minimaxir 2022-05-12 16:48 UTC link

> I’m just now learning that Parag fired Kayvon while he was on paternity leave, which is truly awful.

> Parag is on his way out too. Why is he firing his product leaders during his lame-duck period?

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1524790595968901122

danso 2022-05-12 16:50 UTC link

More info and more firings:

https://twitter.com/mikeisaac/status/1524793136051986434

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/technology/two-twitter-le...

Mindwipe 2022-05-12 17:04 UTC link

Twitter's consumer product team is truly awful and have just made the product more and more miserable to use, so I don't cry too much about the change in leadership.

Having said that, firing someone on paternity leave is terrible and would be rightly illegal in many countries.

paxys 2022-05-12 17:11 UTC link

Why is Parag making any major changes at this point? What "new vision" is he going to execute in his last few months at the company before Elon comes in and torpedoes it anyways?

kadenwolff 2022-05-12 17:22 UTC link

Interesting that he co-founded Periscope and they also just removed any mention of Periscope from their TOS. Maybe just an artifact of them considering removing him, or it has no meaning. Just found the timing notable.

dpeck 2022-05-12 17:23 UTC link

Letting people go while they’re on maternity or paternity leave us not cool.

Traster 2022-05-12 17:30 UTC link

So there's two options right - the first is that Parag is for some reason making big strategic decisions about the direction of the company despite the fact that we all know he'll be gone if the deal closes. Or he's making big strategic changes at the behest of the acquirers before the deal closes.

Neither of these things seem particularly kosher moves to make. The question is how to figure out which one it is.

It would seem weird for Parag to be following Musk's orders given how Musk has behaved. It also seems weird for Musk to already have the insight into the company to know specifically who to fire. There's not much advantage to making these changes now.

On the other hand, going rogue and making big strategic decisions about the company really has the potential to burn Parag's reputation for wherever he would move next.

I guess there's a third option - that Musk has expressed a specific view, Parag has a different view, but that they both think that this move is necessary anyway so just got on and did it.

5bolts 2022-05-12 17:32 UTC link

If he's fired now the current board can offer him a severance package that may not be on the table once Elon takes over. Might be a good thing, or strategic?

brk 2022-05-12 17:33 UTC link

Without knowing details of the severance, non-compete clauses, etc., it is hard to read too much into this. It could be a giant favor, or a giant kick in the balls.

hintymad 2022-05-12 17:33 UTC link

Growing up outside of the US, I feel kinda cringed when he said he was "INSANELY proud of our collective teams achieved". Such an interesting cultural difference.

moralestapia 2022-05-12 17:38 UTC link

>Twitter’s DAU has grown by over 87% since Q2 2018

LOL, that's why you got the boot, pal.

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 2022-05-12 17:45 UTC link

Are we all going to pretend Twitter's consumer product is not in desperate need of reworking?

It's failing hard to users and on the business side.

The decision makes sense...

This is extremely personal matter, beyond the Elon hate, I can't imagine why anyone would think its a good idea to make a public show about all this.

Good luck to him though. Would be awesome if he can prove Twitter (and the world) wrong and not be a one-hit wonder with Periscope. Or, not..

Time will tell.

bogomipz 2022-05-12 17:52 UTC link

While trying to read the Head of Consumer Product's exit Twitter post which was split across 8 or 9 separate Tweets, I was prevented from reading them by the login wall pop up. For me this sums up a lot about the state of the product.

lvl102 2022-05-12 17:57 UTC link

Not sure what he is proud of? Twitter did NOTHING for a decade. That’s why they’re being acquired. Zuckerberg was right about his “clown car” comment.

kyledrake 2022-05-12 18:05 UTC link

I've been using Twitter since it's main novelty was that it was a successful Ruby on Rails app, and honestly I've been trying to figure out where the exit is for my personal use of Twitter lately. If the acquisition goes through, Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt, and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform, which frankly has never worked very well for me anyways. The fact that they're doing a leadership purge right now is not helping my opinion on this.

I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. Content moderation debates have never been so ham-fisted as they are online so I won't try here, suffice to say there's some pretty horrible, disgusting things that are "legal under US law" (and as a content moderator, I've seen them all). If Twitter allows people to do them, it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in. To say nothing about whether advertisers will tolerate some of it, or even Apple's app store.

johnboiles 2022-05-12 18:13 UTC link

This is mind boggling to me. Kayvon is one of the best product leaders / visionaries I know. It was confusing to me in Dec that he wasn't Jack's successor.

Kayvon was a huge driving force behind all the interesting product efforts of the last few years: Spaces, Fleets, topics, etc. Twitter went from not iterating on product (remember when Twitter's only change in several years was to change the star to a heart?) to starting to take some shots. Behind the scenes he was often pushing against significant headwinds that resisted product change (not the least of which was the internal 'sacred cow' that all things must be built with Scala and only run inside Twitter's on-prem datacenters).

gumby 2022-05-12 18:14 UTC link

First of all, this isn't a diss on the guy who was fired, though it must sting. This is how things go.*

Second of all, for the question "why now?": Twitter's CEO Parag has to "run through the tape": regardless of what he thinks might happen, he has to keep to the plan and in fact can't talk to the potential acquirer. One reason is that perhaps the deal won't happen, but also he's just not allowed to.

If that sounds strange, consider CNN+ which was launched and killed within a couple of weeks. The buyer of CNN couldn't tell CNN what they thought but planned all along to nuke it; the CNN people either didn't understand that, were fanatics, or just didn't give a fuck.

* We don't know the whole story so it's possible he was actually doing something bad. But I think that's very unlikely, as these days those things are usually mentioned rather than being swept under the carpet.

jmyeet 2022-05-12 18:27 UTC link

The two execs fired were:

- Kayvon Beykpour, Head of Consumer Product (3 years, 11 months) [1]; and

- Bruce Falck, Revenue Product Lead (5 years at Twitter, 3 years and 11 months in this position) [2]

Kinda weird that both people were just shy of serving 4 years in their current roles. When I see moves like this my immediate thought is always, it's to save or make money. For example, there could be an options pool in the event of a change of control. Well, you've just fired a couple of people right before a huge vest (probably; I have no concrete information) and increased your share of that options pool.

It just reminds me of Skype firing executives at the Microsoft buyout to avoid payouts [3].

Otherwise making these moves before an acquisition has closed doesn't make a lot of sense. My money is on this having everything to do with money.

EDIT: Updated comment as the link was updated from the original Twitter thread by Kayvon Beykpour about his firing.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayvon-beykpour-2b264b4?original...

[2]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brucefalck?original_referer=http...

[3]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/skype-fires-executives....

Vaslo 2022-05-12 19:20 UTC link

All- some of you are clinging onto the paternity leave. I can't quote whether this is true, but at both Fortune 250 companies I worked for, you were paid out for your entire leave even if you weren't coming back after. So I would bet money he is still being paid for the whole leave, but if someone sees something else, please correct me. There is incentive to pay it out since one annoying side effect can be a person gone for 3 to 4 months suddenly calls 2 days before leave is over and says "I think I am resigning." It's better to pay the full leave and have them tell you that from the start so you don't waste 3 months.

fleddr 2022-05-12 20:24 UTC link

Just a spring cleaning that is about a decade late.

Twitter under-performs in every aspect imaginable: financially, product quality, product innovation. Nothing ever gets released and whilst this pace has improved in recent years, those "innovations" don't really deliver. They're barely used, copycats from other apps, and so on. Meanwhile, age-old problems are never addressed, like bots and the extremely hostile mob mentality on the platform.

They're ineffective and lack accountability. They need a reset and mentality change.

skybrian 2022-05-12 17:05 UTC link

My guess: the new boss gets started on a more positive note if they don't have to fire people because the old boss did it for him?

Or at least, that would be a good explanation if we weren't talking about Musk.

criley2 2022-05-12 17:14 UTC link

Firing someone for being on paternity leave is definitely illegal in most places, but laying off executives and high level business folks before a transition at the top isn't illegal. I wonder if being on paternity leave is a "get out of layoffs free" card where you simply cannot be laid off with others while you're out.

philosopher1234 2022-05-12 17:17 UTC link

Its not over till its over. Elon may still not end up owning twitter.

encoderer 2022-05-12 17:17 UTC link

He’s being paid millions to keep his hand on the wheel and not be distracted by a deal that may never close.

YSoManyRaptors 2022-05-12 17:21 UTC link

I mean, what do you expect from the United States, one of the only countries in the UN that doesn’t require employers to have paid parental leave.

asojfdowgh 2022-05-12 17:24 UTC link

I'd strongly disagree just because of periscope alone, putting twitter at the forefront of citizen powered news, like livestream before it.

if your boss or board wants numbers, no product will ever end up good, no matter the people in the product teem

nullc 2022-05-12 17:24 UTC link

> firing someone on paternity leave is terrible

If he was paid through it, which I would assume-- any kind of senior dismissal will come with months of severance, what would the problem be?

s1artibartfast 2022-05-12 17:25 UTC link

We have no information on what his severance package is. It would be hard to cry Foul Play if they receive a giant golden parachute

schnebbau 2022-05-12 17:25 UTC link

Don't worry, he'll be getting a severance larger than you can ever imagine.

r00fus 2022-05-12 17:27 UTC link

Parag was explicitly hired as a hatchet-man: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hatch...

whoisjuan 2022-05-12 17:29 UTC link

Parag is likely the first one getting the boot after the takeover is finished.

bradlys 2022-05-12 17:30 UTC link

Firing while on paternity leave isn't really that bad as long as they give you severance to cover paternity leave plus some extra - which I'm guessing they did since severance packages for higher ups tend to be pretty good. (As compared to no severance or two weeks that many ICs get)

paxys 2022-05-12 17:31 UTC link

He is going to get a severance package larger that most of us will make in our lifetimes. There's no reason to weep for him.

rossdavidh 2022-05-12 17:38 UTC link

I grew up in the US, and I also found that odd. Not unprecedented, but odd. The literal interpretation of that statement might be more justifiable than the one he meant...

bobthepanda 2022-05-12 17:38 UTC link

it's cringeworthy in the US outside of the job-finding/bragging echo chamber this kind of post normally shows up in

qbasic_forever 2022-05-12 17:38 UTC link

Is the twitter deal actually happening? Elon had to get a loan using Tesla stock and if the price of Tesla drops a lot then the whole loan and deal falls apart. I don't know if we know the exact stock price number where it happens, but it's seeming pretty dicey with Tesla continuing to drop in value IMHO.

1290cc 2022-05-12 17:40 UTC link

This is the correct answer, Elon will not be as generous when cutting numbers.

I'll never forget letting go of staff in France and Italy. The employees were overjoyed we were letting them go and got into fights over who would be taking the packages. I learned that they received 1 year of salary upfront tax free with a bunch of additional benefits to help with job training and placement.

An average middle manager friend has had this happen 3 times, each time after a US acquisition. He now has a chateau in the south of france and is very happy with himself.

TameAntelope 2022-05-12 17:42 UTC link

You're discounting the very real possibility that Parag is operating as if the deal will not go through, and is making large strategic decisions in anticipation of that being the case.

For Parag, I don't see it "burning his reputation" at all, considering either a) he's right and will face the tall task of helming a Twitter that continues to disappoint its investors or b) he's wrong and it won't be his problem when Elon fires him next year.

bobro 2022-05-12 17:42 UTC link

what should they have done? waited til he returned? they very likely are giving him a severance, so why wait?

austinl 2022-05-12 17:44 UTC link

I think Parag is making decisions that he sees as inevitable, whether the deal goes through or not. The deal, and all of the discussions that have come from it about the future direction of Twitter, is probably enough of a catalyst for certain changes. Twitter is likely not left unchanged even it falls through.

next_xibalba 2022-05-12 17:47 UTC link

> So there's two options right

There are far more possibilities than those two. Here's just one off the top of my head (I assign no probabilities here, just pointing out this false binary): This person is being fired as a result of some investigation or process that began prior to the acquisition process and whose results have only just been reached. There are a whole range of process driving, "my hands are tied" scenarios that could explain this.

no-dr-onboard 2022-05-12 17:47 UTC link

Curious why anyone would see this as "awful"

The sheer amount of equity, cash and packaging going into Kayvon's severance is going to be princely. Additionally, he's a founder of periscopeco, so he's not without direction.

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 2022-05-12 17:53 UTC link

Wild. Technically is that legal?

adrianmonk 2022-05-12 18:10 UTC link

> So there's two options right - the first is that Parag is for some reason making big strategic decisions about the direction of the company despite the fact that we all know he'll be gone if the deal closes. Or he's making big strategic changes at the behest of the acquirers before the deal closes.

It's conceivable that he already had a backlog of changes in his mind that he wanted to do at some point, sooner or later. But due to acquisition coming, sooner or later has turned into now or never.

If he legitimately believed these changes were best for the company before, he might still believe so.

In other words, yes, there's a reason, but not necessarily a nefarious one. It could be, or maybe it's as innocuous as urgency.

bogomipz 2022-05-12 18:17 UTC link

>'Zuckerberg was right about his “clown car” comment.'

I was curious what this was because I don't think I've ever heard Zuckerberg say anything that was either remotely or intentionally funny:

Mark Zuckerberg: "Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in."[1]

It's seems to be largely anecdotal but a funny comment none the less.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/zuckerberg-twitter_n_4256014

anonAndOn 2022-05-12 18:21 UTC link

How much of the DAU do you think is bot driven? I suspect it's larger than a publicly traded stock company is willing to admit and that some of that cesspool rhetoric is Aktive Measures to provoke unrest. Perhaps taking Twitter private and removing the chorus of machines will actually make it a more pleasant experience. Content Mod is never easy but expunging the bot armies is a big first step.

halfmatthalfcat 2022-05-12 18:23 UTC link

Twitter copied all of those features from other apps. Spaces = Clubhouse, Fleets (which was also cancelled last year) = Snapchat. At best, Kayvon was good a being reactionary to competition. Not that great of a track record.

ibejoeb 2022-05-12 18:27 UTC link

> Twitter is one of the most important, unique and impactful products in the world.

As long as there are no follow-up questions...

SV hubris is its own thing.

ManBlanket 2022-05-12 18:28 UTC link

What about the possibility guy was going to be asked to leave regardless of recent events, but the executive team decided the least they could do after he put in good time is allow him to collect some PTO on parental leave before handing him the official pink slip? I don't know what Twitter's benefits are but I imagine they have an, "unlimited leave" policy. Could be they've disagreed for a while and an argument came to an affront similar to, "Look man, I'm going to take leave to spend time with my new child, then we'll decide if it's the right move for me to return." Frankly this is a pretty boring conspiracy regardless, people leave jobs all the time. All I have to say is I hope dude enjoys a nice Summer with his family without worrying about this dumb product that for the most part narcissists use to trick themselves into thinking anybody gives a shit about what they have to say.

stagger87 2022-05-12 18:30 UTC link

It's boring executive marketing speak, and it's prevalent worldwide, not just in the US.

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