Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and former Chief Executive Officer stepped down from the role on Monday and named Parag Agrawal as the microblogging platform’s new Chief Executive Officer. The news has been causing buzz since it was announced and the question that has been on the lips of virtually everyone is “who is Parag Agrawal?”
Born in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India, Parag Agrawal is an Indian-American who currently works at Twitter as the company’s Chief Executive Officer following the company’s founder’s resignation from the position. Thirty-seven years old, he was born on the 21st of May, 1984 and obtained his B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2005 before moving to the US to pursue a PhD in Computer Science from Standford University. He is married to Vineeta Agrawal, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and they have a son.
He attended Atomic Energy Central School and won numerous prizes throughout his academic life. He ranked 77th in the Joint Entrance Examination in 2000. In 2001, he won a gold medal at the 2001 International Physics Olympiad held in Turkey. As a young man, he was described as one full of potentials and on the path of greatness.
Before joining Twitter in 2011 as a software engineer, Parag Agrawal had worked in other big names. He interned at Yahoo, AT&T and Microsoft and went on to hold leadership positions in the aforementioned companies. Described as hardworking and reliable, he was chosen to replace Adam Massinger as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. In 2019, he was entrusted with Project Bluesky, an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol.
An email sent by Jack Dorsey earlier this week said that Parag Agrawal has been the lead choice of replacement “for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs”. In his position as Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal will have to meet the company’s rigid internal goals. Twitter’s goal since this year has been to at least double its annual revenue and have 315 monetizable daily active users.
