Company Profile: Twitter
Looking for a job in 2021 requires a lot of detective work. To make an educated decision you should know about the organization and what the internet has to say about them. As you can imagine, this is time intensive. In a perfect world this lives in one place on the internet, but alas. In an effort to help, I’ll highlight a company every Friday and see what I find with a bit of internet sleuthing.
Origin Story
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Evan WIlliams, Noah Glass & Biz Stone in March 2006 launched in July 2006. All founders are quite active in the social/blogging space and between them have founded blogger, medium, Xanga & Jelly. As is prevalent at most early stage SV companies, early Twitter seemed to be flocked (hehe) with ego and drama. So much so, there’s even a book about the early days, ‘Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal.’
Twitter continued to grow over the years thanks to 1.5 billion in funding and on Nov. 7, 2013 they went public - TWTR.
Today
Twitter is currently valued at over 50 billion dollars and has just announced plans to double revenue by 2023. Jack is back to being CEO, after a few back and forth and he’s also the CEO of Square (as you can imagine, there’s constant drama over this dual role). Generally, it seems like people have feelings about Dorsey and it probably doesn’t help that he has turned into a bit of a ‘operating on a higher level’ wellness guru type.
Details
Number of Employees 6426 (per LinkedIn)
Employees Open to Opportunities: 13%1 (per LinkedIn Recruiter)
Location - HQ is in SF, but they are Global & WFH
Compensation - Location based pay
Web Says
Three Interesting Things
Black Representation. There has been a lot of discourse around Twitter’s love for Black creators vs their love for Black employees. This conversation started being reported on in 2015, when they had only 49 Black employees out of 3000 total employees. Since that time, Twitter has made a push to have better representation internally and, per their diversity report, 6.5% of their US employees are Black, which equates to around 280 employees (of 4298 based in US…..again, was able to pull this from LI Recruiter).
Diversity Goals. Twitter actively speaks about their goals in Diversity and have recently committed to both the 25x25 pledge as well as having 50% of their Global workforce be women by 2025. The talk almost none about bringing in genders outside of the ‘traditional’ binary and that shows by their almost negligible number of employees who identify as non-binary and/or gender non-conforming (less than 1% at highest and 0% at lowest).
Accessibility. In a shocking discovery by the internet in mid 2020, Twitter admitted that they did not have a team internally dedicated to accessibility. Even @twittersupport acknowledged this misstep. Not shockingly, Twitter announced a few months later that they were building an internal team.
Leadership
Parag Agrawal- CTO - 9 years @twitter, 3 in role
Leslie Berland - CMO & People - 5 years @twitter 3 in role
Jack Dorsey - CEO - 14 years @twitter, 5 in role
Ned Segal - CFO - 3.5 years
Kayvon Beykpour - Product Lead - 2 years @twitter, prev CEO @periscope (acquired by twitter)
Dantley Davis - Head of Design and Research - 1.5 years
Matt Derella - Customers Lead - 8.5 years @twitter, 3 in role
Bruce Falck - Revenue Product Lead - 3.5 @twitter, 2.5 in role
Vijaya Gadde - Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead - 9.5 @twitter, 7.5 in role
Michael Montano - VP, Engineering - 9.5 years
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko - Security - Recently hired from Stripe
Board of Directors
13% is an admirable number. I regularly see 20-30% open.