Ali Rowghani got a voice mail on his mobile phone from Steve Jobs on a Saturday in early 2010. The Apple co-founder wanted to keep Rowghani, then chief financial officer at Walt Disney's Pixar, from leaving to become finance chief at Twitter. Jobs, who also led Pixar before selling it to Disney, made several calls, as did Disney chief executive officer Bob Iger, said a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the interchange was private. Rowghani left anyway. "This company is already world famous and making this massive impact and has clearly touched this nerve," Rowghani remembers saying about Twitter at the time. "I didn't think I'd encounter opportunities like that very frequently." At his new employer, Rowghani, 39, has assumed a broader range of responsibilities than the typical number-crunching CFO, holding sway over partnerships and global expansion. While Rowghani also handles finances, he's one of the closest advisers to CEO Dick Costolo, and he will figure more prominently as the microblogging service seeks to fend off competition while heading for an eventual initial public offering.
"Ali's brought terrific business judgment to the company," said Peter Currie, a private investor who is on Twitter's board. "He thinks broadly. He doesn't think just from the point of view from his position as CFO."
Executives have declined to speculate on a timetable for an IPO. For now, the company is focused on attracting users and finding ways to generate revenue from advertisers eager to reach Twitter's audience of more than 140 million people. The company is forecasting at least $1 billion in sales in 2014, two sources had said in June. That was about twice the prediction at the time from EMarketer.
Aside from helping Twitter grapple with such companies as Facebook and Google, Rowghani's bigger challenge will come in navigating the San Francisco-based company toward an IPO. He hasn't guided a new company through the process and has little experience holding the top finance job at a publicly traded company. Twitter will probably be the biggest consumer-web company to make a market debut since Facebook, which has lost half its value since May 17, when it went public, with too high a price set by its finance chief, David Ebersman, along with advisers. Rowghani will need to set Twitter's price high enough to secure the funding Twitter needs without giving it a loftier valuation than it deserves.
"Like Facebook, Twitter will be a very high-profile consumer IPO and will be scrutinised even more closely as a result of Facebook's missteps," said Lise Buyer, principal at Class V Group in Portola Valley, California. "The CFO is the member of the management team who is most deeply involved in the process from start to finish."
In a recent example of Rowghani's widening remit, he was given oversight of business development and partnerships, according to persons with knowledge of the matter. "He's a calm and strategic thinker," CEOCostolo said. "He's been incredibly helpful to me in driving operating leverage and operating efficiency across the company." Relations with partners have not always gone smoothly. The company said this year it's tightening rules on how Twitter's tweets could be used on other sites. It forced companies such as LinkedIn to pull Twitter postings and it rankled partners, including Instapaper, maker of a news-archiving application.
"Effectively, Twitter can decide your app is breaking a (potentially vague) rule at any time, or they can add a new rule that your app inadvertently breaks," Marco Arment, Instapaper's founder, wrote in a blog.
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