Twitter's CTO, Parag Agrawal, is now the microblogging site's CEO after its co-founder, Jack Dorsey has stepped down from his role.
Since all eyes are now on the new chief executive, everyone is curious to know more about him, and why was he chosen to steer the ship?
Here are 8 facts you might not know about Parag Agrawal:
1. Parag Agrawal is a 37-year-old immigrant from India. He was born in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
2. Agrawal's father was a senior official in the Indian Department of Atomic Energy, and his mother is a retired school teacher.
3. Agrawal received an undergraduate degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2005, and then moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
4. He is is the youngest person to run a company in the S&P 500, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
5. According to Agrawal's LinkedIn profile, he has worked as a researcher for Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc. and AT&T Corp.
6. Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 as an engineer at a time when the company had fewer than 1,000 employees.
7. In 2017, he was named the CTO of the company where he led the company's technical strategy including overseeing advancements in machine learning, according to Twitter's website.
8. In an interview with The Information earlier this year, Agrawal mentioned that he spearheaded the effort to advance Twitter’s internal technology back in 2018 in an effort to try and help speed up the pace of feature development and deployment.
9. One of his biggest projects as a CTO has been his overseeing the company’s decentralized Bluesky platform, which was first announced in December 2019.
It's worth noting that Twitter currently faces a host of challenges, including slow growth in its user base, as well as continuing struggles with misinformation and hate speech.
