Newly named Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has emerged from behind the scenes to take over considered one of Silicon Valley’s highest-profile and politically risky jobs.
However his prior lack of identify recognition coupled with a stable technical background seems to be what some large firm backers have been searching for to steer Twitter out of its present morass.
A 37-year-old immigrant from India, Agrawal comes from outdoors the ranks of celeb CEOs, which embrace the person he’s changing, Jack Dorsey, Fb’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla. These brand-name firm founders and leaders have usually been within the information — and on Twitter — for exploits past the day-to-day working of their firms.
READ MORE: Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey steps down as CEO
Having served as Twitter’s chief know-how officer for the final 4 years, Agrawal’s appointment was seen by Wall Avenue as a selection of somebody who will concentrate on ushering Twitter into what’s broadly seen because the web’s subsequent period — the metaverse.
Agrawal is a “‘protected’ decide who must be regarded upon as favorably by buyers,” wrote CFRA Analysis analyst Angelo Zino, who famous that Twitter shareholder Elliott Administration Corp. had pressured Dorsey to step down.
Elliott launched a press release Monday saying Agrawal and new board chairman Bret Taylor have been the “proper leaders for Twitter at this pivotal second for the corporate.” Taylor is president and chief working officer of the enterprise software program firm Salesforce.
Agrawal, whose identify is pronounced (PUH-rag AH-gur-wahl), joins a rising cadre of Indian-American CEOs of huge tech firms, together with Sundar Pichai of Google dad or mum Alphabet, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and IBM’s Arvind Krishna.
He joined San Francisco-based Twitter in 2011, when it had simply 1,000 workers, and has been its chief technical officer since 2017. On the finish of final yr, the corporate had a workforce of 5,500.
Agrawal beforehand labored at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T in analysis roles. At Twitter, he’s labored on machine studying, income and shopper engineering and serving to with viewers progress. He studied at Stanford and the Indian Institute of Expertise, Bombay.
Whereas Twitter has high-profile customers like politicians and celebrities and is a favourite of journalists, its person base lags far behind outdated rivals like Fb and YouTube and newer ones like TikTok. It has simply over 200 million each day energetic customers, a standard business metric.
As CEO, Agrawal should step past the technical particulars and take care of the social and political points Twitter and social media are fighting. These embrace misinformation, abuse and results on psychological well being.
Agrawal bought a quick introduction to life as CEO of a high-profile firm that’s one of many central platforms for political speech on-line. Conservatives shortly unearthed a tweet he despatched in 2010 that learn “If they don’t seem to be gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why ought to I distinguish between white individuals and racists.”
As some Twitter customers identified, the 11-year-old tweet was quoting a phase on “The Every day Present,” which was referencing the firing of Juan Williams, who made a remark about being nervous about Muslims on an airplane.
Twitter didn’t instantly reply to a message for touch upon the tweet.
