Anand Mahindra Chairman of Mahindra Group on one of the tweets of the big news wrote “This is one pandemic…we’re happy and proud to say originated in India. It’s the Indian CEO virus… No vaccine against it.” Former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey said “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. Being appointed as the CEO of Twitter, Agrawal said, “I look forward to building on everything we have accomplished under Jack’s leadership, and I am incredibly energized by the opportunities ahead. By continuing to improve our execution, we will deliver tremendous value for our customers and shareholders as we reshape the future of public conversation.”
Here are 10 things to know about Parag Agrawal
Parag completed his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. After passing out from IIT Bombay, he did PhD in philosophy and computer science from Stanford University.
Agrawal in 2006, joined Microsoft for a brief four-month research role before he moved to research positions at AT&T and Yahoo
It was in 2011, when he first arrived at Twitter months after Dorsey returned as CEO. Agrawal is not a new face for Big Tech Companies. He has been working with Twitter for over a decade, working his way up from an engineer to become its top executive.
In October 2011, he focused on ad products and then became the 1st recipient of the company’s “Distinguished Engineer” title.
He has been a chief technology officer.Back in 2017, he was promoted to the role of Twitter CTO. “In his capacity as CTO, he’s focused on scaling a cohesive machine learning and AI approach across our consumer and revenue product and infrastructure teams”, the company stated.
He also confirmed, Twitter is putting all efforts to detect bot accounts and label potentially harmful content with the Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson.
Parag is a very close friend of the former Twitter CEO, Dorsey. Agrawal has been behind ‘every critical decision’ that helped turn Twitter around said Dorsey. In his resignation letter, Dorsey said Agrawal had been unanimously appointed by Twitter’s board and had been his personal pick to lead the position for some time. “My trust in him [Agrawal] as our CEO is bone deep,” Dorsey said.
In 2019, Jack Dorsey made Agrawal the head of Bluesky project. This Bluesky was a project that was developed as a team of an independent team of open-source architects to control misinformation on Twitter.
A New York Times report, quoting Silicon Valley insiders, says that, just like Jack Dorsey, Parag too is “quiet, polite, deeply technical and enthused about an internet where power and control are given back to users.” The report terms him the spiritual successor of Dorsey.
Twitter has recently disclosed that as CEO, Parag will be given an annual compensation of $1 million as well as stock compensation worth $12.5 million.
Critics have pointed to Agrawal’s previous statement on Twitter’s response to handle misinformation as evidence of censorship against conservatives. This happened just after Parag was officially announced as the new CEO. Critics specially pointed towards an interview he gave to MIT Technology Review in 2020, where he said “Twitter’s “role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation.”
