Meet Twitter’s New Indian-Origin CEO Parag Agrawal

Twitter on Monday promoted company insider and technology head Parag Agrawal to replace Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey. The social media networking platform joins tech giants Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet in tapping a company insider for the top job.

Here are some facts about Agrawal:

Decade with Twitter

Agrawal joined Twitter as a software engineer and has been with the company for over a decade. He was appointed chief technology officer in October 2017.

He oversaw Twitter’s technical strategy and was responsible for improving the pace of software development, while advancing the use of machine learning across the company.

Project Bluesky

Since December 2019, Agrawal has also been working on Project Bluesky, an independent team of open source architects, engineers and designers to combat abusive and misleading information on Twitter.

Bluesky is seeking to introduce a new decentralised technology, the idea being that Twitter and others will become clients of Bluesky and rebuild their platforms on top of the standard, Dorsey has said previously.

Ex-Microsoft, Yahoo employee

Before joining Twitter, Agrawal worked at Microsoft, Yahoo, and AT&T Labs in their research units, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Stanford graduate

Agrawal has a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

© Thomson Reuters 2021