In digging around trying to investigate rumors that KPCB VC John Doerr lost his “board observer”status at Twitter two weeks ago, I came across the information that almost all investors including Doerr were told to stop coming to board meetings in late August/September, when it was reported that Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet had left.
The thing that’s hard to understand here is that Doerr never actually had an official observer seat to begin with, so there was nothing to “lose” per se. After Doerr, Wilson and Sabet stopped attending meetings, the remaining seats were stripped of their VC affiliations and became “independent directors,” said a source familiar with the matter with knowledge of what transpired.
What I’m assuming this means is that non-staff board members like Mike McCue, who was appointed to the board by a joint KPCB and Twitter decision, is no longer the venture firm’s eyes and ears. I have no idea how this concept applies to Benchmark VC Peter Fenton’s position, as Benchmark is still very clearly invested in Twitter.
Post-Sabet, Wilson and Doer, the remaining Twitter board members are Chairman Jack Dorsey, Dick Costolo, Evan Williams and “independent” board members Peter Fenton, Mike McCue, David Rosenblatt and Peter Currie.
According to multiple sources, the board streamlining happened because “everyone agreed it was for the good of the company,” — A statement which granted has many interpretations, including some very interesting ones when juxtaposed against past reporting. The speculation that the board will be adding another member and more specifically a woman soon is just speculation we’re hearing.
Twitter confirmed the new board arrangement with us via the following statement, “Twitter’s board of directors currently has seven members. In addition to Dick, Ev and Jack, who serves as chairman, the board includes four independent directors: Peter Fenton from Benchmark Capital, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, former DoubleClick executive David Rosenblatt and Peter Currie of Currie Capital.”
And then there were seven.
Image via: Quantum Marketer
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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