Twitter promotes Ali Rowghani to COO, Mike Gupta named CFO

Twitter is shuffling its executive ranks, promoting Ali Rowghani from chief financial officer to chief operating officer and naming Mike Gupta to fill the vacated CFO seat. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo--who served as COO prior to taking over the top spot in Oct. 2010--confirmed the appointments Wednesday evening via tweet.

Rowghani joined Twitter in 2010 after close to a decade at Disney's Pixar, serving as the animation unit's CFO for roughly half of that time. All Things D reports that during his Twitter stint, Rowghani assumed greater operational responsibilities than the average CFO, most notably helping spearhead the expansion of the microblogging platform's premium advertising efforts.

Gupta arrived at Twitter just last month, signing on as vice president of corporate finance and treasurer after a year as treasurer at beleaguered social gaming firm Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA). Prior to joining the Zynga team, Gupta spent eight years at Yahoo, where he played a key role in finalizing search and online deals with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).

Gupta is one of several high-profile Twitter executive hires in 2012: This summer, the company named Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) veteran Richard Alfonsi vice president of global online sales, and SAY Media alum Michael Sippey joined as vice president of consumer products. Twitter also brought aboard two new vice presidents of engineering: Chris Fry (hired from Salesforce.com) and Adam Messinger (poached from Oracle). The Twitter ranks now include more than 1,500 staffers in all.

Twitter also is saying goodbye to Vice President of Growth Othman Laraki, who announced his resignation Wednesday, shortly after the firm said that monthly active users now top 200 million worldwide. Laraki did not disclose his future plans.

For more:
- read this All Things D article

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