In a surprise development, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey decided to step down from a company he was deeply associated with, handing over the baton to Indian-origin Parag Agrawal, the current CTO, who will be the new CEO and a member of the Board, effective immediately.
Agrawal has been with Twitter for more than a decade and has served as Chief Technology Officer since 2017.
“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,” said Dorsey.
Agrawal said: “I look forward to building on everything we have accomplished under Jack’s leadership and I am incredibly energised 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.”
In a letter to employees, Dorsey said he will serve out his term on the board of directors until “May-ish” when he will also leave that position.
New CEO Agrawal joined the company in 2011 as an ads engineer, eventually taking the title of CTO in 2018.
In addition to Agrawal’s appointment to the Board, the Company announced that Bret Taylor, a member of the Twitter Board since 2016, has been named Independent Chair of the Board, effective immediately.
A graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mr Agrawal has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.Before joining Twitter, he had worked at Microsoft, Yahoo and US telecoms giant AT&T in various research roles.
As the chief technology officer at Twitter, he was responsible for the company’s technical strategy, leading work to “improve development velocity while advancing the state of machine learning across the company”, the firm said.
Minutes after the announcement, Parag Agrawal became the most-talked-about person on Indian internet, with people talking about how yet another Indian-origin person has gone on to lead a global tech company. His name was among the most-searched keywords on Google with over 2 lakh searches.
