Twitter VP Engineering and Operations Lee Mighdoll has left Twitter after 3 months, reports Silicon Alley Insider.
Peter Kafka quotes Biz Stone saying “both Lee and Twitter came to the conclusion that the match was not perfect…We are seeking to fill this role with a refined search criteria that fits with our plan to scale Twitter as a company and as a service.”
Michael noted yesterday that Mighdoll was a key hire this year for Twitter, and his joins Blaine Cook in leaving Twitter this month. Given Mighdoll’s role, Twitter’s scaling issues may be a factor (more so given Stone mentions scaling) and yet Twitter praised Mighdoll when they hired him saying “his genuine enthusiasm for building global systems that operate at scale made him an easy choice.”
So what changed after such as short tenure?
Anecdotally Twitter uptime has been on the up this year in terms of reliability, particularly since they dumped Joyent for NTT. It’s not perfect (weekends this month haven’t been great), but given that Twitter’s uptime has improved, what’s really going on at Twitter? Management isn’t talking openly, but we’ve heard that the company is talking to VC’s about a new round (SAI reports likewise), despite the last round of $5.4million being 9 months old. The company still has no discernible source of income, outside of it’s Japanese licensing deal (if money changed hands…and that’s not a given), and if they’re chasing more money it can only mean the $5.4 million is running out. With zero revenue, Twitter is a flip or flop proposition, a likely proposition given that Biz Stone ran Blogger in a similar fashion (Blogger only had minimal revenue via premium subscriptions and no adverising before being sold to Google). As time rolls on, no one buys Twitter and the money runs out; is the stress this causes now being reflected by the management issues at Twitter? It makes more sense than scaling: if Cook was out due to scaling, why wait till now given the dramatic failures of last year? How can someone like Mighdoll, praised by Twitter, leave after such a short time if all was well at the management level of Twitter?