Rise of humble engineer
PARAG AGRAWAL, who took over on Monday (29) as the new head of Twitter, shot from relative obscurity as the platform’s technology expert to becoming the latest Indiaborn talent to lead a US tech giant.
Unlike his predecessor, co-founder Jack Dorsey, Agrawal enjoyed until Monday a much more low-profile role at the company, with only about 24,000 followers on the platform, compared to Dorsey’s almost six million.
But with a tweeted statement that began, “Thank you, Jack, I’m honored and humbled,” Agrawal took the reins of a company aiming to steer away from free speech battles and toward growth.
Agrawal is also the latest India-born star tapped to head a major US-based tech company, following the likes of Googleparent Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“He’s been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around,” Dorsey wrote of Agrawal in a message to Twitter staff.
“He leads with heart and soul, and is someone I learn from daily. My trust in him as our
CEO is bone deep.”
Educated in computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (now Mumbai) and holding a PhD from Stanford University in California, Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 and rose to become its CTO by 2017.
As the head of technology at the firm, he oversaw machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as the company’s broad technical strategy.
These specialties make him a natural choice to replace Dorsey, Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi told AFP.
“Going forward AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) will be more and more critical in making the platform healthier and more engaging for users and more profitable for the company,” she said.
“We might also see some more rigour and rational in the decisionmaking process,” Milanesi added.
A profile in the New York Times quoted Jennifer Widom, who led the research lab and served as his thesis adviser, as saying that “even among students at Stanford, Agrawal stood out for his strong grasp of the math and the theory that underpins computer science”.
Prior to being appointed CTO, he “had risen to be Twitter’s first Distinguished Engineer due to his work across revenue and consumer engineering, including his impact on the re-acceleration of audience growth in 2016 and 2017,” the company said.
Agrawal was also head of the company’s “Bluesky” push to create a more open and decentralised standard for social media.
“I recognize that some of you know me well, some just a little, and some not at all,” Agrawal said in an email to the some 5,500 employees at San Francisco-based Twitter.
The platform has grown far less exponentially than its Silicon Valley neighbours and has very meagre net profits compared to the two giants of digital advertising, Google and Facebook’s parent Meta.
Profitable for the first time in 2017, Twitter has slipped back into the red several times since.
Dorsey is perhaps best known to the public as the man who kicked former president Donald Trump off Twitter.