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Major leadership changes Thursday at Twitter renewed questions about its business prospects -- was the replacement of CEO Jack Dorsey by fellow co-founder Evan Williams a shuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic? But VC backers of the microblogging service interviewed by wired.com Friday insisted they remain bullish, and Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Twitter backer Spark Capital, revealed that new revenue models will be unveiled in the first half of next year. For now, they grow weary of the question. “It’s like the stupidest question in the world: How’s Twitter going to make money?," said Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, another investor. "It’s like 'How was Google going to make money?' "Eventually Google was going to make money and they figured out how to do it and they figured out a great business, and I think the same thing is true with Twitter.” There are a number of new products and services in addition to the new business models that have been discussed and are currently in the works, says Sabet, but he wouldn’t go into any specific detail. He also downplayed the notion that there was anything to worry about, even in an environment when investments and ad dollars are drying up. “I think it’s very normal and expected for people in this economy, saying ‘when is Twitter going to show us how it can generate revenue,’ and the answer is ‘stay tuned, and they’re working on it,” Sabet said. Wilson said there are plenty of possibilities for building a business on Twitter, not only for themselves but for third party developers, like Twitterific, which are already supporting advertising in their apps. The recently acquired search engine, Summize, might be a good place to start. “There’s a lot of commercial activity happening today on Twitter, and what Twitter’s going to do is figure out how to harness that commercial activity and make it better and stronger,” said Wilson. Thursday Williams announced that he would be replacing Dorsey as CEO, as the company enters into its next phase. “Healthy companies acknowledge the need for change even during the best of times,” wrote Williams. The past 6 months have been spent on stabilizing the service and making it reliable and scalable, and the leadership roles were simply altered to better prepare themselves for the future. “Increasingly it was becoming a little bit of a too many cooks in the kitchen problem, and we just had to pick one person to be the boss,” said Wilson. “I think it’s a better fit for each individual’s set of strengths.” The company raised about $15 million this summer giving it a total of around $20 million in resources and a valuation of about $80 million.
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