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Jack Dorsey has been thinking about Twitter for almost a decade, so it’s understandable that after a high-profile return as CEO three months ago, he has jam-packed some pretty major milestones into a short amount of time.
He has slashed employee headcount and green-lighted major projects. He has also been busy taking another company he founded public.
But Wall Street doesn’t seem to love much of it. The company’s stock hit an all-time low last week, closing on Friday at just below $20 a share. Here’s a look back at what has been going on at Twitter since Dorsey took control:
Twitter’s Workforce
Dorsey’s first major move was cutting 8 percent of Twitter’s workforce, more than 300 people. The company had gotten too bloated, and teams weren’t focused the way Dorsey expected. “The [product] roadmap is also a plan to change how we work, and what we need to do that work,” he wrote to employees the day of the cuts. “We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team.”
The CEO has not yet made a splashy hire since his return. Jessica Verrilli, a key corporate development exec, returned following Dorsey’s arrival, but other key folks, like Twitter’s head of consumer video and head of design, have departed. Twitter is still looking for a VP of communications, a head of corporate development, a chief marketing officer and a design boss.
Twitter’s Product
Dorsey’s first major product push was when Twitter launched Moments. Yes, that means this project was in the works well before Dorsey took over, but it’s also a product that will forever be tied to his reign as the company’s leader. Why? Twitter has never pumped up a product release the way it did with Moments, and as a result it shouldered Moments with fixing the company’s longstanding Achilles’ heel — stagnant user growth. It’s a challenge that Dorsey and Moments must tackle together.
While Moments is the biggest change Twitter has launched, it’s not the only product it’s working on. Dorsey has also green-lighted “Beyond 140,” a plan to expand the character limit for tweets from 140 to as much as 10,000. COO Adam Bain told Re/code last week that this was a project brought forward thanks to Dorsey. “There are a number of things on the product side that Jack brought a crystalized focus to,” Bain said.
Twitter’s Stock Price
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The stock market has been brutal lately, but Twitter stock has been much, much worse. Twitter stock is down 24 percent since Dorsey took over and closed under $20 per share for the first time ever on Friday. The S&P 500 is only down 1.5 percent in that time. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down less than 1 percent.
It could rebound, of course, if Twitter can deliver a solid earnings report in early February. But Twitter has always struggled to communicate with Wall Street; on his first earnings call, after the company reported what appeared to be solid financials, Dorsey sent the stock tanking with a dose of “real talk” about how Twitter’s turnaround was going to require a lot of patience. That spooked investors, and it’s too soon to tell if the two sides will find some synergy in 2016.
Twitter Developers
Dorsey has made a strong effort to repair Twitter’s relationship with its developer community. For starters, he openly apologized at the company’s annual developer conference in October. Then he reinstated Politwoops, a site that saves tweets deleted by politicians, after it was initially banned — some believe unfairly — for violating Twitter’s developer agreement. Many of the best parts of Twitter over the years were built by developers outside of the company. Dorsey is clearly trying to win them over and bring that back. Having other people build products that make yours more interesting isn’t a bad idea.
Twitter Distractions
There’s really just one thing distracting Dorsey from his full-time job as Twitter CEO: His full-time job as Square’s CEO. Dorsey took Square public in November and is still serving as the top dog at both companies. It’s hard to imagine that this is a long-term solution — no knock on Dorsey here, it’s just that running two separate, publicly traded companies is a bit of a challenge. Square stock is also down more than 13 percent since mid-November.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
