Who is Agrawal, the new commander of Twitter?

[Asia Economy Reporter Yujin Cho] Following Jack Dorsey as CEO, Parag Agrawal, who will lead Twitter, is a software engineer by background and is the same age as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, born in 1984.

According to data compiled by Bloomberg on the 29th (local time), with this CEO appointment, he becomes the youngest CEO among S&P 500 large companies alongside Zuckerberg.

Foreign media have evaluated that appointing a CEO who started as an engineer at a Silicon Valley big tech company is very unusual.

Agrawal, who earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University, worked as a researcher at Microsoft and Yahoo before joining Twitter in 2011. At that time, he began his career as a software engineer at Twitter, which had fewer than 1,000 employees.

Since then, he has led Twitter's technology division as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) since 2017. During his tenure as CTO, he played a key role in building Bluesky, an open-source project creating decentralized social media technology, paving the way for Twitter's new business expansion.

It is also reported that the crypto team, a dedicated virtual currency team announced last month, is directly reporting to Agrawal and that he is deeply involved.

Bloomberg reported that Dorsey, a prominent Bitcoin advocate, appointing him as his successor suggests that Twitter will expand into Bitcoin-related services in the future.

Dorsey has stated that after successfully introducing Bitcoin trading to Square in 2019, he plans to integrate digital assets into Twitter's future.

The primary challenges Agrawal will face as CEO include expanding the user base and increasing revenue. Earlier this year, Twitter set management goals to increase monthly active users by 1.5 times within two years and to at least double annual revenue.

Another challenge is finding a breakthrough for stagnant stock prices. Compared to other social media companies, Twitter's stock price has shown slow growth for years. Since Dorsey returned as CEO in 2015, Twitter's stock price has only risen 62% through this year, and annual revenue growth was only 68%. During the same period, competitor Meta's stock price rose 260%, and revenue increased more than fourfold.

In a statement announcing his resignation, Dorsey expressed deep trust in Agrawal, saying, "Agrawal's work over the past decade has been very transformative. He has been deeply involved in our business as an engineer, and now it is time for him to lead Twitter."

Agrawal also expressed his aspirations, saying, "I am grateful for the board's trust in my leadership and Dorsey's ongoing mentoring, support, and partnership. Building on the foundation of growth Dorsey established, we will reshape the future of social media to deliver great value to customers and shareholders."

Dorsey is expected to step down from the CEO position immediately after the statement and completely withdraw from Twitter management by leaving the board around May next year when his term expires.