Twitter names Omid Kordestani as executive chairman

Twitter named former Google chief business officer Omid Kordestani its executive chairman of the board, part of a series of big changes enacted since the return of co-founder Jack Dorsey as CEO.

Kordestani, who is affectionately known as the “business founder” of Google, was the search engine’s first sales chief and held the top position until 2009.

A well-liked executive in Silicon Valley, Kordestani has advised several tech companies, including Spotify, where he sat on the board, and the social media service Klout.

Based on Dorsey’s tweets, it sounds like Kordestani will “coach” him and the rest of the company’s leadership. “It’s rare you get to be at a company with an wonderful business that’s also transforming the world”, Kordestani tweeted. In August along with Google’s reorganization into Alphabet Inc., the company said Mr. Kordestani…

What’s interesting is that as speculation was ramping up in the last couple of months around who would become Twitter’s head honcho, we’d heard that Twitter had whittled the list down to two: Dorsey and someone at Google. Twitter said Tuesday it would cut more than 300 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce.

Shares of Twitter are up 0.6% in morning trading.