On 29th November Parag Agrawal wrote a small note to the staff of Twitter mentioning the world is watching us now, even more than ever before. The same day he was named CEO (Chief of Executive Officer of Twitter).
Parag Agrawal becomes the most recent India-born CEO to take over a major American technology company. Executives of South Asian descent are now at the wheel of companies including Microsoft, Google, and IBM. He succeeded co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has struggled to keep tempo with contemporaries such as Facebook. This will be probably the first time Agrawal has stepped into the media glare; however, he has been among the key force at Twitter.
Dorsey himself acknowledged. “(Parag) has been my choice for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs. Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around…. My trust in him as CEO is bone-deep,”.
Parag Agarwal who joined Twitter as an engineer in the year 2011 who later became the San Fransisco-based company’s CTO (Chief Technology Officer) has been a responsible employee responsible for conducting most of the path-breaking projects at the company, the most crucial being the successful monetization of company’s advertisement-based revenue models. He under the ads team used machine-learning to analyze data and target advertisements to users.
He has also worked to speed up user growth by improving ‘Home timeline’ relevance, adapting the company’s technical strategy, and overseeing machine learning and AI across the platform. In 2019, Dorsey leaned on Agrawal to launch Bluesky, a Twitter-funded proposal to create a decentralized social media, where users can apply their algorithms to moderate and promote content.
Who is Parag Agrawal?
Parag is an Indian IITian. He is an Indian-American, who shifted to the US in 2005. He was completing his doctorate when he joined Twitter in 2011. He did his Computer Science Engineering from IIT Mumbai, after securing 77 ranks in the entrance exam in 2000. In 2012 he completed his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University. He worked with the TAG group of Twitter that was responsible for the new products and technologies of Twitter.
