New Twitter Boss Under Pressure to Deliver Fast Results

To anyone hoping for a makeover on Twitter, this week’s promotion of Parag Agrawal to CEO may have seemed something of an anticlimax.

The sudden announcement on Monday that company co-founder Jack Dorsey had resigned with immediate effect — his second sudden exit from Twitter — suggested that a deeper shift might be at hand. Dorsey may have had some control of the moment, but after the flurry of shareholder activists, including a request from her head two years ago, the manner of her exit left the clear impression of a poorly negotiated deal.

Agrawal, however, has all the hallmarks of the consummate insider’s excellence and was a close ally of the outgoing CEO. He spent ten years climbing the ranks of Twitter, becoming chief technology officer four years ago, and is closely associated with many initiatives that were most cherished by Dorsey.
“It’s part of the building, basically,” said a former colleague on Twitter, who warned against expecting significant changes in the company.

Another commented that proximity to Dorsey earned Agrawal a special place in the Twitter hierarchy. If you wanted to propose an idea to the sometimes distant chief executive of the company, the best start was often to present it to Agrawal, according to this person.

But despite all that, Agrawal’s promotion to one of the hottest spots in the tech industry could indicate a tipping point. Former employees describe a company that struggled to regain confidence after a string of failed products and lost its appetite for the kind of constant experimentation and product iteration that Silicon Valley’s most successful companies are known for. Agrawal’s fans say he is well on his way to solving these problems.

Little known outside the halls of Twitter, his background as an engineer and chief product officer has earned him a solid reputation among Twitter peers and some investors. He arrived in the United States in 2005 as a graduate of the India Institute of Technology in Mumbai and, like the Indian CEOs of Microsoft and IBM, his appointment was seen as an attempt to bring stronger engineering leadership to a company that it was in danger of losing its technological advantage.

In his early years on Twitter, he helped reshape the technical infrastructure, laying a stronger foundation for the faster pace of product innovation and growth that Wall Street demanded. Agrawal joined the company after a Ph.D. from Stanford University, interspersed with stints in research at Microsoft, Yahoo, and AT&T.

That job earned him recognition as Twitter’s first “remarkable engineer” — a title that confers tremendous status among Silicon Valley’s engineering elite but rarely paves the way for a CEO position.

After taking over as head of technology, Agrawal helped accelerate Twitter’s new product cycles. The result has been an increase in the pace of launches, including, in the last year, an audio chat room service and Twitter’s first subscription offering. None of them, however, represented a radical change factor.

Focusing on engineering and product development, Twitter this week also named one of Silicon Valley’s top product managers as president. Though in his early 30s, Bret Taylor has a background that includes helping create Google Maps, serving as Facebook’s chief technology officer, and founding two startups. More recently, he has emerged as Salesforce’s top product guru, his rise hit a day after the Twitter changes with the news that Taylor has also been named co-CEO at the enterprise software company.

Even among Silicon Valley’s dense personal networks, this could be something of a first. Five years ago, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff tried to buy Twitter before giving in to pressure from his own shareholders and backing down. Today, its newly anointed co-CEO is running the business on Twitter’s board.

A pure engineering mind in the lead could overcome the indecision that has invaded Twitter under Dorsey’s direction, according to Alex Roetter, the company’s former director of engineering. Engineers “tend to look at the data and move on with things,” he said, adding of Agrawal: “He’s very data driven, he can be intense. He has a low tolerance for things that are less than great. But he has a way to make people want to work with him”.

Whatever his technical achievements, however, Agrawal’s inexperience in the public eye could be an obstacle for a company that played an exaggerated role in the cultural environment of the time and that is often at the center of political storms over alleged trends and the spread of misinformation on social media.

Dorsey’s personal connections have helped make Twitter a cultural phenomenon and raised her profile among celebrities, said a former employee. According to him, the famous were always dazzled when they met the founder, adding that, in this sense, Agrawal will have difficulty filling Dorsey’s place.

With Wall Street pressing for results, the new boss can’t wait for a big honeymoon. Twitter’s ambitious growth targets call for it to increase the number of daily active users by 50% by the end of 2023, and investors are impatient for its business to reach a scale comparable to its considerable influence in the social media world.

“It could be a $200 billion (R$1.12 trillion) company by following the products roadmap and monetizing this huge and growing user base,” insisted one shareholder.

Recently, however, Twitter’s market valuation has retreated to below US$35 billion (R$196 billion). The company’s share price has nearly halved from its peak in February, to roughly its position at the end of day one as a public company eight years ago.

Dorsey left after failing to convince investors that he could make a significant shift in Twitter’s growth trajectory. To avoid that fate, Agrawal will have to deliver some results quickly.