Twitter CEO hunt: Indian Padmasree Warrior joins race

Vijaywada native Padmasree Warrior is among top business executives that Twitter’s head hunting firm has contacted about running the struggling social media company as its CEO.

Padmasree Warrior is in the race to become Twitter's next CEO. (Livemint Photo)

Vijaywada native Padmasree Warrior is among top business executives that Twitter's head hunting firm has contacted about running the struggling social media company as its CEO.

The company's search firm, Spencer Stuart, has narrowed its hunt for Jack Dorsey's replacement down to three or four business executives, including CBS Interactive Inc's Jim Lanzone, Bloomberg Business reported.

IIT-Delhi alumnus

Warrior, who was born Yellepeddi Padmasree, is a former CTO of Cisco Systems and Motorola. She was born in Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, where she completed her schooling .

She completed her graduation in chemical engineering from IIT-Delhi and obtained her postgraduate degree at Cornell University in the US.

Forbes listed Warrior as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world in 2014 and Fortune magazine called her one of the four rising stars in its Most Powerful Women list of 2006.

Pressure on Twitter

Pressure on Twitter's board is mounting . In the three months since the company started searching for a new chief executive officer, its stock has slipped 22% and several product executives have left.

Media reports quoting sources close to the board said a leading internal candidate is interim leader and co-founder Jack Dorsey, who is also CEO at Square Inc, a company on the verge of an initial public offering.

Investors are getting impatient for the directors to make a decision, said Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W Baird & Co.

"The company, its employees and certainly its shareholders are in a little bit of limbo," Sebastian told Bloomberg. "That qualifies it as an urgent matter of business."

Twitter's share price has been lingering for the past month around the $26 price investors paid in its initial public offering in November 2013.

Part of the selloff was triggered by Dorsey, who bluntly said after the company's second-quarter earnings report in July that it will take a while before Twitter is able to reverse a slowdown in growth. He called its product performance "unacceptable".

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