Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has decided to step down as CEO of the company.
Indian-American Dr Parag Agrawal, presently Twitter’s CTO, will take over the helm, the company said Monday.
Dorsey said in a statement,
“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders.”
Dorsey, 45 yo, was serving as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company.
He will remain a member of the board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders.
Agrawal has been with Twitter for more than a decade and had been in charge of strategies involving artificial intelligence and machine learning.
He earned an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. Later, he held research internships at AT&T, Microsoft, and Yahoo before joining Twitter.
Agrawal said in his note to Dorsey:
“The world is watching us right now, even more than they have before. Lots of people are going to have lots of different views and opinions about today’s news. It is because they care about Twitter and our future, and it’s a signal that the work we do here matters.”
Dorsey said in an email he published on Twitter that Agrawal has been his choice to lead the company “for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs.”
Dorsey, who co-founded the social media giant in 2006, served as CEO until 2008 before being pushed out of the role. He returned to lead Twitter in 2015 after former CEO Dick Costolo stepped down.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, tweeted his congratulations to Agrawal.
With his appointment as CEO of Twitter, Agrawal has joined fellow Indian-origin techies at the helm of Google (Sundar Pichai), Microsoft (Satya Nadella), IBM (Arvind Krishna), VMWare (Raghu Raghuram), and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen).
