Parag Agrawal is taking a crash course on what it’s like to be a famous CEO.
By appointing Parag Agrawal as chief executive officer, Twitter Inc. looking inward, choosing a technologist with a low profile to run a social network underperforming in the marketplace, pausing new product launches, and fighting harmful content moderation under a leader. Leadership has long been criticized for the Division of Attention.
Agrawal, 37, was named on Monday to succeed co-founder Jack Dorsey after four years as CTO, a role where he oversaw Twitter’s pursuit of blockchain and decentralized technologies. is different. Dorsey, 45, will remain on the board through the summer and will stay on to run Square Inc., the payments company he also co-founded.
While Dorsey is a famous billionaire with celebrity friends and millions of Twitter followers, Agrawal remains a relative unknown who doesn’t spend time in the limelight at the controversial social media company argue. Dorsey’s personal interests — like music and Bitcoin — often featured in his posts and were eventually included in the company’s product road map, but he was unable to switch jobs. business since taking over his second CEO term. in 2015.
The company’s new chief will inherit Twitter’s political tussles – including criticism over its ban on former President Donald Trump as well as friction with India’s ruling party. And he’ll have to pursue aggressive goals to drive user growth, double revenue, and accelerate product execution.
“What will his North Star be that he sets out there to bet his farm – or at least his career – on?” Mark Shmulik, an equity research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said. “And then how successful will he be against that?”
Agrawal is the youngest person to run a company in the S&P 500, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Before switching to Twitter, Agrawal earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
He has worked as a researcher for Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc. and AT&T Corp., according to his LinkedIn profile. He joined Twitter in 2011 as an engineer at a time when the company had less than 1,000 employees. In that role, he worked to drive audience growth and revenue and was named Twitter’s first outstanding engineer, the company said. After being appointed CTO in 2017, he led the company’s technical strategy including overseeing advancements in the field of machine learning, according to Twitter’s website.
Now, Agrawal is taking over a company that has been slow to roll out new products and features for years, but has started growing faster, making more acquisitions, and pushing into open areas. business wide, like live audio and subscriptions.
Twitter’s growth-boosting goals came after activist investor Elliott Management Corp. buy shares in early 2020 to pressure the company to start business. After making initial changes that made Elliott happy in 2020, in February 2021, Twitter announced its goal of doubling annual revenue by 2023 and continuing to grow its user base by 20%. in the next three years.
On the plus side, Agrawal’s appointment means Twitter will have a full-time CEO for the first time in years. Dorsey’s leadership of Square is one of Elliott’s main criticisms of the social network. On Monday, Agrawal sent out a message to Twitter employees, alluding to the challenges and opportunities ahead.
“We recently updated our strategy to achieve ambitious goals, and I believe it is bold and right,” Agrawal wrote. “But our key challenge is how we work to perform against it and deliver results – that’s how we’re going to make Twitter the best it can be for our customers, shareholders.” ours and for each of you.”
Insiders’ reaction to the news was mixed. A poll on Blind, an anonymous app for employees who sign up with a company email address, found that more than three-quarters of more than 150 respondents either did not believe Agrawal was the “boy” for work or waiting. to decide but “feels negative.” Some of the other employee tweets were more positive, and many acknowledged that the CEO transition looked smoother than the last time Twitter changed leadership.
Twitter shareholders will be looking to Agrawal to chart a more stable path to building metrics on the company’s revenue and engagement. While Twitter’s user base has expanded steadily over the years, the company hasn’t been able to match the growth rates or stock returns of industry peers like Snapchat parent Snap Inc. and Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. Twitter stock is up 62% since Dorsey got back in 2015, and annual revenue is up 68% from 2015. Meta’s stock is up 260% in that same time, and sales are up. more than four times.
Competitors’ investments in augmented and virtual reality-enabled devices and services could put pressure on Twitter to innovate more boldly and quickly. Meta recently changed its name to signal a focus on the immersive digital world known as the metaverse, which many major tech companies are pursuing as the next transformative computing platform.
“The headline here is the implementation of Twitter,” said Mandeep Singh, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “The level of engagement they had, they could never monetize it as well as some of the other social media platforms.”
To stay competitive, Shmulik argues, Agrawal may need to change the company’s culture so that new products and strategies can be implemented at a faster rate than in previous years.
“Can he at least avoid being the tooth that everything needs to go through in order to get approval and let things work out?” Shmulik said. “Can he give more autonomy to different parts of the organization so they can move at a faster pace?”
Agrawal won’t just continue to grow Twitter’s business. The company also remains at the center of some thorny political issues, such as how to moderate internet speech, and is a prime target for conservative politicians who believe that public companies Technology has too much power.
Twitter is regularly criticized by politicians around the world for its management of misinformation, hate speech and other forms of objectionable content across the vast social network of 211 million active users. daily. It became the social media platform where politicians turned to business, where CEOs announced new products and daily users talked about the latest events.
Twitter’s broad reach also makes it a place of polarization, and the company is often attacked for the decisions it makes around policy content. It is accused of censorship by people whose tweets have been removed or flagged, and criticized by others for failing to protect users from abuse or hate speech when it posted some posts.
This difficult balance is one reason the company is pushing for what it calls Bluesky, an open-source project that aims to decentralize the technology used to run social media platforms. In theory, different organizations should have the freedom to create their own rules and algorithms for governing the social network. A post that may violate Twitter’s rules and thus be removed may appear on another service that uses the same protocol but with more lenient content standards. Agrawal understands Bluesky, as well as any other executive at Twitter, helped incubate the idea internally before Twitter appointed an external lead for the project.
So far, Twitter’s approach to content moderation has not drawn criticism from Washington lawmakers, who regularly ask Dorsey to appear before Congress to testify about the company’s policies. External pressure from politicians and pundits will be a stark change for Agrawal, who has spent his time at Twitter going unnoticed.
Agrawal is taking a crash course on what it’s like to be a senior executive. Shortly after he was announced as Dorsey’s successor, several Twitter users posted a tweet from him in 2010, citing a Daily Show joke about how to treat all Muslims like Muslims. Terrorists are the same as treating all whites as racist.
Dorsey will stay on the board of San Francisco-based Twitter until the end of his term in 2022, the company said. Agrawal also joins the board, and director Bret Taylor, chief executive officer of software maker Salesforce.com Inc., has been named as independent chairman.
While Agrawal may never be as public as his predecessor, as CEO he will be required to forge new relationships with the press, regulators and even even its employees.
“The world is watching us right now, even more than it was before,” Agrawal wrote Monday. “That’s because they care about Twitter and our future, and it’s a signal that the work we do here is important.”
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