real traction. Williams said the company now has 300 employees — compared to 20 when he became CEO. “Back then, people were creating about 1.25 million tweets a day—compared to 90 million today. In those same two years, we grew from 3 million registered users to more than 160 million today,” he wrote.

Costolo, founder of Feedburner, joined Twitter a year ago but was an investor as far back as 2007, according to Crunchbase. Still, he was a bit of a tough sell even in that capacity, Williams says. “I got a lot of questions from my board. But I knew Dick would be a strong complement to me, and this has proven to be the case,” he said. “During his year at Twitter, he has been a critical leader in devising and executing our revenue efforts, while simultaneously and effectively making the trains run on time in the office.”

So the audition is over and Costolo get the big chair just as Twitter starts what should be a serious push to finally answer the question every tech journalist wants to know: How are you going to make money?

Costolo is setting the bar appropriately high. “You couldn’t ask to take a job like this at a better time – the team is incredible, we have awesome stuff in the pipeline, and we’re ready to accomplish more in the next two years than we’ve accomplished in the last four,” he said in a company press release.

So far Twitter — which, relatively speaking, doesn’t need much money to operate and has said it has enough money to last for years — hasn’t been terribly inventive in the pursuit of serious revenue. There are those deals with Google and Bing. “Promoted Tweets” doesn’t seem like the sort of make-it-up-in-volume windfall that Google’s little text ads are. A recent re-design of Twitter home pages, still being rolled out, makes using Twitter on the web (instead of third-party apps) more appealing, but the company has said this was not about creating a friendlier platform for ads.

Twitter is still a private company, so it does not disclose its financials. But this particular changing of the guard is a strong signal that the heat is on, even if it is not quite at the level of “bring in adult supervision” as happened when Eric Schmidt took over as CEO from Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

When the entrepreneurs in young companies step from the CEO’s office into strategic roles, it’s always about getting serious about money.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• With Tweetie Acquisition, Twitter Locks On Mobile
• Twitter Ads Test Billion-Dollar Valuation
• Twitter To Make Money In 2010 With ‘Non-Traditional’ Ads: Biz
• Twitter Unveils Ad-Supported Business Model

Authors: John C Abell

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