Why Twitter’s C.E.O. Demoted Himself

AT the annual South by Southwest gathering of techies in Austin, Tex., in March, conference organizers had chosen a hangar-size room to accommodate their star speaker: Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, the messaging and social networking site that had become a digital phenomenon.

In a private moment before the doors opened, Mr. Williams, who is famously deliberate and cautious, snapped a photograph of the endless rows of chairs facing the stage and posted it on Twitter.

“Gulp,” he wrote.

Later, as Mr. Williams talked with the interviewer about building a 21st-century business, keeping to Twitter’s foundational principle (the Google-like “be a force for good”) and fostering corporate experimentation, members of his audience started groaning — and leaving, one by one.

“They wanted Ev Williams; they got Ev Williams,” a Twitter staff member said later.

It is no small irony, of course, that a man so ill at ease on the big stage is a pivotal force in a communications revolution, one that has made it easier for people to chat, disseminate information and mobilize locally and globally with almost anyone who has a cellphone or an Internet connection.

And Twitter has become one of the rare but fabled Web companies with a growth rate that resembles the shape of a hockey stick. It has 175 million registered users, up from 503,000 three years ago and 58 million just last year. It is adding about 370,000 new users a day.

It has helped transform the way that news is gathered and distributed, reshaped how public figures from celebrities to political leaders communicate, and played a role in popular protests in Iran, China and Moldova. It has become so muscular and ubiquitous that it now competes with the likes of Google and Facebook for users — and is beginning to compete with them for advertising dollars.

Yet for all its astonishing growth, Twitter has succeeded in spite of itself — the enviable product of a great idea and lightning-in-a-bottle viral success rather than a disciplined approach to how it’s managed.

Because of that, Twitter is on the cusp of becoming the next big, independent Internet company — or the next start-up to be swallowed whole by a giant like Google or, possibly, the next start-up to run out of steam.

Now the company is trying to instill some of the rigor and sense of purpose it needs to ensure that it is, indeed, the next big thing.

“The thing I’ve learned that’s much different than any other time in my life is I have a team that is really, really great,” says Mr. Williams, 38. “I’ve been studying this stuff for a really long time, and I’ve screwed up in many, many, many ways in terms of managing people and product decisions and business, so I feel fairly confident at this point that it could scale pretty well.”

Last month, he unexpectedly announced that he had decided to step down as chief executive and give the job to Dick Costolo, who had been Twitter’s chief operating officer.

Mr. Williams, who remains on the company’s board, now focuses on product strategy. He made the decision after conceiving and spending months working on the recent redesign of the Twitter Web site. People who have worked with him say he excels at understanding what Internet users want and contemplating Twitter’s future, but isn’t a detail-oriented task manager.

“He takes these things that everyone thinks are as big as they can get, these geeky things, and he makes them mainstream,” says Philip Kaplan, a co-founder of the review site Blippy and one of Mr. Williams’s close friends.

Mr. Costolo, meanwhile, is all about the details of making money and getting things done. This has been his third time running a company; he sold his last one, the Web subscription service FeedBurner, to Google in 2007.

For his part, Mr. Williams may embody a classic Silicon Valley type — the inspired, talented start-up guy with good ideas, but not the one to execute a sophisticated business strategy once things get rolling, says Steve Blank, an entrepreneurship teacher at Stanford.

And Mr. Williams may have also earned the self-awareness and confidence to recognize exactly who he is.

“Evan Williams is the type of entrepreneur who knows when to pivot,” says Mr. Blank, “and what we may be seeing is wonderful signs of entrepreneurial wisdom.”

TWITTER was born in 2006 as a side project.

At the time, it was an appendage of a podcasting service named Odeo, another company that Mr. Williams co-founded that had millions of dollars from investors.

Even the founders, though, were having a hard time getting excited about Odeo, and Mr. Williams told everyone who worked there to hatch new ideas. While sitting on a children’s slide at a park eating Mexican food one day, an engineer, Jack Dorsey, suggested to colleagues a simple way to send status updates by using text messages.