Quick answer
Esther Crawford is a serial founder and product leader. She co-founded Squad, a screen-sharing social app, which Twitter acquired in December 2020. At Twitter she oversaw Twitter Blue and payments until she was laid off in February 2023. She then became a Director of Product at Meta. In May 2026 she said she had left Meta to build a new company with a small team in Oakland, which she describes as a hardware company, and she now posts startup advice on TikTok.
Esther Crawford had a director-level job at Meta. She left it to go back to the hardest version of the job.
“I started a hardware company in my 40s,” she writes in a recent post on @esthercrawford1 on TikTok, where she has started posting startup lessons for other founders. It is the latest turn in a career that has taken her from a venture-backed social app to the middle of Twitter’s most turbulent year, then to Meta, and now back to a small team building something new.
Key takeaways
- Crawford co-founded Squad, a video chat and screen-sharing app, with CTO Ethan Sutin. Twitter acquired it in December 2020.
- At Twitter she oversaw Twitter Blue and the company’s payments work. She was laid off in February 2023 in a round of roughly 200 cuts.
- She joined Meta in 2024 as a Director of Product on the Messenger team.
- In May 2026 she announced she had left Meta to build a new company with a small team in Oakland. On TikTok she calls it a hardware company.
- She now shares founder advice on TikTok, with a simple rule at its center: build an audience before you launch.
Who is Esther Crawford?
Crawford is a product builder and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her career has followed one thread: consumer products that help people talk to each other. Squad let friends video chat while sharing their phone screens. At Twitter she worked on the conversation and subscription side of the product, and at Meta she worked on Messenger.
She is also unusually open about the path. Her TikTok bio sums it up in four lines: founder and CEO, sold her last company to Twitter, product director at Meta, and a focus on consumer hardware and social media.
What was Squad, and why did Twitter buy it?
Squad was a social app for video chatting and sharing your screen with friends. Its users were largely teenage girls, and the company had raised about $7.2 million in venture funding.
In December 2020, TechCrunch reported that Twitter was acquiring Squad and that Crawford and co-founder Ethan Sutin would join Twitter’s design, engineering and product teams. Twitter shut the app down the next day. The deal was an acqui-hire: Twitter wanted the team to help build new ways for people to start and join conversations on the platform.
What happened to Esther Crawford at Twitter?
After Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, Crawford became one of the most visible people inside the company. She oversaw Twitter Blue, the paid verification subscription, and the company’s payments project. A photo she posted of herself sleeping on the office floor during the push to relaunch Blue became one of the defining images of that period.
In February 2023, TechCrunch and other outlets reported that she was laid off in a round of roughly 200 cuts. She has a TikTok video about how she came to report directly to Musk, and another reflecting on the layoff itself.
Why does she call getting laid off a gift?
Crawford has reframed the layoff publicly. In a TikTok video she calls getting laid off “the best gift I’ve ever received,” and writes that it still hurt, but that losing the job made space for a sabbatical, and the sabbatical made space for “the boldest chapter” of her career.
Getting laid off was the best gift I’ve ever received
After that break she joined Meta in 2024 as a Director of Product on the Messenger team.
What is Esther Crawford building now?
In May 2026 Crawford wrote on X that she had “left Meta a while back to build something new.” She described it as a side project that became her full-time obsession, built by “a small team in Oakland making a sci-fi idea real.” Her LinkedIn lists the company only as “New co.”
She has not announced the company’s name or product. On TikTok she calls it a hardware company, tags it with robotics, and writes that the robots are coming, which hints at the direction. Her message to other people starting late is short: “you can just do things.”
I started a hardware company in my 40s
What startup advice does she share?
Crawford’s TikTok channel reads like a founder’s field notes. A few ideas come up again and again:
- Build the audience before you need it. If you only start showing up at launch, she writes, you are asking people to trust a company they have never heard from.
- Post your thinking, not just your wins. Her list of what founders should post includes what you are learning, what you got wrong, how you make decisions and the beliefs you will stand behind.
- Early decisions compound. Customer discovery, pricing, hiring, co-founder agreements, distribution and speed, she argues, are not separate problems.
- Ambition and gratitude can coexist. Many of her posts pair hard-driving career advice with reflections on family and on what she already has.
For a founder who has seen a startup from seed round to acquisition, and one of the biggest tech companies from the inside during its most chaotic year, the advice is practical and the tone is candid.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Esther Crawford?
Esther Crawford is a startup founder, product leader and angel investor. She co-founded Squad, which Twitter acquired in 2020, led Twitter Blue and payments at Twitter, and was a Director of Product at Meta before leaving to start a new company.
What company did Esther Crawford sell to Twitter?
She co-founded Squad, a video chat and screen-sharing social app. Twitter acquired it in December 2020 and shut the app down the next day.
Does Esther Crawford still work at Meta?
No. In May 2026 she posted that she had left Meta a while back to build a new company with a small team in Oakland.
What is Esther Crawford’s new company?
She has not announced its name. She describes it as a hardware company and has tagged her posts about it with robotics. Her LinkedIn lists it as “New co.”
Where can I follow Esther Crawford?
She posts startup and career advice on TikTok at @esthercrawford1 and is also active on X and LinkedIn.
Follow her build
Esther Crawford shares startup lessons and updates on her new company on @esthercrawford1 on TikTok.
This profile is based on Esther Crawford’s public posts and published news reports. Booked Impact did not interview her, and she did not review this article before publication.
Read us often? Make Booked Impact Live Editorial a preferred source in Google Search and see our reporting more often in Top Stories.
