Agrawal, an IIT-Bombay and Stanford University alumnus, was the chief technology officer of Twitter before the elevation that caught investors by surprise. Twitter stock went up by as much as 10% with the news in opening trade. The two most powerful people at Twitter will now be India-born—the other being Vijaya Gadde, its policy and safety lead director.
Agrawal will join the league of several India-born executives, such as IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, to lead large US technology companies that have a presence globally.
Dorsey said the Twitter board of directors ran a rigorous process to look for a successor and “unanimously” appointed Agrawal who will also be appointed to the Twitter’s board. In a letter to Twitter employees that he shared on the platform, Dorsey said Agrawal has “been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around”.
“He’s (Agrawal) curious, probing, rational, creative, demanding, self-aware, and humble. He leads with heart and soul, and is someone I learn from daily. My trust in him as our CEO is bone deep,” Dorsey wrote.
Agrawal — who has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University — began his career at Microsoft Research with stints in R&D units of Yahoo and AT&T Labs before joining Twitter as a software engineer in October 2011.
STARTUP ROCKSTARS IN 2021
Sign-in to see our list of the most promising startups of 2021
“I joined this company 10 years ago when there were fewer than 1,000 employees,” he wrote to Twitter employees in a letter that was shared on his handle. “While it was a decade ago, those days feel like yesterday to me. I’ve walked in your shoes, I’ve seen the ups and downs, the challenges and obstacles, the wins and the mistakes. But then and now, above all else, I see Twitter’s incredible impact, our continued progress, and the exciting opportunities ahead of us… Our purpose has never been more important. Our people and our culture are unlike anything in the world. There is no limit to what we can do together.”
As Twitter’s chief technology officer since October 2017, Agrawal has been responsible for the company’s technical strategy, leading work to improve development velocity while advancing the state of machine learning across the company.
Prior to being appointed CTO, Parag 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, the company said in its statement.
