Twitter announced that it is acquiring Squad and that the team from the screen-sharing social app will be joining Twitter’s ranks. Squad’s co-founders, CEO Esther Crawford and CTO Ethan Sutin, and the rest of the team will be coming aboard inside Twitter’s design, engineering and product departments, Twitter tells us. Crawford specifically notes that she will be leading a product in the conversations space. The group is “looking forward to building new formats that allow for fun, meaningful and engaging conversations,” she said. Twitter didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition and didn’t say if the agreement included Squad’s tech.
“I hope that our exit will tip the scale a bit more toward convincing investors to put money into diverse teams because each success is another proof point that we, the historically under-capitalized and underestimated founders, are a good bet,” Crawford added. “Invest in women and people of color because we will make you money.”
Squad had a breakout moment at the start of the pandemic when usage increased by 1,100 percent. So it’s surprising to find out Twitter plans to shutter the experience. As of December 12th, you won’t be able to access the software anymore. TechCrunch suggests Twitter’s decision to shut down Squad may have something to do with how much of it was built using Snap’s developer tools. The app’s reliance on those tools may have made porting Squad over to Twitter’s backend unfeasible.
It may not be such a bad thing that Squad won’t continue to exist. Twitter doesn’t have the best history of managing apps that fall outside of its core competency. The company famously shuttered Vine in 2017, only for TikTok to take its place and become one of the most popular social media apps out there.
