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In an earlier life, Kevin Weil was a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford in theoretical particle physics. Today, as Twitter steams toward a public offering, the 30-year-old ultramarathoner is playing a surprisingly central role in turning Twitter into a key platform for advertisers--and, in turn, a profitable business.
Mr. Weil had no advertising experience before landing at Twitter in 2009 as a data scientist, yet he is creating the products that make the social-media company money. (It's poised to rake in close to $600 million this year, according to a recent eMarketer estimate.) When most people think of Twitter as a business, they think of Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain, but it's Mr. Weil who builds the products Mr. Bain sells. Mr. Weil played a key role in the acquisition of TV-analytics startup Bluefin Labs and was just last week named a VP at the 2,000-employee company.
He's an engineer with deep technical expertise and the ability to lead a big team. But he also has something pretty rare in Silicon Valley: the ability to speak fluently in the tongue of marketers. "It's very rare that you find someone who has that EQ/IQ balance in engineering," said Lauren Crampsie, Ogilvy & Mather's chief marketing officer.
"He really...