 |
| Parag Agrawal is Twitter's new CEO. |
Another Indian American immigrant is taking the helm of a tech company. Parag Agrawal was named CEO of Twitter after serving as the social media company's Chief Technology Officer.
Agrawal's promotion was announced Tuesday after Jack Dorsey decided to step down as CEO of Twitter, a company he founded in 2006 in San Francisco.
"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," said Dorsey.
"I want to thank the Board for their confidence in my leadership and Jack for his continued mentorship, support, and partnership," said Agrawal. "I look forward to building on everything we have accomplished under Jack's leadership and I am incredibly energized by the opportunities ahead. By continuing to improve our execution, we will deliver tremendous value for our customers and shareholders as we reshape the future of public conversation."
Agrawal joins a cadre of Indian Americans leading high profile U.S. tech companies. including Sundar Pichai of Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Adobe's Shantanu Narayen and VMWare's Raghu Raghuram.
Dorsey's departure and Agrawal's promotion comes as Twitter is being questioned about its role in spreading falsehoods and acting as the medium for the spread of the lies of radical rightwingers, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists.
Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
Upon the announcement of Agrawal's promotion conservatives began spreading tweet he sent in 2010 that read "If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people racists."
As some Twitter users pointed out, the 11-year-old tweet was quoting a segment on “The Daily Show,” which was referencing the firing of Juan Williams, who made a comment about being nervous about Muslims on an airplane.
It didn't take long before the tweet went viral and people began trolling Agrawal. What people missed was that at the time of posting his tweet in 2010, Agrawal, 37, had already clarified his comments to a Twitter user. "I was quoting Asif Mandvi from The Daily Show. The article you are reading seems too deep for my current mental state," Agrawal said.
In a later tweet on the same thread from the timeline, the Twitter CEO had further said, "I am amused by people that pass judgement on people for passing judgement. I was attempting to do the same to amuse myself.”
The 37-year old Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 and has served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) since October 2017. As CTO, he has been responsible for the Company's technical strategy, leading work to improve development velocity while advancing the state of Machine Learning across the company.
Prior to being appointed CTO, Parag 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.
Parag holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
No comments:
Post a Comment