Parag Agrawal has been appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer of Twitter. This comes after Jack Dorsey stepped down as the CEO of social media platform Twitter.
Jack Dorsey said, “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.”
Parag Agrawal, a board member, and former chief technology officer, has been appointed CEO effective immediately, and Dorsey will remain a member of the board until his term expires at next year’s stockholders’ meeting, the company said in a statement.
Agrawal has a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, began his career at Microsoft Research with stints in R&D units of Yahoo and AT&T Labs before joining Twitter as a software engineer in October 2011.
As chief technology officer, Parag was responsible for the company’s technical strategy, leading work to improve development velocity, while advancing the state of Machine Learning across the company.
In December 2019, Agrawal was put in charge of Project Bluesky, an independent team of open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media that would help better control abusive and misleading information on its platform.
Dorsey said in an email to employees that Agrawal has been his choice to lead the company “for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs.”
Agrawal said in a tweet, “Deep gratitude for jack and our entire team, and so much excitement for the future. Here’s the note I sent to the company. Thank you all for your trust and support.”
