On the day we meet, the big question on everyone's lips across Silicon Valley and even Dublin's Docklands is: Who will lead Twitter? Despite all the talk that co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey would return to the chief executive post, the Silicon Valley rumour mill threw up a second candidate: Twitter's head of revenue Adam Bain.
Bain is the man widely credited for taking the social platform from $25 million revenue in 2010 to more than $200 billion at the last count. He also has a reputation for being one of the nicest guys in the business.
When he sits down with The Irish Times Bain is on his way back from a conference in Germany, where he has been meeting customers. It's part of the job that he seems to enjoy, and it's an approach that has helped to inform Twitter's decisions on the type of advertising it takes on for the network. Not only does it have to be effective for customers, it also has to fit in with the platform's user base.
“The thing that we thought about from day one was content,” explains Bain. “Even advertising is content – what we wanted to do was make sure content was amazing from brands. There are a lot of brands that don’t have marketers. They may not have amazing content. We worked on that; some of it was trial and error.”
One example was search ads. The ads may fit in well with Twitter's 140 character limit, but Bain says they performed terribly. "The magic of Twitter is not in 140 characters of text; the magic is in this mentality that the audience has when they touch the platform. They're in a mode of what's hot, what's new, what's going on in the world, or what's happening in my world. The content that's there, the tweets and the promoted tweets, should answer that question. Any ads that perform and work well answer those questions.
“That’s what we’ve been trying to do over the past five years, is make those answers relevant and better.
Diversification
In keeping with this, Twitter has gone for a number of options, from sponsored and promoted tweets to video ads and branded emojis, a new addition to the lineup that started with the #ShareACoke tag.
“One of the things I’m most proud of is the revenue diversification that we’ve accomplished so far,” Bain says. “We started with servicing big businesses and now we’ve got big business, mid market and also small businesses across the world. The diversification area is around global revenue. We started with just US revenue, and now we’ve diversified the revenue stream out to service global.
“We have an on-Twitter ads business, but we also have off-Twitter ads business, running ads into other partners’ apps; a data licensing business; and also a really nascent commerce business.”
The company recently opened up its small business platform to 200 markets across the world, an initiative driven by Twitter’s Dublin team. It has also opened up Niche, a platform that brings together marketers and content creators.
But the commerce addition, although new, is grabbing attention. Twitter users can now buy products via tweets, through a programme with payments firm Stripe that adds a buy button for businesses.
“It’s still early days for us around commerce but we’ve seen so many people talking about products and services that we just wanted to shrink the distance between people having the conversation about product to actually buying that product through a tweet,” Bain says.
“I think it’s compelling because we already know people are talking about these products.
“One of the problems of buying in general on mobile is that there were so many steps to go through. Part of what Twitter commerce does is just really simplify the experience.”
The introduction of the commerce option follows Twitter’s usual method of introducing new features: listening to users.
“Our product development is based by watching closely what our users are doing and just making that easier. So if you look back through history, the retweet was something that users created and we just made it easier, the @ replies, the hashtag was something users created,” says Bain.
“It’s one of the most amazing things about the Twitter user is that they’re such impassioned and engaged people in the platform that they often show us the way and lead us through product development.”
While the ad business seems to be picking up pace, on the face of it, Twitter has one problem. While it generates a lot of activity and discussion, user growth has stalled, at least on the face of it. In its most recent set of results, one figure was highlighted: 315 million. That is how many monthly active users the company has, and it’s a figure that has stalled a little.
The reach of the network isn't just about its active signed-in users, Bain points out. There are plenty of people who visit Twitter who are logged out of the network, coming in through Google or other partners. Take those into account and Twitter says you are looking at closer to one billion.
The company doesn’t make any money from those logged-out users yet though.
Bain refuses to give anything away about his ambitions for his role in the company. However, he backs Dorsey as the permanent chief executive.
Operating role
“We’ve got an amazing CEO in the chair right now. He’s someone I’ve been working closely with for the past five years,” he says, describing the “close and collaborative” relationship he’s had with Dorsey since he started at the company. “It’s been kind of a dream to have him come back in an operating role and get a chance to work closer with him. He’s a fascinating person and has an incredible mind, and is incredible on the business side.”
You get the feeling he's not just paying lip service to Dorsey; his admiration is genuine. But then, you would expect nothing less from a man who had his own hashtag trending on Twitter not so long ago. The homage to Bain's "nice guy" personality was started by Re/Code's Kara Swisher, who mentioned he was "soooo nice" while musing on the potential successors to Costolo. Dorsey was already in the role, but Bain was a contender, she said.
It spawned a hashtag on Twitter as people shared the reasons why Adam was so nice, some of which were plausible, others not so much.
Think Chuck Norris facts, but with an altogether fuzzier feel. Bain has apparently done everything from take meetings at 6am to take international flights for people (we suspect the last one isn’t true).
Bain, true to form, has taken it with good grace. But he admits that the hashtag was a little embarrassing.
"I've been in Europe all week and I've been practising my swear words to see if I can shake people up," he laughs. "It was in Germany, and all I could remember was 'schnitzel', which isn't even a swear word."
The nice-guy reputation wasn’t the ultimate goal. “We decided five years ago to hire and train the team to be experts in the ‘how’ of Twitter and that’s how we’ve worked with our customers,” he says. “Hopefully it comes off as more than being nice; hopefully it’s more strategic.” So could Bain be the leader in waiting that Twitter needs? While Dorsey is currently in the hot seat, Twitter previously told investors that its permanent chief executive would be a full-time job, in an apparent warning against double-jobbing elsewhere.
That would effectively rule Dorsey out if he wanted to take his other project, Square, through initial public offering (IPO). The company is expected to file for its IPO any day now.
For now though, Bain is concentrating on his current role. “We are one of the fastest ramps of all time past a billion dollars. There is no other billion dollar plus ads business today that’s growing faster than Twitter that I know about, on a year on year basis,” he says.
Although tradition has it that nice guys finish last – and the tech world is littered with tales of executives who fail to make the personality grade – Bain could buck that trend and also deliver some much needed revenue to Twitter.
