Twitter last week hired Omid Kordestani to be its new executive chairman. Twitter poached Kordestani from Google, where he made his name as a business exec, but where he recently appeared to have been shunted into a lesser role.
Twitter signed on Kord-estani just after laying off hundreds of employees, so the hiring looks like an effort to pump some serious business sense into upper management and put a listing company on an even keel.
Kordestani was one of Google’s first hires—the 11th—and he is widely credited with figuring out how the search engine could make money while offering a free service. When Kordestani joined Google from Netscape, he began by calling former clients and asking them to spend $1,000 to buy Google’s Adwords, small text-based ads that ran alongside the search results. Fairly soon, advertisers reported good results and revenues skyrocketed.
After 10 years, Kordestani left Google in 2009, but returned last year as chief business officer.
A few months ago, Google was reorganized with Google continuing as the search engine, but a new holding company named Alphabet above Google. In the changeover, the post of chief business officer role was eliminated and Kordestani became an advisor to Alphabet and Google without a specific title.
Google declined to comment on whether it would be replacing Kordestani or just eliminating his position.
Kordestani joins Twitter as anything but an enthusiastic tweet author. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey announced Kordestani was joining Twitter and also commented that in the three years since Kordestani started his account he has tweeted all of 11 times.
Kordestani will be bringing some strong commercial and business background to Twitter at a crucial time for the company.
Twitter’s stock and business has been on a roller coaster since going public last year. The turmoil and lack of growth prompted the resignation of Dick Costolo as CEO, along with many other executive departures. Some have speculated that Kordestani’s now-former employer might buy it, and others more generally have ques-tioned the direction of the company.
Kordestani, now 53, was born in Tehran and grew up there attending Andisheh Don Bosco School, an Italian Catholic school that emphasized education and language skills. He moved to San Jose, California at the age of 14 after the death of his father. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from San Jose State University in 1984 and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1991.
Time magazine described the Google executive as “the main brains behind Google’s innovative and aggressive push to reach deals with a multitude of partners and make big money through advertising.”
Kordestani married fellow Iranian American Bita Daryabari, but the marriage didn’t last. Kordestani and Daryabari, herself a telecom executive turned philanthropist, divorced when Kordestani fell in love with coworker Gisel Hiscock, a New York-based finance director for Google.
Dorsey, Twitter’s new CEO, tweeted, “Omid is a proven & experienced leader, who will directly help & coach me and our leadership, and help us recruit the best folks to Twitter.”
The New York Times said Kordestani, who has a reputation for affability and business acumen, “could bring a level of calm and stability to Twitter, which has been plagued by management chaos it its nine-year history.”
As chief business officer, Kordestani was Google’s highest-paid executive in 2014, with a $130 million pay package that consisted mostly of stock vesting over four years.
Twitter said in a regulatory filing Friday that it would pay Kordestani a base salary of $50,000. In addition, Mr. Kordestani will be granted the option to buy 800,000 shares of Twitter stock, and will be eligible for a one-time stock award in the form of performance-based restricted stock units covering 400,000 shares of Twitter common stock.
Eight hundred thousand shares of Twitter would be valued at roughly $23.8 million, according to Thursday’s closing price. The filing didn’t state the price at which Kordestani is eligible to buy the shares.
