Twitter has promoted its COO to the CEO post in place of co-founder Evan Williams, while Skype has tapped a Cisco exec as its new chief.
Williams has handed the reins to Dick Costolo, who joined the startup as COO a year ago.
In a blog post, Williams said he planned to focus exclusively on product strategy.
“I am most satisfied while pushing product direction,” he said. “Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build.”
Costolo has been a CEO three times in his career, Williams pointed out. “When I insisted on bringing Dick into the COO role a year ago, I got a lot of questions from my board. But I knew Dick would be a strong complement to me, and this has proven to be the case.”
Costolo is also a former product manager at Google, and was one of Twitter's early investors.