Parag Agarwal, The Youngest CEO in the S&P 500

At 37,Parag Agrawal is not only the youngest CEO in the S&P 500 but also the latest to join the ranks of India-born techies

FREMONT, CA: The new CEO of Twitter, has joined a group of at least a dozen other Indian-born IT executives among the world's most powerful Silicon Valley companies. At 37,Parag Agrawal is not only the youngest CEO in the S&P 500 but also the latest to join the ranks of India-born techies like Satya Nadella of Microsoft Corp, Shantanu Narayen of Adobe Inc, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc.. This came into effect after the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey recently announced that he has stepped down as CEO after spending almost 16 years at the micro-blogging platform. He endorsed Agrawal’s technical capabilities as “transformational” in his note upon stepping down.

Mr. Agarwal holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and is a Computer Science and Engineering alumnus of IIT-Bombay. Agrawal worked on large-scale data management research with collaborators at Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, and AT&T Labs before joining Twitter in 2011.He began his career at twitter as an ads engineer and went on to hold the title of Twitter's 'Distinguished Software Engineer' for his role in helping boost audience growth and revenue. He was then appointed as the 'Chief Technology Officer' in 2017.One of his key contributions has been leading the company’s efforts in using artificial intelligence to increase the relevance of tweets in users’ timelines.

In December 2019, Dorsey had also put Agrawal in charge of Project Bluesky, the firm’s decentralized social networking efforts. Speaking at an  interview about a year ago, Agrawal claimed Twitter's method of dealing with misinformation as an increasingly nuanced approach with a range of interventions. He wants to continue to work on the long-held emphasis on trying to keep Twitter a neutral platform