In move that shuffles some of the highest ranking members of the microblogging start-up’s executive team, Ali Rowghani has been named chief operating officer of Twitter, according to a change in his Twitter profile, shifting into the role that CEO Dick Costolo once held only a few years ago.
Rowghani, who has been with the company since 2010, came to Twitter to act as chief financial officer after leaving the same role he held at Walt Disney Company’s Pixar animation studios. He was at Pixar for more than nine years, serving as CFO for half that time.
Update 7 pm PT: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo just confirmed the news via tweet: “Congratulations to @rowghani on his new role as COO and to @mgupta on his new role as CFO.”
Rowghani has often been noted as the quiet, behind-the-scenes body man to Twitter CEO Costolo, taking on far more operational responsibilities than that of typical CFOs. Rowghani has had his hand in many important areas of the business, including contributing to ideas around Twitter’s Promoted Suite of ad products, a key component of the company’s monetization efforts.
So effectively, Rowghani as COO is less of a new role than it is a solidification of his current efforts — a title change, as it were.
Former Zynga treasurer Mike Gupta will slide into Rowghani’s CFO slot, according to Gupta’s updated Twitter profile. Gupta spent a little more than a year in the role at Zynga, and was previously a high-ranking exec at Yahoo, where he played an instrumental part in Yahoo’s search and online partnership deals with Microsoft.
Via: All Things D
