Twitter reshuffles its executive team, names new COO and CFO

Things really have been busy at Twitter HQ. The company shuffled things around a bit up top by making current CFO Ali Rowghani its new COO, and naming former Zynga treasurer Mike Gupta as the company’s CFO.

The news appropriately came via CEO Dick Costolo in a congratulatory tweet.

Congratulations to @rowghani on his new role as COO and to @mgupta on his new role as CFO.

— dick costolo (@dickc) December 20, 2012

According to AllThingsD, Rowghani, who was formerly CFO at Disney’s Pixar, has been playing more of an operational role at Twitter of late and has been the “behind the scenes body man to Costolo”. The report notes that the new role is more of a title change, solidifying what he has been doing in the company.

“Rowghani has had his hand in many important areas of the business, including contributing to ideas around Twitter’s Promoted Suite of ad products, a key component of the company’s monetization efforts,” writes AllThingsD.

Gupta will move into Rowghani’s former position after a stint as the treasurer for Zynga. According to AllThingsD, Gupta was at Zynga for just over a year and previously worked as a high-level executive at Yahoo as part of its search team and as well as on online partnership deals with Microsoft.

Interestingly, Twitter’s VP of Growth, Othman Laraki, also announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down from his role.

Excited to announce that I am embarking on a new adventure (destination to be disclosed). Thanks to the @twitter peeps for a fabulous ride!

— Othman Laraki (@othman) December 20, 2012

Laraki was responsible for growing Twitter’s user base, something the company has done successfully in the past year following its latest announcement that it has reached the 200-million active user mark.

Twitter has been aggressively hiring from other high profile tech companies in the last year, poaching talent from Google, Salesforce and SAY Media. It will be interesting to see what this translates to in the current social media saturated market.

There is also speculation that the new executive hires are in preparation for an IPO in the next two years. Some reports state that the hire of Gupta makes sense as he “brings with him experience in helping take a company public”. He joined Zynga in the lead up its IPO in 2011, though Zynga’s track record is probably not something Twitter should strive to emulate.