Leading the Tweets with Dick Costolo

Dick Costolo

"We are the free speech wing of the free speech party."

- Dick Costolo

With his disarmingly relaxed self, Dick Costolo that once dived into comedy, has led, advised and invested in multiple instances as his efforts in pursuing his new dream. Since then, Costolo climbed his career ladder and later known as the CEO of one of the most phenomenal social networking service and microblogging service: Twitter.

Costolo changed Twitter from a media company to a media business that distributes one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media property. His methods and ways has made Twitter grew faster than ever before, irrespective of anything Google of Facebook is doing.


Early Life

Dick Costolo was born in Detroit on September 10th, 1963. He graduated computer science with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan. During his years in the university, Costolo involved in theater and took theater classes to fulfill the university's graduation requirements. Upon graduation, he decided not to accept offers from technology companies and instead moved to Chicago to work in improvisational theatre and comedy.

Throughout college, Costolo wasn't interested in being a computer scientist, he wanted to be a comedian, which he was for some time. After he left college, he doubled up for a while as a technology consultant and stand-up comedian. He used to perform with Chicago’s Annoyance Theater and at various comedy festivals in Edinburgh, Montreal and other places.

Eventually he abandoned comedy to follow his new dream. Costolo spent most of the 90s in Chicago founding and running digital media companies (Burning Door Networked Media, SpyOnIt) as his efforts in pursuing his IT dream.


Founding FeedBurner

In 2004, Costolo co-founded FeedBurner with his friends, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski and Matt Shobe. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.

FeedBurner is a typical Web 2.0 service, providing web service application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other software to interact with it. After 3 years launching, in 2007, FeedBurner hosted over a million feeds for 584,832 publishers, including 142,534 podcast and videocast feeds.

After Google Inc. bought FeedBurner in the mid 2007, Costolo worked for Google. As an employee of the search giant, Costolo also worked in other areas of Google before he left in 2009.


Joining Twitter

In September 2009, Dick Costolo joined Twitter as its COO, responsible for monetization and the day to day operations of the business. In 2010, he temporarily took the job as CEO replacing Twitter's co-founder, Evan Williams, which was eventually became permanent.

With Costolo leading the company, Twitter has crossed the threshold from web novelty into something substantial. His aim is providing a network where people can share and be heard, by becoming members in the ring of mobile wars. Costolo also target brands and businesses in many industries to use Twitter as a customer relationship management tool.

With a close relationship with Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and the Chairman of the Board, Dick Costolo's job is to turn Twitter into a business big enough to justify the high valuation investors have given the messaging company.

On June 11th, 2015, it was announced that Costolo would step down as CEO on July 1, 2015. Dorsey returns to the company on an interim basis until Twitter's Board of Directors could find a replacement.


Other Ventures and Careers

Costolo that is also an Advisor of LaunchBox Digital, a Mentor at TechStars, LLC, and a former Director of FlowPlay, Inc.. He served as a Senior Vice President of MNO Solutions at 724 Solutions Inc. where was responsible for defining and implementing market strategies for the firm. In September 2000, following 724 Solution Inc.'s acquisition of Spyonit.com, Costolo served as Senior Vice President of Notification Services. Between October 1999 and September 2000, he served as the CEO, President, and Co-Founder at Spyonit.com.

Before his venture and career at Spyonit, Costolo co-founded Burning Door Networked Media. Prior to this, his entrepreneurial endeavors included serving as the Vice President of Product Development at Digital Knowledge Assets. Costolo also spent eight years at Andersen Consulting, where he served as a Senior Manager of Strategy of Application Products Group and Senior Manager of Application Infrastructure of Eagle Advanced Technology Group and was part of the team that created the first web based enterprise training application.


Personal Life

Dick Costolo offers a personally-taught course on "managing at Twitter" to new managers at the company which he started working on around November 2011. Costolo has some very particular views about management, and there's no more powerful way of driving them home than personally delivering them. And clearly, he makes it a priority to explain failures instead of just successes, which can be a much more powerful tool.