Bringing an end to his 16-year stint with Twitter, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and the chief executive officer stepped down from his position on November 29. The company’s Board has unanimously named Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal as Dorsey’s successor.
To enable a smooth transition, Dorsey will remain a member of the Board till around May 2022.
“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being founder-led. Ultimately, I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure,“ Dorsey said in a statement.
On Agrawal’s appointment as the CEO, Dorsey said, “He has been my choice for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs. Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around. My trust in him as our CEO is bone-deep.”
Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 and was appointed as the company’s CTO in 2017.The appointment of Agrawal as Twitter’s new CEO implies the company has chosen engineering as its top priority.
Agrawal has helped lead Twitter’s work on incorporating cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies into the company and also pursue its long-term ambition to rebuild how social media companies operate. He has been a key figure in Bluesky, a Twitter-funded organization that is seeking to build a “decentralized” common standard for social media companies. Such a standard would allow different social platforms to operate on the same technology and let users post content across the services, for instance.
