Twitter had said it would look elsewhere for a chairman, seeking to allay concerns about co-founder Dorsey’s dual role as head of the mobile payments company Square Inc. Now, CNBC reports that Kordestani “is no longer affiliated with Google”.
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The new executive chairman ascension comes only a little over a week after Jack Dorsey, who has dominated social media headlines, was officially named chief executive officer.
“It is rare you get to be at a firm with an incredible business that is also transforming the planet”, he tweeted.
James Cordwell, an analyst at Atlantic Equities told Reuters that hiring Kordestani is a good move. “He was very well-respected at Google”, Bloomberg reported.
Shares of Twitter were up more than 1 percent in the premarket.
Kordestani is also one of the earliest employees at Google, joining the company in 1999, a year after Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the tech giant.
He led Google’s business operations “from the first employees and the first dollar in revenue to over 12,000 employees and over $20B in revenues”, he wrote.
After 10 years of executive positions at Google, he became a senior adviser at the company in August to help it through leadership and structural changes as it rebranded itself as Alphabet Inc.
Twitter is working to reignite growth after last quarter reporting its slowest rise in monthly average users since going public in 2013.
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The two companies have struck partnerships in recent months, which includes showing Tweets in search results and allowing advertisers to buy and measure ad views on Twitter using Google’s DoubleClick service. He received a $60 million equity award from Google in 2014, plus a one-time supplemental equity award worth $65 million.
