Twitter appoints Google's Omid Kordestani as new chairman

Twitter has poached Google's chief business officer Omid Kordestani to fill the role of executive chairman

The social media company's reinstated chief executive officer Jack Dorsey, fresh from cutting 8% of Twitter's global workforce as part of his restructuring plan, announced the appointment in a Tweet.

Dorsey said that Kordestani, who joined Google a year after it was founded, was "a proven and experienced leader, who will directly help and coach me and our leadership, and help us recruit the best folks to Twitter".

"A great chairperson is the first step towards continuing to make our board one of the best in the world, and purpose-built to serve Twitter."

Iran-born Kordestani, was Google's highest-paid executive last year, having come to Google from Netscape, where he was part of an executive team that grew the its revenue from $88m to more than $200m in 18 months.

Although less well known than founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page or longtime CEO Eric Schmidt, Kordestani joined Google in 1999 and led the signing of crucial partnerships with his former employer, Yahoo and AOL that were key to the nascent search company becoming profitable within two years of his joining.

Kordestani left the company in 2009 before returning on an interim basis in 2014 and when Google restructured to become Alphabet earlier this year, Kordestani shifted from Google’s chief business officer to take more of an advisory role to Alphabet and Google - although according to Google's own corporate website on Wednesday he was still named a senior vice president and chief business officer.