Jack Dorsey Hands Over Twitter’s Reins to Parag Agrawal, Shifts to Square

After facing some turbulence last year from billionaire investor Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down from his role at Twitter yesterday. By announcing Parag Agrawal, a seasoned techie who shares his vision, as his replacement, Dorsey is clearly prioritizing Twitter’s long-term strategy of innovating in the decentralized social space.

Twitter co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey has announced he is leaving the company and is handing over the reins to his CTO Parag Agrawal. Dorsey made the announcement on the microblogging site on Monday, citing the ‘severe limitations’ of a company being founder-led. “I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.”

Now that it has, it is worthwhile to look at Dorsey’s stint as the head of the company he founded 15 years ago. After founding the company in March 2006, Dorsey steered at the helm for a year between 2007-2008 before being pushed out. He retained his position as the board chairman when co-founder Evan Williams, and later Dick Costolo headed the company between 2008-2010 and 2010-2015 respectively.

Dorsey returned in 2015 as Twitter’s CEO. He also relinquished his seat at the board, making way for Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor, his own appointment from 2016. This is interesting because it doesn’t look like the outgoing exec is planning to come back in any capacity in the future.

“I’m going to serve on the board through my term (Mayish) to help Parag and Bret with the transition. And after that…I’ll leave the board,” wrote Dorsey. “Why not stay or become chair? I believe it’s important to give Parag the space he needs to lead. And back to my previous point, I believe it’s critical a company can stand on it own, free of its founder’s influence or direction.”

So who exactly is Parag Agrawal? Well, he’s the latest in the line of CEOs of U.S.-based tech companies who grew up in India. Born in 1984 in Mumbai, just after Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Agrawal is now the youngest CEO in the S&P 500, as pointed out by Bloomberg.

A core techie at heart, after graduating from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Agrawal worked at Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AT&T between 2006 and 2010. He joined Twitter in 2011 as an engineer involved in the advertising wing. Back then, Twitter had approximately 1,000 employees as opposed to  around 5,500 at present.

Agrawal, who also completed his PhD from Stanford University in 2012, was little known outside Twitter as evident from his Twitter follower count hovering around the twenty thousand mark just before the announcement (the number has now surged to over 239K). But even inside Twitter, Agrawal more or less stayed away from public view.

Before taking over as Twitter’s CTO in October 2017, Agrawal earned the title of ‘Distinguished Software Engineer’ at the company, the first one at that. Prior to becoming the company’s CTO, Agrawal was involved in devising Twitter timeline algorithms and developing Twitter ads when it was just emerging. Twitter ads is now the principal source of revenue of the company, pooling in $1.14 billionOpens a new window of the company’s $1.28 billion revenue in Q3 2021.

Parag was one of the first engineers I worked with when I started at Twitter (when we were first working on timeline ranking). The rigor he brings to every decision was clear then, and I’m delighted to see it recognized today. Congratulations, @paragaOpens a new window !

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 29, 2021Opens a new window

See More: Twitter’s Decentralized Social Media Ambitions Has a New Face: Jay Graber

After becoming the CTO, he turned his attention to a host of undertakings such as formulating the platform’s artificial intelligence and machine learning strategy, including that for timeline optimization. He also shepherded Dorsey’s ambitions for a decentralized social protocol  dubbed Bluesky, eventually landing cryptocurrency developer Jay GraberOpens a new window .

Fairly similar to ActivityPubOpens a new window , Bluesky is aimed at bringing content interoperability and control across social platforms. Bluesky operates independently within Twitter and has been headed by Graber since August 2021. She postedOpens a new window on Twitter: “[Dorsey’s] technical expertise and cultural understanding runs deep. It’s hard to replace a founder-CEO, but someone who’s been in the trenches this long is a great bet. He’s also been a champion of  @bluesky  since the start.”

With a shared vision for web3, and how Twitter and other social platforms fit into it, Agrawal and Dorsey also grew closer over the years. Dorsey said his trust in Agrawal as the CEO is “bone deep.” “He’s been my choice for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs. Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around.”

It will be interesting to see how Agrawal carries forward the company’s existing policies, some more controversial than others. This includes the platform’s moderation policies, the tendency of racial bias, fake news, and shunning free speech.

Financially, Twitter is doing well. It is still on track to achieve  $7.5 billion or more in revenue by 2023, nearly double compared to 2020 revenues. Twitter shares jumped 10.33% at the start of the day but dropped by 11.75% at day’s end.

Dorsey will continue as the Twitter board chairman until his term ends around 2022. He will also continue as the co-founder and CEO of financial and digital payment services company Square. Elliott Management has a stake in both Twitter and Square. Last year, the investment management firm’s founder and billionaire investor Paul Singer sought to remove Dorsey as the Twitter CEO owing to his attention being split between the two companies he started.

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