Dick Costolo

“As a leader, you need to care deeply, deeply about your people while not worrying or really even caring about what they think about you. Managing by trying to be liked is the path to ruin.”

“When you're doing what you love to do, you become resilient. You create a habit of taking chances on yourself. If you do what's expected of you, and things go poorly, you will look to external sources for what to do next, because that will be your habit. You will be standing there frozen. If you are just filling a role, you will be blindsided.”

“The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters - a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They're not all celebrities. There's 'CNN Breaking News.' And the 'New York Times.' And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren't really that known outside that world.”

“I think if you look down the road for Twitter, we would like to be a company - a service - that is used by billions of people around the world in every country in the world because we feel that the power of Twitter is that it brings people closer to each other, to their governments, to their heroes, etc.”

“We have a core value here at Twitter that says we want to defend and respect the user's voice. And that's important to us on a global basis. Someone doesn't sign up for a service expecting that their sign up information is going to be handed over without them being asked... We're going to defend our users' rights.”

“Twitter brings you closer. I mean, we see this over and over again from our users. It brings them closer to the action. It brings them closer to their heroes.”

“The way you build trust with your team is around super-clear communication in that instant when they say, 'I will be sad if you don't do X.' You have to say, 'We're not going to do X, and here's why, and believe me, you'll be much sadder later if I let you go do it and you spend a bunch of time on it and nothing ever happens.'”

“I think that content posted to Twitter is distributed to more platforms, services, sites, online and offline than any other services out there. Would love to see if someone can prove to me otherwise.”

“One of the things that I think I do well as a CEO is that I'm present. When I'm with my employees, I'm there in the moment.”

“One of the things you learn operating in the technology industry is disruptions are occurring every day.”

“Twitter needs to continue being a good listener and recognize that the service has been redefined by lots of people, tweet by tweet, but also come up with its own priorities.”

“You can choose to listen to one end of the spectrum or the other on Twitter, just like you can on television. But hopefully what we've done is given a voice to that broad middle ground.”

“I was in Shanghai recently, where Twitter is blocked, and yet there were ads and billboards across town with hashtags on them.”

“I try to spend a lot of time with people outside my direct reports. The view from the top is totally distorted. If you only spend time with your directs, you have no perspective on what's really going on.”

“We've recognized that Twitter is the second screen for TV, and TV is more fun with Twitter. There are a bunch of ways that we can be complementary to broadcasters.”

“For many people, when they come to Twitter, the language is opaque. We need to push the scaffolding to the background and bring the content forward. The media, the photos, the videos.”

“Not only can you not plan the impact you're going to have, you often won't recognize it even while you're having it.”

“Authenticity is absolutely the key to a great tweet.”

“People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care.”

“The way you build trust with your people is by being forthright and clear with them from day one. You may think people are fooled when you tell them what they want to hear. They are not fooled.”