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Who is Parag Agrawal?
Parag Agrawal is an Indian-American CEO of Twitter Inc. He was elevated to the post after Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down in November 2021. In the past, Agarwal was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the social media firm. He is the youngest CEO leading a Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 company and is also part of a select group of CEOs of Indian origin heading technology companies in the US.
Early life and education
Parag Agrawal was born in Maharashtra. His mother is a retired school teacher and his father was employed in the atomic energy sector. Agrawal studied at the Atomic Energy Central School in Mumbai. He completed his B Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay (IIT Bombay) in 2005.
Later, he moved to the United States and joined Twitter in 2011 while still pursuing his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in California.
Parag Agrawal's career
Parag Agrawal joined Twitter as a Distinguished Software Engineer and was elevated as chief technology officer in 2017. Agrawal joined Twitter at a time when the company had fewer than 1,000 employees.
He worked on boosting audience growth and revenue. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has also worked with AT&T Labs Inc, Microsoft and Yahoo!.
As a CTO, Agrawal managed Twitter's technical strategy and was responsible for improving the pace of software development, while advancing the use of machine learning across the company.
Project Bluesky
Since December 2019, Parag has been working on Project Bluesky, an independent team of open source architects, engineers and designers to combat abusive and misleading information on Twitter.