Twitter Hires Commerce Chief to Add Shopping Via Tweets

August 28, 2013 Leave a comment

Twitter Hires Commerce Chief to Add Shopping Via Tweets

Twitter Inc. hired Nathan Hubbard, the former president of Ticketmaster, as its first head of commerce, part of a push to enable shopping via short postings on its social website. Hubbard, 38, started at San Francisco-based Twitter this week, said Jim Prosser, a spokesman for the online social service. As commerce chief, Hubbard will report to Adam Bain, Twitter’s head of global revenue. Hubbard left Live Nation Entertainment Inc. (LYV)’s Ticketmaster unit earlier this month amid an overhaul of its online services.Twitter is seeking new sources of revenue as it prepares for a potential initial public offering and targets $1 billion in 2014 sales. In its first foray into e-commerce, projected by Forrester Research Inc. (FORR) to be a $370 billion market in the U.S. by 2017, Twitter plans to offer retailers tools for selling goods and services inside tweets, Hubbard said in an interview.

“We’re going to go to people who have stuff to sell and help them use Twitter to sell it more effectively,” Hubbard said.

Hubbard will look to team up with merchants and providers of payment services rather than compete with those companies, and may take a percentage of any transactions on its site, he said.

“One of the hallmarks of Twitter’s entire approach has been partnering,” Hubbard said. “We’re going to take the same approach with owners of physical and digital goods.”

Hubbard, a Princeton University graduate with a masters in business administration from Stanford University, was formerly a touring and recording artist, and has released five albums.

Online Shopping

By enabling shopping via Twitter’s site and mobile applications, the company is seeking to keep users on the site for longer and to learn more about their interests. Data about online-shopping habits would be valuable to advertisers, who contribute the bulk of Twitter’s estimated $582.8 million in ad sales this year, according to EMarketer Inc.

Earlier this month, Twitter said it’s working with research firm Datalogix Inc. to track when advertisements on the site, called Promoted Tweets, lead to purchases in brick-and-mortar stores.

While Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo has said that management isn’t concentrating on an IPO, the company is widely predicted to hold a share sale before long to help it bankroll expansion, and give early investors a way to realize financial gains on their holdings.

The CEO has bolstered his management team, promoting Ali Rowghani to chief operating officer, adding finance veteran Mike Gupta and hiring former Morgan Stanley executive Cynthia Gaylor to run corporate development.

At Ticketmaster, Hubbard had been overseeing a $75 million overhaul of the unit’s online technology to make the service easier to use for consumers and venue owners. He joined Live Nation in after the concert promoter bought a majority of Musictoday, an online merchandising company where Hubbard was CEO.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Erlichman in Los Angeles at jerlichman1@bloomberg.net; Douglas MacMillan in San Francisco at dmacmillan3@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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