A man with an interesting history of making money for high-tech organizations may now try his hand at doing the same for Twitter. Today, Twitter announced that Satya Patel, who worked on AdSense for about six years, is joining it as a director of product management.
We should note that Twitter didn’t steal Patel directly from Google. Or from his current employer, for that matter. Patel’s actually worked at venture capital firm Battery Ventures since 2007, specializing in matters related to software, digital media, and the consumer-oriented Internet, and he’ll still have some sort of role there in the future.
@satyap
Satya PatelThrilled to @jointheflock @twitter to build awesome products w/ friends & former colleagues. Will still be working w/ @batteryventures cos.
6 hours ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto
It was from 2003 to 2007 that Patel worked at Google (with the title “Senior Product Manager”), and before that, he spent a couple of years at DoubleClick.
Patel may know all sorts of things about both advertising and smallish companies that are going to make it big, then. Bhavesh Mehta, a director of engineering at Google, even wrote on his LinkedIn profile, “He is one of the best product managers and business people I have worked with in my long career. We really miss him at Google.”
Patel will start at Twitter on April 4th, so keep an eye out for his hand in any interesting things that occur sometime after that. And in case you didn’t hear, all of this is happening at the same time that widespread rumors suggest Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey will rejoin the company with a title something like “Chief Product Officer.”