The elevation of Parag Agrawal as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Twitter has once again highlighted the fact that Indian-origin techies head many prominent global technology companies.
The 37-year-old computer scientist with a PhD from Stanford will immediately take over the microblogging site's CEO, following Jack Dorsey's surprise resignation. Agrawal has joined the likes of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, who all are at the helm of global tech.
There are several other Indians at the top of global firms. Rajeev Suri was elevated to President and CEO of Nokia in April 2014 after Microsoft acquired the company.
While Shantanu Narayen has been heading Adobe as CEO since 2007, SanDisk was co-founded by Indian-American businessman Sanjay Mehrotra. Nikesh Arora, the ex-CEO of investment firm Softbank now heads security firm Palo Alto Networks as its chairman and CEO.
With this, Twitter is the new addition to the tech giants to be led by an Indian.
Parag, aged 37, is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai where he did his Bachelors in Engineering in computer science. He moved to the US for further studies, with his doctorate from Stanford University based in California.
Further, Parag joined Twitter in 2011. Before that, he briefly worked at Microsoft, AT&T and Yahoo. In all three companies, his work was primarily research-oriented. Initially, he worked on ad-related products at Twitter, but gradually, he also dabbled in artificial intelligence.
Earlier, Dorsey announced that he was resigning as CEO of Twitter and that Agrawal was replacing him.
"Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around. He's curious, probing, rational, creative, demanding, self-aware and humble," Dorsey posted on his Twitter account.
(ANI)