, he has been ousted from the company he has been a part of for seven years.
“The truth is that this isn’t how and when I imagined leaving Twitter, and this wasn’t my decision,” Beykpour tweeted, adding that Agarwal had asked him to leave after letting him know that he wants to take the team in a different direction.
Falck also claimed that he was fired by Agarwal in a tweet that has now been deleted. “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,” reads another tweet by Falck that is still available on the platform.
For Agarwal’s part, he thanked both of them for their services to Twitter. He also confirmed in the internal memo that effective this week, the company was putting a halt on most hiring and backfills, with business-critical roles (as determined by its senior leadership team in partnership with their HRBPs) being the exception. All extended offers will be reviewed as well to determine their criticality and those that are not will be pulled back.
Additionally, Twitter will be pulling back on non-labor costs to ensure what Agarwal says will be efficiency and responsibility. Other expenses that will be cut include contractor and consulting expenditure, travel and events, marketing, our real estate footprint, on-premise and public-cloud-related infrastructure expenditure, and other operational costs.
