Highlights:
- The new CEO of Twitter has been named Parag Agrawal.
- Parag is an IIT-Bombay graduate and received his MS and PhD from Stanford University.
- Parag joined Twitter in 2011, and in 2017 he was promoted to CTO.
After Jack Dorsey announced his resignation, Parag Agrawal took over as Twitter CEO on Monday. The move seems to have taken months to complete. There were rumours that the Twitter board was seeking someone to replace Jack Dorsey. The hunt appears to have finished with an in-house candidate. Parag, who was formerly the CTO of Twitter, will take over as CEO of the company immediately.
So, who exactly is Parag Agarwal? Parag, 37, is an IIT-Bombay graduate and has worked at Twitter for a long and is supposedly well-liked by Jack Dorsey, which is likely one of the factors that helped him get the top spot at Twitter.
The microblogging platform is following in the footsteps of corporate behemoths Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet by naming a company insider for the top spot.
Agrawal began his career at Twitter as a software developer and has remained with the firm for almost a decade. In October 2017, he was named chief technology officer.
He was in charge of Twitter’s technological strategy and was in charge of improving the pace of software development as well as developing the company’s usage of machine learning.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Agrawal worked in research departments at Microsoft, Yahoo, and AT&T Labs before joining Twitter.
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Agrawal earned his bachelor’s degree and MS, Ph.D. in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay and Stanford University respectively.
Agrawal has also been working on Project Bluesky, an independent team of open-source architects, engineers, and designers dedicated to combating abusive and deceptive content on Twitter, since December 2019.
Dorsey has said that Bluesky is aiming to develop new decentralised technology in the hopes that Twitter and others would become Bluesky customers and restructure their platforms on top of the standard.
Although he had been in a leadership position at a microblogging site for some time, Parag was not quite known when he became CEO. In an email issued to Twitter staff on Monday, Parag acknowledges this. He penned, “I recognize that some of you know me well, some just a little, and some not at all. Let’s consider ourselves at the beginning-the first step towards our future. I’m sure you have lots of questions and there’s a lot for us to discuss. At the all-hands tomorrow we’ll have lots of time for Q&A and discussion. It will be the beginning of ongoing open, direct conversations I wish for us to have together.”
In 2005, Parag moved to the United States. He joined Twitter in 2011, while still a doctorate student at Stanford. According to the New York Times, his thesis adviser, Jennifer Widom, encouraged him to finish his studies.
