Micro-blogging giant, Twitter Inc. on Friday announced that its board size has cut short from nine earlier to seven now as directors, venture capitalists Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson would be departing from the board list. A replacement for the two would be soon looked into. The departing duo were two of Twitter’s earliest investors as well as members of the board.
The departing duo made Twitter’s vice president of communications, Sean Garrett think a lot before he could make a public statement on the departure. The briefing from Garrett took more than 140 characters to let others know his thoughts on the same. He said:
Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson both played important and greatly appreciated roles in our success. Both saw what Twitter could become before most anyone else. We look forward to their continued input as both investors in the company and passionate users of the product.
Both Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson weren’t available for the comment, but a person familiar with the matter said the departures had close linkings to the reduction of their firms’ stakes in Twitter as part of a financing round in August.
Management changes has been quite frequent for Twitter in the span of one year or so, as last year in October, co-founder Evan Williams was replaced by Dick Costolo as chief executive. This change had another inspiring change which had Jack Dorsey, another co-founder, coming back to Twitter as executive chairman. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone along with Williams had started a new project called Obvious Corp recently, which operates as a web media incubator that provides podcasting services like Odeo and Twitter.
The focus of Twitter has been on the rise as its working hard to build a revenue-generating advertising business on top of its Web service which has more than 100 million active users as of today. It was being noted by Twitter as to broaden the areas of its service where ads would be viewed by the tweep. This was notified by Costolo when he was briefing the reporters and analysts at the company’s San Francisco headquarters last week. The meeting had Costolo citing Wilson in examples and anecdotes on a repetitive basis on topics relating to the various uses for Twitter. For the departing duo, Twitter might have a few matters to be concern for as it quoted on Friday that Wilson and Sabet have played important roles in the company’s success.
Apart from the directors, chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, even confirmed that he is leaving twitter, which was confirmed by him via a Tweet. The reasons for the same has not yet been disclosed. TechCrunch however has been of the thought that yet again the latest round of funding might be the culprit to force Chowdhury to move out of Twitter. That might be the case, but if not, still its a worry for Twitter as it leads to speculation that there are a few problems at Twitter. Chowdhury, has been responsible for developing implementing Twitter Search and Trends among other projects.