Who could be Twitter’s next CEO

I’m back in Los Angeles after spending a few days in Las Vegas, where it was great seeing some of you during CES shenanigans. This week: an informed guessing game of who could be Twitter’s next CEO, what I’m hearing about the fear inside Google around looming layoffs, and my takeaways on the state of the mobile app economy. Plus, some WhatsApp and TikTok personnel moves that are first reported here, and more. But first… --- On the OpenAI / Microsoft funding talk mania The Information and Fortune have the best reporting so far on the state of what looks increasingly like a very complicated deal. I found this sentiment from an anonymous subscriber and venture capitalist compelling: “Very savvy of Microsoft. Get the hottest AI company. Get to let it operate at arm’s length. Get a great Azure use case (and money is a lot less than it seems, thanks to credits). Potentially bolsters Bing (and Office), etc. Next question: will startups really view OpenAI as ‘open’? I think you should probably view it as Microsoft and act accordingly.” --- [Image: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cZcSeMYKfVmPLhCeseoEeQ0ty3Q=/0x0:501x500/501x500/filters:focal(251x250:252x251)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24697802/Twitter.jpg] Who should be Twitter’s next CEO? Elon Musk has said he will find a new CEO for Twitter after users voted for him to leave. But who would, in his own words, be “foolish enough to take the job”? It’s a question I’ve been posing in conversations over the past week. Based on my checks with people who would know, Musk doesn’t appear to be running a formal search yet. And given his propensity to lie go back on his word, he might not try to find someone. The matter is complicated by his saying that, even after finding a CEO, he will still run the “software & servers teams.” That’s basically the whole company. For what it’s worth, I do think Musk will eventually find a CEO, not only because he told his Twitter investors he would but because it’s the rational thing for him to do. Below are the names that have been floated to me as good candidates should Musk actually hand over the reins of Twitter. (I’m not including the obvious members of Musk’s transition team that helped him in the early days of the takeover — namely David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, and Sriram Krishnan — since my read is that they are not in a position to take the job if asked.) Sheryl Sandberg, ex-Meta COO Pros: This pick is perhaps the most obvious choice, especially if Musk does what he says and continues to lead engineering at Twitter after naming a new CEO. Sandberg has the rep with advertisers and connections that Musk needs to begin repairing Twitter’s spiraling business. And she’s a free agent after leaving Meta last year. Cons: Musk is no fan of Facebook, and I don’t think they would get along. Sandberg also seems happy focusing on her philanthropy and family life these days. Emmett Shear, co-founder and CEO of Twitch Pros: While Shear wasn’t on my shortlist of possible names until I started asking around, I’m coming around to the idea. As the co-founder and current head of Twitch, he has successfully sold a social media company to a tech giant and has the experience Musk needs for his plan to turn Twitter into more of a video platform for creators. Plus, I’ve been hearing that the Twitch org is in disarray as of late. Cons: He hasn’t led a public company, and Musk plans to bring Twitter back out to the public markets in several years. And Twitch has been unable to successfully expand outside of its main niche of gamer livestreams. Vanessa Pappas, TikTok COO Pros: She has the experience Musk needs, having first helped stand up YouTube’s early creator program and more recently as the COO of TikTok. I’ve also heard whispers that she may be planning an exit from TikTok / ByteDance sometime this year. Con: If Musk is mainly looking for someone that the big advertisers know to lead Twitter, she wouldn’t be the top choice since her focus has mainly been on product and creators. Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo Pros: Lanzone’s background is more in media and advertising, aside from his brief stint as CEO of Tinder. He is now leading Yahoo but may jump for the right opportunity. He has the connections with the advertising community and operations experience that Musk could use and the constitution to deal with Musk’s antics. Con: Unclear if he would want to work for Musk and take on the headache that is Twitter right now. Kevin Systrom, Instagram co-founder Pros: In terms of pedigree and product chops, the Instagram co-founder and former CEO is definitely a top pick. He has been quiet since he left Instagram / Facebook in 2018 after clashing with Mark Zuckerberg, though he showed his interest in the TikTok model of social media — disentangling in-feed recommendations from someone’s social graph — on Lex Fridman’s podcast last year. That’s exactly what Musk wants Twitter to focus on, too. Cons: He has already worked for an opinionated founder / CEO, made a lot of money, and likely doesn’t want to do it all again. Also doesn’t have the degree of clout with the advertising community that Musk is probably looking for. Honorable mentions floated to me: Adam Bain, Susan Wojcicki, Sarah Friar, Kayvon Beykpour, and Kevin Weil. Am I missing anyone else? Let me know... --- [Image: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dmcB9QDWNSCSRgPOlpT72Xb4fcI=/0x0:501x501/501x501/filters:focal(251x251:252x252)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24697805/Google.jpg] Google’s GRAD fears It’s performance review season in Silicon Valley. Inside Google, the mood is unusually tense. This week, Alphabet announced cuts for its “Other Bets” P&L, axing employees in its Verily health tech subsidiary and robotics arm, Intrinsic. But a RIF has yet to hit the mothership that is Google / YouTube. Based on my recent conversations with employees in various parts of Google, the widespread fear is that the annual GRAD (Google Reviews and Development) cycle that’s underway is a precursor to cuts after mid-February, when the results are set to be shared. “Everyone is worried about their ratings,” one manager told me. “There’s more fear,” said another. “Every major tech company has done layoffs and we haven’t.” Even employees in Google’s sprawling search division are worried about their jobs, which is something I frankly never thought I would write. Belt tightening inside Google has been underway for a while. CEO Sundar Pichai’s memo from July about the need to work with “greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger” was certainly a shot across the bow. Then there was the introduction of the revamped performance review system for this year, which increases the percentage of Googlers who could be rated as the lowest performers by next month from 2 percent to 6 percent. If you get that lowest rating, the expectation is that you’re going on a PIP and will be out the door soon. Complicating matters is that managers are required to do “support check-ins” before Google’s system lets them assign a low rating. I’ve heard stories of employees quitting when a support check-in gets put on their work calendar. It’s that dire of a situation. There were a lot of promotions across the company after last year’s review cycle. But this year, promos are expected to be very difficult to come by. A key change is that, for non-engineers, your promo needs to have a clear business justification, meaning one won’t be granted just because you think you deserve a level jump. I’ve heard that some teams have been given negative headcount targets for this year, which means attrition is expected one way or the other. Meanwhile, cost cutting is happening everywhere, at least by Google standards. An exclusive offsite for several dozen of the company’s highest performers was recently held in Napa instead of the multiweek, globetrotting event it has been in previous years. There was no splashy companywide holiday party with plus ones and an open bar like in years past. Some teams have been told to cut their temporary workers, and it’s getting harder to have travel expenses approved. As one observer told me, Google’s multidecade run of unbridled excess is coming to an end. --- State of the app economy Data.ai (formerly App Annie) released its 2022 review of the mobile app economy this week. I spoke with head of insights Lexi Sydow about the most interesting takeaways, both at the individual app and iOS / Android platform level. (Here, I should note the obvious caveat that this is all based on estimates, and numbers aren’t blessed by the companies mentioned. But hey, if it’s good enough for their own internal research decks, it’s good enough for us.) [Image: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1RPP_oQTfltcCrDofo8K32xDvTo=/0x0:440x750/440x750/filters:focal(220x375:221x376)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24697806/Downloads.jpg] [Image: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1g4OisaCWs79zy8WwApIpSS_P80=/0x0:440x750/440x750/filters:focal(220x375:221x376)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24697807/Consumer_Spend.jpg] App-level takeaways: * Meta owns half of the top 10 most downloaded apps globally last year, with WhatsApp for Business entering the list for the first time. Forty percent of all downloads for that app came from India, followed by Pakistan, Indonesia, and Brazil. * Zoom was the only app to fall off the top 10 global downloads list from 2021 to 2022. Instagram swapped with TikTok for the top spot. * Telegram is crushing it. It was number six for global downloads and moved from the seventh to sixth spot for monthly users, kicking down Amazon. Besides all the product improvements announced last year, I’m sure the Ukraine war helped, given Telegram’s dominance in Russia. Snapchat also had a good year, moving from the sixth to fifth spot. * TikTok is setting all kinds of records. Its tipping culture of buying in-app coins to give to creators has “really upended that social media monetization scheme,” according to Sydow. TikTok wasn’t in the top 100 apps for consumer spend until 2020, and last year, it reached the top spot with over $3 billion in spending. In the US, 22 percent of purchases were for TikTok’s $250 coin package, which... wow. Apple says yum to that! And believe me when I say that Meta is taking notes. * YouTube is the king of time spent, and the reports of Facebook’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Here are the top six apps outside of China in terms of time spent last year: 1. YouTube, 2. Facebook, 3. WhatsApp, 4. Chrome, 5. Instagram, 6. TikTok. Platform-level takeaways: * People are spending, on average, about five hours per day on their phones, up 3 percent from 2021. * This was the first year that overall consumer spend on both iOS and Android declined, with both platforms seeing a combined 2 percent dip thanks to a pullback in spending on games. “Gaming sort of mirrored the sort of decline in dollars and wealth” tracked by the OECD, according to Sydow. “Spending in apps bucked that trend. To me that was one of the surprises.” * Where things get interesting is non-gaming app spend. Apple’s iOS remains the most lucrative platform in terms of sheer spend at $33.8 billion compared to Android’s $13.4 billion. But Google Play’s non-gaming spend is growing much faster at 27 percent from 2021 versus iOS at just 2 percent growth. This is mostly fueled by increases in spending on OTT and “short video” apps like TikTok. “In the non-gaming space, people are not compromising on their subscriptions,” said Sydow. --- People moves * After a long interview process involving internal and external candidates, I’ve confirmed that WhatsApp has found a new head of product: Alice Newton Rex, who was previously a product director for the app in London. She’ll report to WhatsApp head Will Cathcart and drive the mandate from Meta CPO Chris Cox to compete more aggressively with Telegram’s feature set. * Sam Singh, who was spotted at CES last week with an upbeat Blake Chandlee, is TikTok’s new GM for Global Business Solutions in North America, reporting to Chandlee. He previously ran TikTok’s business for Southeast Asia. * Peter Stern, Apple’s VP of Services overseeing its bundling efforts, is leaving to reportedly “spend more time on the East Coast.” Could this have to do with Apple losing the NFL deal to YouTube? I’m all ears… * Adaire Fox-Martin is running sales for Google Cloud now. * Dominic Perella, Snap’s former chief compliance officer, has joined Branch as general counsel. --- Feedback from last week On the crackdowns by Meta and Shopify on internal meetings I wrote about: “Interestingly, both Meta and Shopify’s changes have similarities to good parts of Elon’s operational model. (focus on small teams, do more with fewer resources, ICs enablement, less management, fewer meetings …)” – A recently departed Twitter executive --- Interesting links: * My colleague at Recode, Shirin Ghaffary, digs into the last year inside Meta and how employees are feeling. * Eugene Kim and Claire Atkinson for Insider: “Inside Amazon, there’s chatter, and jokes, about Jeff Bezos coming back as CEO in the midst of massive layoffs and a plummeting stock price” * Netflix made it harder to spy on what your colleagues make, according to The Wall Street Journal. * Microsoft finds a creative way to cut costs by introducing unlimited time off. * Adobe tried to buy Figma twice before it clinched the deal by wildly overpaying, and Microsoft was in the mix at one point, per fresh regulatory filings. * Tim Cook’s pay is getting cut by more than 40 percent this year, and apparently it was his idea? * The PC market is having a tough time. * Sam Bankman-Fried started a Substack. --- Thanks again for being an early subscriber. I’ll be back in your inbox next Thursday. If you have any feedback on this week’s edition or tips, please reach out.

Who could be Twitter’s next CEO

Who could be Twitter’s next CEO

Plus: Layoff fears inside Google, the state of the app economy, and some interesting people moves.

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Who could be Twitter’s next CEO

Who could be Twitter’s next CEO

Plus: Layoff fears inside Google, the state of the app economy, and some interesting people moves.

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Start your Command Line free trial now to continue reading

Already a Command Line subscriber?Sign in

Google launches Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4

PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks

Google is ending the year with a big update for Pixel devices

Google’s Bard chatbot is getting way better thanks to Gemini

There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works

More from Tech

Amazon has renewed Gen V for a sophomore season

Universal Music sues AI company Anthropic for distributing song lyrics

FCC greenlights superfast Wi-Fi tethering for AR and VR headsets

OpenAI is opening up DALL-E 3 access