Twitter To Face Exodus Of Top Executives

Twitter’s head of product Kevin Weil and head of media Katie Jacobs Stanton are to leave the company in the coming weeks, as is Alex Roetter, Twitter’s head of engineering. Skip Schipper, who was responsible for human resources matters, is also departing.

In a statement, posted on Twitter late Sunday, CEO Jack Dorsey said that he had hoped to talk to Twitter employees later in the week about the departures, but that given the “inaccurate press rumours” about the departures, he wanted to set the record straight.

He said: “I’m sad to announce that Alex Roetter, Skip Schipper, Katie Stanton, and Kevin Weil have chosen to leave the company. Alex and Kevin, both here over five years, scaled the ads product and engineering teams from producing near-zero revenue to the over-$2 billion run rate it is today.

“I’m personally grateful to each of them for everything they’ve contributed to Twitter and our purpose in the world. They are phenomenal people!”

Was really hoping to talk to Twitter employees about this later this week, but want to set the record straight now: pic.twitter.com/PcpRyTzOlW

— Jack (@jack) January 25, 2016

In addition, Dorsey said that the company’s chief operating officer Adam Bain would take on responsibility for all revenue-related product teams as well as the media and human resources teams on an interim basis, while chief technology officer Adam Messinger would take on oversight of engineering and consumer product, design and research, user services and Fabric, Twitter’s mobile development platform.

Twitter is also going to announce some new board members, as well as a new head of PR, according to Recode and a separate report in the New York Times.

Soon afterward, Jason Toff, who ran the Vine video streaming service, and who was among those departing, tweeted a “personal update” that he was “joining Google to work on VR.” Toff added, “The decision to leave Vine was hard.”

Personal update! I’m joining Google to work on VR. So much exciting potential there.

— Jason Toff (@jasontoff) January 25, 2016

Twitter closed at $17.84 on Friday, about a quarter of its record high of $69 seen in January 2014.