Twitter isn’t looking to go public anytime soon, if Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s comments at Wired‘s business conference in New York City Tuesday are to be believed.
“You IPO because you want to finance the growth of your business,” said Costolo. “Our business is growing on its own organically. We have plenty of money in the bank from private financing. [An IPO] is not something I worry or think about.”
“We financed the growth of the company the way we wanted to finance it last year,” Costolo added, referring to the funding the San Francisco-based startup raised from Digital Sky Technologies in August 2011.
Costolo also talked about what he’s achieved since becoming CEO in October 2010. Much of his focus has been on scaling. Costolo said he’s worked to “organize the company in a way that allows [Twitter] to build and deliver products more efficiently.”
A key part of that effort: uniting the design and engineering practices, so that the two teams develop projects jointly from the get-go.
Costolo also spoke about the development of Twitter’s revenue model. Because Twitter has long supported tweets on devices of varying sophistication, from basic feature phones to desktops, the company knew it “needed a monetization model that went wherever the tweets went.” Consequently, the company realized “the unit of monetization had to be the tweet, that the tweets would be ads themselves,” Costolo recalled.
It was also important that those tweets wouldn’t irritate users. Twitter wanted to create a system where “companies [would be] less motivated to deliver ads that were annoying to people,” Costolo added.
Looking ahead, Costolo said Twitter was working to “bundle real-world and the Twitter experience closer,” although he declined to furnish further details on the matter. He also said Twitter intends to continue to improve its Discover tool, and even suggested that the company is looking into developing a premium version of its service for individual users.
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