Twitter CEO: IPO still a long way off
(CNET) "We don't see any need or urgency to even think about that stuff," Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said today when asked when the company is going public.
Speaking with writer Steven Levy at Wired's Disruptive by Design conference today in New York, Costolo said that the business was working extremely well and that the company had plenty of money in the bank (it's raised more than $1 billion in venture funds). "We don't need to worry about financing now," he said.
Costolo also signaled that he may not want to run a public company the way the markets demand. "I'm never going to optimize for short-term revenue at the expense of user experience," he said. "If people think we're going too cautiously, I don't care. They can stay on the sidelines."
The Twitter CEO expressed a disdain for the thinking that there's an "IPO window" that may close soon and leave Twitter unable to raise public funds, if it ever needs to. "That's silly and shortsighted thinking," he said. "Google went public on its own terms. If you have a great business, you can be a public company whenever you want to be a public company. You're not beholden to a window."
Levy asked Costolo if Twitter was going to expand its revenue model, the Promoted Tweets advertising program. Costolo confirmed that the company is on track to bring in $250 million a year in revenues and said, "We're confident we've got a hit on our hands."
Speaking about the Twitter product itself, Costolo did confirm that "onboarding" new users to Twitter was a continuing challenge. It's difficult to show them the benefit of the platform when they're new. Thus, the company's new #Discovery feature, announced this morning. "We need to make it super simple and dead easy for both our existing users and users new the platform," he said.
He added that the new, personalized Discovery feature is based, today, simply on who users follow. He did hint that this was very valuable data to Twitter, and thus to advertisers, but it's apparently not being used to target advertising yet. "The interest graph paints a maybe even more compelling picture of who you are than either age or geography," he said.
This article first appeared at CNET.