From IIT Bombay To Twitter CEO: Here's What You Need To Know About Parag Agrawal

Parag Agrawal made history by replacing Jack Dorsey to become the new CEO of Twitter. Agrawal worked with the microblogging site for around ten years and became the Chief Technology Officer in 2017.

Ex-CEO Jack Dorsey took to Twitter and announced his resignation by sharing an e-mail he sent to his team. "Parag has been my choice for some time given how deeply he understands the Company and its needs. He has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this Company around. My trust in him as our CEO is bone-deep," said Dorsey.

Replying to this, Parag Agrawal shared a note thanking everyone for his support. He asked the Company to come together and have a brief discussion with him to have a question-answer session.

From IIT Bombay To Twitter

Parag Agrawal's upbringing was in India. He was born in Mumbai, and his father was a senior official in the Department of Atomic Energy, whereas his mother is now a retired school teacher. The 37-year-old did his B.Tech degree in Computer Science from IIT Bombay and graduated in 2005. He moved to the United States, where he got admission to Stanford University for PhD in the same subject.

Before joining Twitter, he worked for several tech giants such as AT&T, Microsoft and Yahoo. He is married to Vineeta Agarwala, a general partner in an American venture capital firm called 'Andreessen Horowitz'. The couple has one son.

Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011. He worked as a software engineer for the first six years. He became the Company's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in 2017, until November when he replaced Dorsey as the CEO. India Today quoted, "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. Before 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."

With this, Agrawal has joined the esteemed list of Indian-Americans who are now heading significant companies. This list includes Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe), Arvind Krishna (IBM) and many more. This also marks an important milestone as Indians play an integral role in the current business and economic scenario.

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