Tweeter’s Chief Technology Officer, Parag Agrawal, has been promoted to the position of Chief Executive Officer, taking over from Jack Dorsey. As reported by the news agency Reuters, Dorsey will step down from his position, and the company’s board of directors has been planning for his departure since last year.
Agrawal, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, was named Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Twitter on March 8, 2018. Adam Messinger, who had departed the firm in December 2016, had been his predecessor. The announcement of Agrawal’s appointment was made internally in October 2017.
As Chief Technology Officer, Agrawal has been in charge of the company’s technology strategy, as well as directing machine learning and artificial intelligence. Since joining Twitter 10 years ago, he has been in the forefront of attempts to scale the company’s advertising technologies, as well as efforts to re-accelerate user growth by improving the relevance of users’ home timelines.
As a Distinguished Software Engineer at Twitter, Agrawal joined the company in October 2011 after the completion of his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University. During his time at Stanford, he worked as a research intern for companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AT&T Laboratories.
His previous research experience includes collaborations with colleagues at Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, and AT&T Labs on large-scale data management. He joined Twitter in 2012. The Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Bombay, from which he graduated in 2005, distinguish Agrawal from the rest of the field.
Agrawal expressed gratitude to Dorsey on Twitter, thanking him for his ongoing guidance and friendship. In addition, he expressed gratitude to the whole team for their confidence and support.
“There has never been a time when our mission was more crucial. There is nothing like our people and culture anywhere else in the globe. “There are no boundaries to what we can do as a team,” Agrawal said in a message that was published on his Twitter account.
He went on to say that “during tomorrow’s all-hands meeting, we’ll have plenty of time for Q&A and debate.”
There are going to be a lot of different points of view and opinions expressed on today’s news by a lot of different individuals. The reason for this is because they care about Twitter and its future, and it serves as a signal that the work we do here is important. “Let’s demonstrate to the rest of the world Twitter’s full potential,” Agrawal said.
Agrawal joins a group of Indian-American technology executives that includes Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM, Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, and Shantanu Narayen, chairman, president, and CEO of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Agrawal’s hiring comes at a time when Twitter is actively pursuing expansion, which is fortunate for him. It was earlier this year that the company stated its goal of having 315 million monetisable daily active users by the end of 2023, as well as an increase in yearly income of at least 50% over the same period.
