Jack Dorsey resigned from Twitter and named Paraga Agrawal his successor.
Five of the largest tech companies in the world, have Indian CEOs, including Twitter (Paraga Agrawal), Google (Sundar Pichai), Microsoft (Satya Nadella), Adobe (Shantanu Narayen), and IBM (Arvind Krishna).
Even in Africa, Indians are at the managerial top of firms like Dangote, MTN, Glo and others.
What are Indians doing right and what can the rest of the world learn from them about upward mobility?
In this regard, Agrawal’s appointment was commended by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man after Jeff Bezos: “USA benefits greatly from Indian talent!” he tweeted in reply to a tweet on Indian-origin persons leading some of the world’s top tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Adobe and IBM.
Also commenting, Patrick Collison, an Irish billionaire, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, the company which acquired Nigeria’s Stripe in October 2020, said: “Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up in India. Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants. (Congrats, @paraga!).”
Agrawal, who holds a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he studied Computer Science and received his degree, has been with Twitter for 10 years and most recently, he occupied the position of chief technology officer.
At the beginning, Agrawal joined Twitter as a software engineer in 2011 and became the CTO in 2017.
The 37-year-old immigrant from India, held leadership positions at Microsoft Research and Yahoo! before joining Twitter.
With Twitter, he was responsible for the company’s technical strategy, overseeing machine learning and AI across the consumer, revenue, and science teams.
While Dorsey will remain a member of the board, Agrawal will work towards meeting the company’s goal of having 315,000,000 monetisable daily active users by the end of 2023 and double its annual revenue in the same year, among other goals.