Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down as chief of the social media company.
Parag Agrawal, the company’s chief technology officer, is taking over as CEO effective immediately.
Jack Dorsey stepped down after 16 years as Twitter’s CEO and Indian-origin Parag Agrawal, a former alumnus of IIT Bombay, was named his replacement. Dorsey will serve on the board until the end of his tenure in 2022.
Agrawal, who joined Twitter in 2011 and was named CTO in 2017, expressed confidence in his replacement. Before joining Twitter, Agrawal worked for companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and AT&T Labs.
Agrawal was previously tasked with choosing a leader for Project Bluesky, a Twitter research project aimed at establishing open and decentralized social media platform standards. Bluesky would let social media companies coordinate on how posts are promoted to users and will give users more choice over the content they see, according to Dorsey. Bluesky may also make it easier for social media platforms to enforce limitations on hate speech and other forms of abuse, allowing them to share the burden at a reduced cost.
“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders,” Dorsey said in a statement, though he didn’t provide any additional detail on why he decided to resign.
Agrawal will be expected to satisfy Twitter’s ambitious internal objectives. The company stated earlier this year that by the end of 2023, it hopes to have 315 million monetizable daily active users and to have more than doubled its annual income.
“Twitter is now executing against an ambitious multi-year plan to dramatically increase the company’s reach and value, and we look forward to the next chapter of Twitter’s story,” the company’s managing partner Jesse Cohn and senior portfolio manager Marc Steinberg said. “Having gotten to know both incoming Chairman Bret Taylor and incoming CEO Parag Agrawal, we are confident that they are the right leaders for Twitter at this pivotal moment for the company.”
