New Delhi: While Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s style, as CEO of the microblogging website, was flamboyant, his successor, Parag Agrawal, is his complete opposite, a behind-the-scenes guy who has remained largely out of public view.
Their contrasting styles and personalities reflect in the number of their Twitter followers. Dorsey has 5.9 million Twitter followers. Agrawal had roughly 24,000 followers, a figure that has zoomed past 2 lakh since his appointment as the Twitter CEO.
In an email to company employees, Dorsey listed three reasons for why he thought it was the right time to leave. “The first is Parag becoming our CEO,” he said. “My trust in him as our CEO is bone deep,” he wrote.
Agrawal, an IIT-Bombay graduate with a PhD from Stanford, joined Twitter as a software engineer in 2011, working his way up to become the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in 2017 and now CEO.
He oversaw Twitter’s technical strategy and was responsible for improving the pace of software development while advancing the use of machine learning, reported Reuters.
Since 2019, Agrawal has been working on Project Bluesky, an independent team of open source architects, engineers and designers to combat abusive and misleading information on Twitter.
Bluesky is seeking to introduce a new decentralised technology, the idea being that Twitter and others will become clients of Bluesky and rebuild their platforms, reported Reuters.
At Twitter, Agrawal also integrated machine learnings models into ads and timeline products, moves that proved highly valuable in Twitter’s growth, according to media reports. A former colleague described him as “phenomenal, understands the problems, stays up late to get it done, mentors others — he’s the whole package”.
In contrast to Agrawal’s behind-the-scene persona, Dorsey is flamboyant.
After co-founding Twitter in 2006, he was removed as its CEO two years later but was back in 2015 after setting up his second company, Square.
As social media companies faced a backlash, he also testified before the Congress alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Dorsey’s biggest challenge as Twitter’s CEO probably came when hackers compromised 130 Twitter accounts, including those of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Kanye West in a bitcoin scam.
Like many billionaires, he owns a luxury house, dates models and drives fast cars.
