Twitter Names Former Goldman Sachs Banker Ned Segal as CFO
Segal will take over the role from Anthony Noto, who will remain chief operating officer.
(Bloomberg) -- Twitter Inc. named Ned Segal, who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., as chief financial officer, the second time the social media company has turned to a veteran of the investment bank for an executive to help revive its fortunes.
Segal, 43, currently a senior vice president of finance at Intuit Inc., will take over the role next month from Anthony Noto, who will remain chief operating officer, Twitter said Tuesday in a statement. Noto has held both posts at San Francisco-based Twitter since November 2016. Segal will report directly to Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey, the company said.
After a failed process to sell itself in 2016, Dorsey has been trying to prove that Twitter can succeed as an independent company and reach profitability by the end of this year. Twitter has been under pressure to boost growth after posting its first quarterly revenue decline since going public in 2013. The company, however, reported in April that average monthly users had increased 6 percent to 328 million in the first quarter from a year earlier and, in May, Biz Stone, a co-founder with Dorsey, said he would rejoin Twitter after a six-year absence to focus on company culture.
The careers of Noto and Segal overlapped at Goldman Sachs from 2010 through 2014 in the technology, media and telecom investment banking group. Noto left the investment bank to join Twitter in 2014. Segal left Goldman Sachs in 2013 for RPX Corp. and joined Intuit in 2015. At Intuit, Segal led the financial and strategic planning for the division that delivers QuickBooks, Payments and Payroll.
Segal’s background and experience “are an ideal fit for Twitter as we work to extend our positive momentum, continue growing our audience and achieve greater operating efficiency,” Dorsey said in the statement.
The appointment will help relieve pressure on Dorsey, who also is CEO at electronic payments company Square Inc., and Noto, who was serving two executive roles at Twitter.
Segal will receive a $22.5 million compensation package, including a $500,000 salary and $300,000 signing bonus, Twitter said in a regulatory filing. The bulk of compensation consists of about 1.17 million shares, valued at about $21.7 million as of Tuesday’s close in New York, that are intended to compensate him over four years. About one-third of the shares are tied to performance targets.
--With assistance from Jenn Zhao
To contact the reporter on this story: Selina Wang in New York at swang533@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Alistair Barr