Twitter now has a new CEO, Parag Agarwal, who has taken over the microblogging platform after former chief Jack Dorsey stepped down, passing the baton to an IIT-Bombay graduate who has been at the company for over a decade. Huh. The move to pick a low-profile technologist to head one of the world’s leading platforms came as a surprise to many. However, according to Dorsey himself, “Parag (Agarwal) has been behind every important decision that helped transform this company.” Not only that, Agarwal has been around even when the company was nothing like it is today, and had less than a thousand employees. At the end of last year, according to a report in the Associated Press, the company had a workforce of 5,500.
Parag Agarwal, who joined as CEO on Monday, made his Twitter debut 10 years ago in October 2011. Prior to this, Stanford PhD holders worked at Microsoft, AT&T and Yahoo. He joined Twitter as an engineer focusing primarily on the company’s advertising products. He gradually worked upwards from there, receiving his first degree of ‘Distinguished Engineer’ in the company. After six years, in October 2017, Agarwal was made the chief. Technology Twitter executives (CTOs). During this time, he focused on tackling the bigger issues Twitter was facing — from a massive password security issue to a racism row over a photo-cropping algorithm that was allegedly biased.
The 37-year-old, however, did not remain in the public eye. At Twitter, he has worked on machine learning, revenue and consumer engineering and helped drive audience growth – but remotely. However, this will change immediately as he assumes the role as CEO.
As chief technical officer, Agarwal’s biggest project is probably overseeing BlueSky, the decentralized platform that was announced in December 2019. BlueSky, a pet project of Jack Dorsey, is likely to be Twitter’s first attempt at reaching the Metaverse, which is intended to be an “open and decentralized standard for social media”. According to reports, the newly established crypto team of Twitter also reported directly to Parag Agarwal.
But now, Twitter’s new CEO has more to address. Agarwal will now have to look beyond the technical details of the company. Instead, they have to deal with the social and political issues that Twitter and social media are grappling with. The platform is already well behind its rivals such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. According to the AP, Twitter has over 200 million daily active users, which is a common industry metric.
Agarwal promised to show the world the full potential of Twitter. In response to Dorsey’s resignation email, where he named Agarwal as CEO, the latter wrote, “The world is watching us now, more than ever. Many people are going to have different views and opinions about today’s news. It’s because they care about Twitter and the future, and it’s a sign that the work we do here matters. Let’s show the world the full potential of Twitter.”
Parag Agarwal has joined the Indian-origin CEOs of Silicon Valley’s big tech companies, including Google’s parent company Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Adobe’s Shantanu Narain and IBM’s Arvind Krishna. Shares of Twitter, which have seen a steady decline over the past few days, rose up to 10 percent on the news of Jack Dorsey stepping down as CEO.
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