“We’re looking for someone who really uses and loves the product in every single way.”
That’s what Jack Dorsey—Twitter inventor, co-founder, chairman, ex-CEO, and soon-to-be-interim CEO—said today after the announcement that Dick Costolo will be stepping down as head of the company. Twitter said it will conduct a broad search, inside and outside its ranks, for a permanent chief executive.
If Dorsey’s Twitter activity is a proxy for his engagement with the service, it has picked up midway through 2015 after a slow start to the year. On the conference call with journalists and analysts, Costolo said he began discussing his future with some of Twitter’s board members at the end of last year. Probably a coincidence.
Judging by his number of tweets, Dorsey is no Marc Andreessen, the Netscape founder and venture capitalist who has become one of Twitter’s most prolific tech personalities, tweeting an average of more than 100 times per day.
But it’s hard to argue that anyone has a longer and deeper vision for Twitter than Dorsey, which arguably makes him the top candidate to become its permanent CEO, if he wants the job. (It’s not really like Steve Jobs coming back to save Apple—Twitter is not on the verge of collapse—but it’s not entirely dissimilar.)
Dorsey went three weeks without tweeting in early 2014, which sparked a Quartz investigation. He has recently tweeted several times about the Golden State Warriors, who are in the NBA finals. And he continues to tweet New York Times links, photos of record labels, and occasional news about Twitter and Square, where he is co-founder and CEO.