Parag AgarwalTake a look at the innovation expectations with the arrival of Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agarwal, an IIT Bombay Graduate.

Earlier this week, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down from his role. He appointed CTO Parag Agrawal as the new CEO, effective immediately. Agrawal, who joined Twitter as an engineer in 2011, already announced a major reorganization of the company, per an internal email obtained by The Washington Post. Twitter confirmed the news to TechCrunch, as well.

With this, Parag Agrawal joins the growing list of Indians who’ve made it to C-level positions at tech giants — Sundar Pichai is the current CEO at Google, and Satya Nadella currently leads Microsoft. Padmashree Warrior had held the CTO role at networking giant Cisco for many years.

Walking Through the Journey of Parag Agarwal   

The new CEO received an undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Agrawal then completed a Ph.D. in philosophy and computer science at Stanford University between 2005-2012, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In 2006, Agrawal joined Microsoft for a brief four-month research role before moving on to research positions at Yahoo and AT&T, according to LinkedIn. Agrawal first arrived at Twitter in 2011, just months after Dorsey returned as CEO following his removal from the top position in 2008. 

When Agrawal started at Twitter, he reportedly worked on a project related to increasing the relevance of users’ tweets on their timelines and audience growth. He then received the title “distinguished engineer” for his impact on audience growth, according to Forbes. Agrawal was named CTO in 2018, nearly seven years after joining the company.

As CTO, Agrawal focused on “scaling a cohesive machine learning and AI approach,” across Twitter’s consumer and infrastructure team. Agrawal spoke in some detail on Twitter’s efforts to use AI to detect bot accounts and label potentially harmful content with the Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson.

A Hope For More Innovation

Given that Agrawal is a techie, there is a hope that this could drive more product innovation. Kal Patel, former partner at Vantage Point Venture Partners, said during a Twitter Spaces session that having an Indian-origin CEO could also have an impact on the relationship the company has with the Indian government. It would also be interesting to see the changes the new CEO could bring on moderation on the platform.

Though not a cofounder of Twitter like Dorsey, Agrawal is a decade-long veteran of the company. He joined Twitter in 2011 as a software engineer and became the company's CTO in 2017 — after prior stints at Microsoft and Yahoo during the 2000s. He holds computer science degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Stanford University. As an engineer, Agrawal played a key role driving the "re-acceleration" of Twitter's growth in 2016 and 2017, according to his company bio, a possible nod to why Agrawal may have been a top choice for the CEO position. As CTO, Agrawal also helped oversee Twitter's fledgling cryptocurrency initiatives and its machine learning efforts.

With Twitter's growing focus on its revenue model, the company could have turned to someone with a background in business. Instead, the company showed it remains committed to leader-engineers — builders who are intimately familiar with their product. In that respect, Agrawal's ascent echoes a familiar Silicon Valley theme. As if to underscore the point, Agrawal made an appeal to his colleagues, telling them in his first memo as CEO: I'm one of you. "I've walked in your shoes," he wrote. "I've seen the ups and downs, the challenges and obstacles, the wins and the mistakes."