Parag Agrawal - Another IITian to lead a global executive position

Parag Agrawal is making headlines after he has been appointed as the new CEO of Twitter.

Originally from Ajmer, Rajasthan, Parag has become the youngest CEO at the age of 37 to head an S&P 500 company.

Parag Agrawal grabbed the limelight after he succeeded Jack Dorsey as the CEO of microblogging giant Twitter. Born in 1984, Parag Agrawal earned his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2005. He then went on to pursue a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in the United States.

Parag joined Twitter in 2011 as a software engineer specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Prior to that, he worked at leadership positions in Microsoft Research and Yahoo! Research in large scale data management. In October 2017, he succeeded Adam Massinger as the chief technology officer (CTO). In this role, Parag implemented the company’s technical strategy and worked on machine learning and AI.

Parag’s appointment as the CEO comes at a time when the company is fiercely pursuing its growth aspirations. At the beginning of this year, Twitter had announced its aim to have 315 million monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year. In alignment with this plan, as per a report from Bloomberg, Twitter is exploring the addition of subscription services and other paid features to supplement its advertising revenues.

The company had announced these plans after it faced the ire of investors for not launching a new monetizable product for a long time. The onus of fulfilling Twitter’s ambitious targets and taking it to new heights now lie on the IIT-B alumnus Parag Agrawal.