It is now confirmed that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will be leaving the company for the second time and this time maybe permanently but the other confirmation is that CTO Parag Agrawal will succeed him.
According to his Wikipedia page, Parag Agrawal is an Indian-American technology executive and the current chief executive officer (CEO) of Twitter. He is responsible for Twitter’s Technical Strategy, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Consumer, Revenue and Science teams.
Agrawal joined the company in October 2011 and held several positions at the company most recently including “Distinguished Software Engineer”. Before joining Twitter, Parag held leadership positions at Microsoft Research and Yahoo! Research.[2] According to Agrawal’s biography on the Twitter leadership page, he is responsible for “Twitter’s technical strategy and overseeing machine learning and AI across the consumer, revenue, and science teams”
Dorsey released a statement just as news of his ouster hit the internet that “I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders”.
The incoming CEO Agrawal has a big shoe to fill however as Twitter has set some really high goals and once of which is having 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023.
Twitter shares have jumped 85 percent since Dorsey’s 2015 return but his other company Square has seen shares surge 1,566 percent since its November 2015 IPO. This analysts think was one of the reasons shareholders asked that Jack Dorsey be returned to the Twitter CEO position while others believed, he would not be able to manage a fast growing Square and a declining Twitter at the same time. However, he has since grown the company from being a $16b site in 2015 to over $47b today.
Twitter in a bid to meet its 2023 monetisation goals has embarked on a series of programs like Super Follow. Revenue was $1.28 billion in Q3. And we continue to see significant ad revenue growth which increased 41% year-over-year this quarter. Average, monetizable DAU increased to $211 million, up 13% of year-over-year, with growth accelerating from an increase of 11% year-over-year in Q2.
While Twitter grew under Jack Dorsey, he made quite a number of controversial decisions like permanently banning former US President Trump from the platform (we don’t think the new CEO will reverse this though). Trump had nearly 90 million followers at the time and was assumed to be on the biggest users of the platform with some of this “politically insensitive” tweets. Nigeria’s Buhari also got his tweet removed and this led to a ban of Twitter in Nigeria for nearly half a year now and even as we speak the ban is still on.
