“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, chief executive of Stripe, said in a tweet on Monday congratulating Mr. Agrawal.
Yet as Twitter’s new chief, Mr. Agrawal has his work cut out for him. 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. Mr. Agrawal is also charged with carrying out Mr. Dorsey’s vision for decentralizing Twitter so that its users can eventually govern what is allowable on the service themselves.
Still, some tech observers said that Mr. Agrawal’s appointment made sense because he was a kind of “spiritual successor” to Mr. Dorsey: Both are quiet, polite, deeply technical and enthused about an internet where power and control are given back to users.
“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 Mr. Agrawal.
Born in Mumbai, Mr. Agrawal studied computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, an elite technical university. In 2005, he moved to the United States and enrolled at Stanford University to pursue a doctorate in computer science. There, he joined a research group focused on databases, which let computers store and mine large amounts of digital information.
Even among students at Stanford, Mr. 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.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/technology/parag-agrawal-twitter.html
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