India-born Parag Agrawal has been appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer of Twitter. This comes after Jack Dorsey stepped down as the CEO of the microblogging site on Monday.
“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders. My trust in Parag as Twitter’s CEO is deep. His work over the past 10 years has been transformational. I’m deeply grateful for his skill, heart, and soul. It’s his time to lead,” said Dorsey.
Agrawal is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Twitter. He has a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Agrawal joined Twitter in October 2011 as software engineer after having worked at Microsoft Research, AT&T Labs and Yahoo! Research.
As CTO, he was responsible for the company’s technical strategy, leading work to improve development velocity, while advancing the state of Machine Learning across the company.
Agrawal had risen to be Twitter’s first Distinguished Engineer due to his work across revenue and consumer engineering, including his impact on the re-acceleration of audience growth in 2016 and 2017.
In December 2019, Agrawal was put in charge of Project Bluesky, an independent team of open source architects, engineers and designers to develop an open and decentralised standard for social media that would help better control abusive and misleading information on its platform.
Dorsey said in an email to employees that Agrawal has been his choice to lead the company “for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs.”
Agrawal said in tweet that he has deep gratitude for Dorsey and “our entire team, and so much excitement for the future. Thank you all for your trust and support.”
