(UPDATED 7:24 p.m. Adding Evan Williams’ comment on his personal Twitter stream.)
(UPDATED 8:39 p.m. Adding comments from Biz Stone at Twitter and Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures.)
Evan Williams. (Credit: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)
Jack Dorsey is out as chief executive at Twitter, the micro-blogging start-up that has become famous in the tech world for a lot of buzz and little revenue.
Evan Williams, Twitter’s chairman, co-founder and chief product officer, will take over as chief executive and run day-to-day operations at the service, which allows people to broadcast messages of 140 characters or less.
Mr. Dorsey, who came up with the idea for Twitter and became C.E.O. when the company was founded in 2007, is becoming chairman.
“We had two very strong leaders here and we really needed to choose one,” said Biz Stone, who co-founded the company with Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Williams. As chief product officer, Mr. Williams had essentially been running the company alongside Mr. Dorsey and they decided that Twitter needed a single leader, Mr. Stone said. Mr. Williams has significant experience running start-ups. He co-founded Pyra Labs, which created Blogger (now owned by Google) and Odeo, for searching audio and video online.
“We all think Ev is a better fit to lead the company from a product perspective, an operations perspective, and a business standpoint,” said Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures who is on the Twitter board of directors.
Mr. Williams announced the news on the San Francisco company’s blog (there are ‘s not a word now two words on his personal Twitter stream: “Big day.”). He said that the board of directors had nothing but praise for Mr. Dorsey, who “took Twitter through an order of magnitude of growth and two major rounds of financing, while safely navigating some very rocky waters that would have taken even more experienced leaders down with the ship.”
The decision is somewhat surprising since Twitter has actually become more stable recently, holding up particularly well during the heavy barrage of messages exchanged by users during the recent presidential debates.
Mr. Stone said that now was the time to make the C.E.O. change because the company has gotten to “a healthy place.”
But the company has no real source of revenue, and venture capitalists are starting to squeeze Silicon Valley start-ups to cut costs and prepare for tough times. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions, a venture capital company led by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.
Businesses have started using Twitter, and the company is considering charging for commercial use as one possible source of revenue, Mr. Stone said. The consumer service will remain free, he said.
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