Factbox – Who is Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal?

(Reuters) – Twitter Inc on Monday appointed technology chief Parag Agrawal as its chief executive officer, replacing Jack Dorsey.

The social media networking platform joins tech giants Apple, Amazon and Alphabet in tapping a company insider for the top job.

Here are some facts about Agrawal:

Decade with twitter

Agrawal joined Twitter more than a decade ago as a software engineer and was appointed chief technology officer in October 2017.

He oversaw Twitter’s technical strategy and was responsible for improving the pace of software development while advancing the use of machine learning across the company.

At 37, Agrawal is the youngest CEO of an S&P 500 company.

LATEST INDIAN-ORIGIN CEO

Agrawal is the latest CEO of Indian origin, joining a list that includes Alphabet Inc’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft Corp’s Satya Nadella and IBM Corp’s Arvind Krishna.

Stanford graduate

Agrawal has a doctorate in philosophy in computer science from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B).

Both Pichai and Krishna also hold bachelor’s degrees from IITs.

Project bluesky

Since December 2019, Agrawal has also been working on Project Bluesky, an independent team of open-source architects, engineers and designers to combat abusive and misleading information on Twitter.

Bluesky is seeking to introduce a new decentralized technology, the idea being that Twitter and others will become clients of Bluesky and rebuild their platforms on top of the standard, Dorsey has said previously.

Free speech

Responding to a question on protecting free speech and fighting misinformation in an interview with the MIT Technology Review in 2020, Agrawal said “our (Twitter’s) role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.”

EX-MICROSOFT, YAHOO EMPLOYEE

Before joining Twitter, Agrawal worked at Microsoft Corp, Yahoo and AT&T Labs Inc in their research units, according to his LinkedIn profile

(Reporting by Eva Mathews and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru)