Parag Agrawal has been appointed as Twitter CEO with immediate effect. The news comes in as a big surprise for Indian tech community since Jack Dorsey resigned rom the company to pave way for Parag. The 37 year old IIT-Bombay graduate had joined Twitter 10 years ago after obtaining doctorate in Stanford University. He shifted to US after graduation and joined Stanford for post graduation and doctorate. It is regarded that Standard is the tough place to obtain doctorate and even admissions are very strictly based on merit.
According to Jack Dorsey, Parag Agrawal has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around. The company now employs over 5000 people instead of 1000 in 2011 when Parag joined the workforce. Parag had a brief stint with Microsoft, AT&T and Yahoo before joining Twitter.
Deep gratitude for @jack and our entire team, and so much excitement for the future. Here’s the note I sent to the company. Thank you all for your trust and support 💙 https://t.co/eNatG1dqH6 pic.twitter.com/liJmTbpYs1
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) November 29, 2021
Parag initially joined the company as an engineer with prime focus on the company’s ad products. He worked very hard right from 2011 and obtained the maiden title of Distinguished Engineer at the company. He was appointed as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Twitter in October 2017. He mainly focused on large-scale password security issue, scalability and alleged racism row. He also worked on machine learning, revenue, consumer engineering including audience growth improvement.
Parag Agrawal draws a annual salary of $1 million (INR 7.5 crores) plus bonuses. Twitter filed the required statutory filing with the US securities and Exchange commission.
Parag Agrawal keenly worked with Bleusky. which is a pet project of Jack Dorsey. The main aim of Bleusky is to access the metaverse, which is an open and decentralised standard for social media. The new Cyrpto team also reported directly to Parag.
With Parag becoming Twitter CEO, he will now have to work on not only technical but also social and political issues. It is to be noted that Twitter has been fighting with Indian Government over the revised IT rules. The company was initially hesitant to appoint Chief Compliance Officer but later they appointed a staff member, which will look into the grievnanes of the company. The social media giant has been struggling to compete with Facebook and YouTube. It remains to be seen as to how Parag will work in such a way to take the company to profitability.
In reply to Jack Dorsey’s resignation letter, Parag Agrawal added that the world is watching us right now even more than they have before. He said that lots of people are going to have lots of different views and opinions about today’s news. It’s all because people care about twitter and it’s a signal that the work we do her matter. We have to show Twitter’s full potential. It’s clear that Parag had high ambitions to scale up Twitter to new heights. We can expect new products under his leadership with enhancements to Twitter as well.
Parag Agrawal has joined the likes of Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Shantanu Narayen and Arvind Krishna. Twitter shares climbed 10% after the news of Jack Dorsey’s resignation and subsequent appointment of Parag.
