The new CEO of Twitter is Parag Agrawal — a (Indian-American) technologist who, until today, has been a relatively low-profile but key member of the company’s leadership team.
Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006, announced his resignation from the social media company Monday. Replacing Dorsey in the top job is Agrawal: a 10-year Twitter veteran who has been its CTO since October 2017 and is suddenly the company’s public face to Wall Street, its millions of users and advertising customers.
Dorsey, in a memo to Twitter staffers he posted publicly, said “my trust in [Agrawal] as our CEO is bone deep.”
“He’s been my choice for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs,” Dorsey wrote of Agrawal. “Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around. He’s curious, probing, rational, creative, demanding, self-aware and humble.”
Twitter has credited Agrawal’s engineering work on its revenue and consumer platforms with helping turn around its audience growth in 2016-17. Under Dorsey, who had been CEO since 2015, the company focused on making Twitter easier to use and more engaging, and also improving the reliability and scalability of the overall service and its advertising stack.
Agrawal noted that there were fewer than 1,000 Twitter employees when he joined the company in 2011. As of the end of September 2021, it has more than 7,100 employees worldwide, up 33% year over year.
“The world is watching us right now, even more than they have before,” Agrawal, 37, wrote in his own email to employees (and posted to Twitter). “Lots of people are going to have lots of different opinions about today’s news. It is because they care about Twitter and our future.
– Variety
