Agrawal may be strange to many, but of course he has a Twitter account. In an e-mail sent there on Monday afternoon, he directed — after broadly thanking his former boss — to his colleagues: “I must admit that some of you know me well, some know me a little, and some do not know me at all. But in truth, he emphasized Agrawal, just me one of the men: I was in your shoes.”
On Twitter, Agrawal is already at the bottom of the ladder. After gaining work experience at Microsoft and Yahoo, among others, Agrawal joined the San Francisco-based company a decade ago. He became the first outstanding engineer, a position that only the most talented and esteemed employees receive. Since 2017, Agrawal has been as Chief Technology Officer Responsible for Twitter’s technical strategy.
Few facts are known about Agrawal’s personal life. He was born in 1983 in the Indian capital, Mumbai. The mother was a teacher, and the father worked in the Indian nuclear power programme. As a high school student, Agrawal excelled in science subjects, winning in 2001 gold medal The International Physics Olympiad in Turkey.
He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, moving to the United States in 2005. There he also met his future wife Vineta, a senior physician at Stanford University School of Medicine. The couple has a son.
as chief executive officer For a large technology company, Agrawal in Silicon Valley does not belong to the group of famous CEOs Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Elon Musk (Tesla). It is noteworthy that Indians are increasingly taking the lead in large technology companies: after Sundar Pichai (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe), Arvind Krishna (IBM) and Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks), Agrawal is sixth.
Experts expect Agrawal to quietly continue the streak Dorsey started on Twitter. “We have recently updated our strategy to achieve ambitious targets,” Agrawal himself wrote in his email. “I think the strategy is bold and correct.”
The all-new Twitter chief faces some major challenges. For example, the platform should prevent its users from turning to competitors like TikTok and Instagram. At the same time, Twitter is also taking on a growing responsibility outside the tech world: it must maintain a balance between protecting freedom of expression and combating fake news. From a political point of view, this is a delicate balance: Former US President Donald Trump recently announced that he will challenge his Twitter ban, among other things, through the courts.
