Twitter is currently laying off its executives. Consumer product leader Kayvon Beykpour announced on Twitter that the platform's current CEO, Parag Agrawal, asked him to leave the company because he wants to take the team in a different direction.
Twitter CEO is Letting Go of Top Executives
Bruce Falck, Twitter's general manager of revenue and head of product for its business side, confirmed in a tweet that he was also fired by Agrawal.
Jay Sullivan, who The Verge spoke to back in March about Twitter's plans to add 100 million daily users on the social media platform, will take over as the head of product and the interim head of revenue.
These moves are happening at the same time that Tesla CEO Elon Musk moves forward with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, although he has not taken ownership of the social media company yet.
In a memo to employees obtained by The Verge, Agrawal wrote that in 2020, the decision was made to invest aggressively and to deliver massive growth in audience and revenue.
However, as a social media company, they did not hit the intermediate milestones that enable confidence in the said goals.
Twitter spokesperson Adrian Zamora confirmed the changes, saying in a statement to The Verge, that they can confirm that both Kayvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck are leaving the platform.
Jay Sullivan is the now new general manager of Bluebird and will also act as the interim general manager of Goldbird. Beykpour said they are also pausing the hiring and backfills, except for critical business roles.
Beykpour also said that they are pulling back on non-labor costs to ensure they are being responsible and efficient, according to Business Today.
As its product leader and GM of consumers, Beykpour has led the development of many of the company's features and design changes over the last several years.
This is a sudden change: Agrawal just reorganized his executive team in early 2022 with the exit of Twitter's design and engineering leads, leaving Beykpour at the top of consumer products.
Kayvon Beykpour's Reign
Beykpour has been at Twitter since 2015 after it bought Periscope, the livestreaming company he co-founded, according to The Washington Post.
As Twitter brought Periscope's livestreaming features into its main app, Beykpour shifted into the larger company, becoming its head of consumer product in 2018 and overseeing a productive period of feature launches in the years that followed. Periscope was finally shut down in 2021.
In a thread of his own, Bruce Falck thanked the engineers he'd worked with at Twitter and said, "When all is said and done, it's the work that matters."
Falck pointed out that they've upgraded the ad serving, prediction, analytics, attribution, billing, API, and many more systems, substantially improving Twitter's reliability and scalability."
Falck may not be as visible to users as Beykpour as he works mostly behind the scenes, but he has been in the news about the platform's changes in how it serves to advertise. He reported that Twitter would look into subscriptions in order to reduce its reliance on advertisement revenues.
Also, it has been reported that Falck's backyard hosted a casual meeting between Beykpour and Instagram head Adam Mosseri that was part of the process of Instagram finally supporting image previews for its links on Twitter.
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Written by Sophie Webster
