“Even then, he had a lot of influence on the engineering direction of the company.” Gade left Twitter in 2014.
“He was on the shortlist of top engineers,” said Krishna Gade, who met Agrawal when he first interviewed with Twitter. He then became a member of what was known as the Twitter Architecture Group, or TAG, a team of top engineers who reviewed and improved the company’s projects that were under development. Using these techniques, Agrawal and his colleagues developed ways to target ads to particular users, which helped raise Twitter’s revenues and his profile. The ads team was among the first inside Twitter to make extensive use of so-called machine learning, mathematical systems that can learn particular skills by analyzing data. “I kept nagging him to go ahead and finish his thesis,” Widom said. He joined the company in 2011 before completing his doctorate and became a key member of the engineering team that oversaw the company’s advertising technologies. “If you are good at the theory, you have the ability to be analytical, to reason, to make decisions.”Īgrawal’s focus on databases made him a natural fit for Twitter, which must juggle data arriving from tens of millions of people across the globe. “Having both of those skills - math and theory - can take you a long way,” she said in a phone interview. There, he joined a research group focused on databases, which let computers store and mine large amounts of digital information.Įven among students at Stanford, Agrawal stood out for his strong grasp of the math and the theory that underpins computer science, said Jennifer Widom, who led the research lab and served as his thesis adviser. In 2005, he moved to the United States and enrolled at Stanford University to pursue a doctorate in computer science. “He definitely takes a big-picture view of what should Twitter be in the world and how should it work,” Mike Masnick, the founder of the technology news site Techdirt, who has advised Twitter on decentralization efforts, said of Agrawal.īorn in Mumbai, Agrawal studied computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology. Still, some tech observers said that Agrawal’s appointment made sense because he was a kind of “spiritual successor” to Dorsey: Both are quiet, polite, deeply technical and enthused about an internet where power and control are given back to users. Agrawal is also charged with carrying out Dorsey’s vision for decentralizing Twitter so that its users can eventually govern what is allowable on the service themselves.
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The company, which is based in San Francisco, faces challenges, such as placating activist investors and calming an agitated Congress about its power, divisiveness and potential to censor free speech. Yet as Twitter’s new chief, Agrawal has his work cut out for him. “Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants,” Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, said in a tweet Monday congratulating Agrawal. To some in Silicon Valley, Agrawal’s elevation was the definition of the American dream. Executives of South Asian descent are now at the helm of companies including Microsoft, Google and IBM, with many of them succeeding the companies’ founders. But then and now, above all else, I see Twitter’s incredible impact, our continued progress, and the exciting opportunities ahead of us.”Īgrawal becomes the latest India-born executive to take over a major American technology company. “I’ve walked in your shoes, I’ve seen the ups and downs, the challenges and obstacles, the wins and the mistakes. “I joined this company 10 years ago when there were fewer than 1,000 employees,” Agrawal wrote in the company email, which he also tweeted.
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