UPDATED 14:01 EDT / DECEMBER 20 2012

A Year of Boardroom Shuffles for Twitter. Beefing Up for an IPO?

Twitter appointed Mike Gupta as its new chief financial officer this week, replacing former CFO and newly promoted COO Ali Rowghani. The changes were announced via a tweet from chief executive Dick Costolo, who himself served as the company’s chief operating officer in its earlier stages.

AllThingsD provided some background on Rowghani, who worked at Pixar for nearly a decade prior to joining Twitter in 2010.

“Rowghani has often been noted as the quiet, behind-the-scenes body man to Twitter CEO Costolo, taking on far more operational responsibilities than that of typical CFOs. Rowghani has had his hand in many important areas of the business, including contributing to ideas around Twitter’s Promoted Suite of ad products, a key component of the company’s monetization efforts.”

Gupta’s track record is just as impressive as Rowaghani’s. Before signing up with Twitter he was in charge of finances for Zynga, and held several leadership positions at Yahoo prior. He played a key role in negotiating the web company’s strategic agreements with Microsoft.

The update is the latest in a string of executive changes that Twitter announced in the past few months. Twitter vice president of growth Othman Laraki stepped down yesterday, and in November the social network brought a former Google executive aboard.

Nicole Wong served as the search giant’s VP and deputy general consul before assuming the role of legal director at Twitter.   The social network appointed former Googler Aliza Knox as the head of its new Singapore office around the same time.

Twitter is beefing up its management team in preparation for an IPO, by the looks of it. As Zynga’s CFO Gupta spearheaded social game developer’s successful public offering last year, and he may be tasked with a very similar assigment in the near future.


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