Bangalore: Twitter, the microblogging site that turns 6 this year, may finally be eyeing the IPO lane reported Jon Erlichman from Bloomberg. Mike Mccue, a director on Twitter's board, revealed in an interview that the rapidly growing company is trying to come up to IPO level, and ‘mature’. The microblogging site has been seeing phenomenal growth, having around 300 million subscribers who contribute to the heavy tweet traffic which peaks on events of national and international importance.
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO said in 2011 that the company had no current plans to go public since it had made more money than expected. “We don't have to worry about questions like does this particular exogenous event have any influence on when we'll be public”, he said in an interview with the Business Insider.
Twitter attracted attention when it made 6 acquisitions of smaller companies, whose specialization ranged from security software to social networks , and its ad sales shot up from $45 million in 2010 to 139.5 million 2011. The company's ad sales are expected to grow four-fold by 2013. Mo Koyfman from Spark Capital told Erlichman that he expects more acquisitions to be made to grow the company’s revenue more. A senior executive of Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding, (run by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor-prince who already invested $300 million in Twitter late last year) told Reuters in an interview that it would be interested in taking part in any initial public offering by Twitter.
Twitter’s board has also seen changes, with Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet leaving, and Jack Dorsey, a co-founder and the company’s first CEO returning to join the board. A report from Business Insider speculates that since Wilson and Sabet are early stage investors who direct a number of startups, Twitter might not have had much use for them in the face of its enormously fast-paced growth. For Twitter, Wilson and Sabet’s moving off the board was important since the company needed to have seats open so that it can complete the construction of a board that is ready to go public and can help the company grow in terms of management, infrastructure, governance, and products.
Keeping board members with experience in the said field would actually be beneficial though, in that they would help in the acquisitions of other startups, noted the Business Insider.