Dick Costolo

Richard William Costolo (pronounced: ) (born September 10, 1963) is an American businessman. He was the CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2010 to 2015; and was the COO before that.

Costolo was born in Royal Oak, Michigan. In 1985, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer and communication sciences from the University of Michigan. Upon graduation, he decided not to accept offers from technology companies and instead moved to Chicago to work in improvisational comedy.

After his improv career in Chicago, Costolo was at Andersen Consulting for eight years, where he was a senior manager in product and technology groups. He then co-founded Burning Door Networked Media, a web design and development consulting company, which was acquired by Digital Knowledge Assets in October 1996. He then co-founded SpyOnIt, a web page monitoring service, which was sold to 724 Solutions in September 2000.

In 2004, Costolo, along with Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe, founded the web feed management provider FeedBurner. After Google bought FeedBurner in 2007, Dick Costolo became an employee of the search giant. After the acquisition, Costolo began working in other areas of Google. In July 2009, he left Google, and in September 2009 it was announced that he was joining Twitter as its COO. Although his 2010 takeover as CEO was supposed to be temporary, while CEO Evan Williams was on paternity leave, it eventually became a permanent position. In 2011, he would notably proclaim about Twitter, “We're the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

In May 2011, it was announced that President Obama had appointed Costolo to the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, along with the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, Scott Charney, and McAfee President of Security David DeWalt.

In January 2012, he was embroiled in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) controversy after commenting on Wikipedia's planned blackout. He stated, "That's just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."