Twitter co-founder and interim CEO Jack Dorsey has long been considered the right man for the permanent CEO post at Twitter, but now more and more voices are coming out in support of him and saying that he can two companies at the same time permanently. Dorsey is also the CEO of Square, a mobile payments company that quietly filed for an initial public offering recently.
Dorsey can head both Twitter and Square
Dorsey has been considered a main contender to be Twitter’s next CEO for a long time, but the perception that he is too overloaded has been a major hurdle for naming him as full-time CEO at Twitter. Now many Twitter and Square investors are making public proclamations that Dorsey is the right man for the job at both companies. They believe that it won’t be difficult for Dorsey to run the two companies at the same time without getting distracted, says a report from CNBC.
On Monday, a spokesman for Rizvi Traverse Management, Justin Dini, said, “After watching Jack execute on his vision at Square, and more recently at Twitter as C.E.O., we are highly confident in Jack’s ability to serve as C.E.O. of both companies.” Dini further said that they not only trust Dorsey but will continue to invest in Twitter as they also have faith in Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue.
Rizvi Traverse is an investment company run by Suhail Rizvi, a private investor. Its support for Dorsey is crucial because when Twitter had its IPO in 2013, it was the micro-blogging firm’s single largest outside shareholder. Rizvi Traverse had a stake of 15.6% in Twitter, which has shrunk to less than 5% after the company’s shares were disbursed to individual investors.
Big names in favor of Dorsey
Rizvi Traverse joins a vocal group calling for Dorsey to run both Twitter and Square permanently. Twitter’s board has been repeatedly pushed by Chris Sacca, an early Twitter investor, to name Dorsey as chief executive. Keith Rabois, a venture capitalist at Khosla Ventures, also supports Dorsey in running two companies at the same time. Khosla Ventures is a major shareholder of Square.
In the corporate world, there are many examples of a single person handling two companies as CEO. Late Steve Jobs was CEO of both Apple and Pixar. Elon Musk is also running two companies at the same time – Tesla and Space X. So many feel the same can be true for the 38-year-old Dorsey.
