Two Twitter engineering managers leaving as user growth plunges

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Patrick Hoge

Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Two Twitter engineering managers are leaving the company in the face of plunging user growth rates.

It is the latest bloodletting at San Francisco-based Twitter, which saw its stock drop 14 percent on Tuesday following a Monday earnings report. User growth has slowed over the prior year to less than a tenth of what it was several years ago. Twitter claimed 284 million monthly active users, a 23 percent increase over last year's September quarter.

Investors who snapped up Twitter's stock for as much as $73 in late 2013 were buying into a much more bullish growth story, which explains the rush to sell. Still, Twitter managed to more than double its revenue to $361 million while posting a net loss of $175 million, that was mainly caused by stock-based compensation expenses, according to the research firm Statista.

For comparison, when Facebook had roughly as many users as Twitter now has, it was still growing at a rate above 200 percent, according to a Statista blog post. Once Facebook's growth rate dropped below 25 percent, its user base had long surpassed one billion people, Statista said.

"Twitter is no second Facebook and will never be as big," the company concluded.

Leaving Twitter are Jeremy Gordon, a vice president of engineering who has been at the company for two years; and Adam Kinney, a

four-year veteran who leads the company's analytics group, according to CNBC. Both men announced their departures via Twitter's platform in upbeat posts that gave no hint of discord, and Gordon even thanked Costolo and engineering vice president Alex Roetter for believing in him.

"Thank you @twitter f or the most amazing 4 years of my career! Now its time to rest, and then on to the next thing," wrote Kinney.

Previous Twitter departures include the entire founding team, as well as longtime product executive Jason Goldman and Chief Operating Officer Ali Rowghani, who left in June after Costolo stripped him of responsibilities.

Patrick covers technology.