Do not underestimate Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal

I’ve been following Twitter for some time and while I’m a power user of the service, I’ve been less optimistic on the stock and the business. My biggest concern has always been Dorsey as a part-time CEO. I don’t believe truly outstanding results can be achieved by a part-time CEO with interests clearly beyond Twitter (e.g. Square and crypto) especially when your competition are outstanding founders like Zuckerberg, Spiegel etc. Yet, we have a new CEO at Twitter, who has potential to become a transformative leader. It’s obviously too early to say, and I’m not making a call to buy the stock, but Parag Agrawal is an extremely interesting person with huge potential: if he is a CEO of a multi billion company at 37, imagine what he can do by his 50s?

• The youngest CEO in S&P 500 (37 years and even younger than Mark Zuckerberg);

• Technical;

• Made a great career since joining Twitter in 2011 as an engineer: was promoted to a CTO in 2017 (he was 33 at the time);

• Won a gold medal at the 2001 International Physics Olympiad held in Turkey;

• Prof Supratim Biswas of the department of Computer Science and Engineering (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay): He was a typical topper type material. He was extremely well-organised and very well-behaved. He had all the qualities in him to excel in academics in IIT-Bombay;

• Married to Vineeta Agarwala (a general partner at a16z — a venture capital firm) who is also a physician and clinical professor at Stanford Medicine. They have one son.

• Has PhD in Computer Science from Stanford. Dean of Engineering at Stanford, Jennifer Widom, was Agrawal’s thesis advisor, who described him as thoughtful and analytical. His PhD was on methodologies to deal with messy and undefined data.

• Before joining Twitter, he had worked at Microsoft, Yahoo and US telecoms giant AT&T in various research roles.

• “Respected by employees” [Barron’s]

• Press release: As CTO, he has been responsible for the Company's technical strategy, leading work to improve development velocity while advancing the state of Machine Learning across the company. Prior to being appointed CTO, Parag had risen to be Twitter's first Distinguished Engineer due to his work across revenue and consumer engineering, including his impact on the re-acceleration of audience growth in 2016 and 2017. (I assume that work earned him a CTO position)

• Jack Dorsey: The board ran a rigorous process considering all options and unanimously appointed Parag. He's been my choice for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs. Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around. He's curious, probing, rational, creative, demanding, self-aware, and humble. He leads with heart and soul, and is someone I learn from daily. My trust in him as our CEO is bone deep.

• Bret Taylor, Twitter's incoming Independent Board Chair: "Parag understands Twitter and appreciates the Company's unique potential. He has been instrumental in tackling our most important priorities, including accelerating our development velocity, and I know he'll hit the ground running to strengthen execution and deliver results. The Board has the utmost confidence in Parag." [press release]

• Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney: “And what underlies these value proposition challenges, we believe, has been an inconsistent product development track record, which the company has acknowledged, to its credit. Perhaps having a ‘full-time’ CEO will improve this track record. It’s hard to know. And we don’t believe we’ll have great insight for several quarters to come.” [Barron’s]

• Managing Partner Jesse Cohn and Senior Portfolio Manager Marc Steinberg, Elliott Investment Management: Twitter is the leading global medium for real-time conversation and engagement, and our collaboration with Jack and the company for the past two years has been productive and effective. Twitter is now executing against an ambitious multi-year plan to dramatically increase the company's reach and value, and we look forward to the next chapter of Twitter's story. Having gotten to know both incoming Chairman Bret Taylor and incoming CEO Parag Agrawal, we are confident that they are the right leaders for Twitter at this pivotal moment for the company. [press release]

• He's worked on machine learning and other technical advances that have enabled Twitter to roll out new features and products more quickly, as it's tried to shake off a reputation for being slow to innovate. [NPR]

• Agrawal has also championed an internal team of researchers investigating whether Twitter's algorithms are fair. Recently that team published research that found its automated photo-cropping system favored white faces, and Twitter announced it was abandoning the software. [NPR]

Below are also some excerpts from articles (The Verge, Washington Post and Protocol):

• Agrawal spearheaded the effort to advance Twitter’s internal technology back in 2018 in an effort to try and help speed up the pace of feature development and deployment, as noted in an interview with The Information earlier this year. “When we hear people say that Twitter is slow at shipping, that hurts, and that is something we use as motivation,” Agrawal said. [The Verge]

• “he spent much of his tenure at Twitter with zero direct reports” [Washington Post]

• One of the employees described Agrawal as a “big ideas guy” who was unproven as a manager, doesn’t relish dealing in details and “isn’t the best with people.” Even so, that employee was “overall happy” with the choice, because Agrawal came across as thoughtful and respectful. [Washington Post]

• “He’s a culture carrier, internally, highly respected within the company, and wouldn’t be highly disruptive” as the new CEO, the person said. “If you look at what Twitter needs to take it from where it is today to a $100 billion, $200 billion company, it’s really a product-driven, innovation mind-set: How do we roll out new features and functionality?” The person cited Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen as examples of internal candidates with little name recognition who emerged as capable leaders at their respective firms. [Washington Post]

• Agrawal’s work ethic and motivation to learn was well known and regarded inside the company, according to several Twitter employees. One year, in preparation for Twitter’s hack week, he read several books and took courses in machine learning just to prepare, according to the same Twitter employee familiar with his work. [Protocol]

• Widom (Jennifer Widom, Agrawal’s thesis adviser and the dean of Engineering at Stanford) — who also attended Agrawal’s wedding — hosted Agrawal and his wife, Vineeta Agarwala, and their son for a backyard happy hour a few months ago… Widom described them as a “power couple” who, despite their impressive careers, “are very, very down-to-earth. He’s not egocentric at all. A very straightforward person,” she said. [Protocol]

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To summarize: Parag Agrawal is the youngest CEO in S&P 500; with a track record of success; rose through the ranks at Twitter at an astonishing pace; respected by his colleagues; “down-to-earth”; has excellent work ethic and motivation to learn; while his leadership skills are still a question mark, he has led a technical team at Twitter which is “hundreds of people” and this work earned him a CEO position. There is a common theme behind all his work over the past 5-6 years: acceleration. While being an engineer his work helped to re-accelerate audience growth; as a CTO he helped to accelerate development velocity.

Many people compare Parag with Satya Nadella (and I agree on similarities), I would also compare him with Lisa Su from AMD when she was appointed in 2014: young, technical insider with PhD with the task of turning company around. So far market is sceptical and this makes the situation so interesting.