When Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, is looking for a successor to replace him as CEO, he does not set his sights on a renowned boss who has been at the helm of several large international groups. To put his social network back on a better track, his choice fell on Parag Agrawal, a discreet man who has spent his entire career at Twitter without capturing much light.
On November 29, the man was appointed CEO by a unanimous board of directors, marking the hushed but nevertheless dazzling success of an immigrant who arrived on American soil only sixteen years ago.
Arrived in 2005 in the United States, at age 21
Born in India, Parag Agrawal spent his childhood in the country’s commercial capital, Bombay, before joining one of its most prestigious universities, the Indian Institute of Technolology. When he arrived in the United States in 2005, it was in the shoes of a young doctorate in computer science at Stanford, the prestigious university in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. At the time, Agrawal’s research director, Jennifer Widom, interviewed speak New York Times, recalls a student particularly gifted in mathematics and theory.
Arrived at Twitter in 2011 with the tag ofexpert in complex data sets, it integrates the advertising department, helping to better target advertising and increase the company’s revenue. It is in this context that he participates in one of the first uses at Twitter of machine learning, a self-learning artificial intelligence that will very quickly become a key tool for several giants of Silicon Valley.
“I joined the company when it had less than 1,000 employees, recalls Parag Agrawal, in a message posted on Twitter. I have seen the ups and downs, the challenges and the obstacles, the victories and the mistakes. “ Quickly, the new employee supplants colleagues who sometimes have five years of seniority, integrating the circle influential engineers of the company, the distinguished engineers. As such, it gives its opinion on many strategic projects, recalls resigning CEO Jack Dorsey :
“Parag has been involved in every critical decision made to transform this business. He is curious, sharp, rational, creative, demanding and humble. He leads with his heart and soul and I learn from him every day. “
Youngest boss of the SP500
In 2014, Parag Agrawal helps the company to employ the machine learning for new purposes, such as audience growth or moderation of problematic content. In 2015, he was one of the key figures in the overhaul of the timeline Twitter, sorting between messages a user sees and those not presented to them.
In 2017, he was appointed technical director of the company, relocating certain services to Amazon Web Service and Google servers. One of its goals will be to increase the company’s responsiveness to deploying new services, an issue that Twitter still struggles with today, according to an interview. given by Parag Agrawal in 2021 to the media The Information.
In November, it is the consecration: Parag Agrawal is appointed, at 37, CEO of Twitter. It is according to Bloomberg the youngest boss of the SP500, a stock market index that benchmarks five hundred of America’s biggest companies. And by May 2022, he should have a free hand to change the course of the company: Jack Dorsey has planned to leave the supervisory board from Twitter on that date. But the challenges that await Parag Agrawal are colossal.
The new CEO will have to try to defuse an accusation often made to Twitter in the columns of the press and the US Congress: that of dividing public opinion and promoting the spread of false information. An attack that places the company in a delicate position. Twitter should both censor more effectively hateful or false speech posted by a section of its users without lending itself to the opposite accusation, that of restricting the freedom of speech guaranteed by the American Constitution, accuses that elected conservatives regularly make him.
Machine learning and moderation
In 2020, Parag Agrawal took a position on this subject in an interview with the university magazine MIT Technology Review, pointing out the importance of contextualization:
“You wouldn’t want us to judge what is right or wrong in this world. And in all fairness, we can’t do it globally in every country we work in, with every culture and nuance that exists. [Nous ne dirons donc pas] whether a message is true or false, but we’ll give it some context. [Nous montrerons] a diversity of points of view on this subject, so that everyone can form their own opinion. “
Recognizing that ” the times have changed “, he notes, still in the columns of the MIT Technology Review, that it has never been easier to express yourself on the Internet. And that the role of Twitter, as a result, “Is to determine how to recommend certain content, how to direct people’s attention to lead to a healthy and participatory public debate”, rather than sticking “To respect the First Amendment”.
In Silicon Valley, the machine learning is, a technical tool in which Parag Agrawal is an expert, is widely seen as a viable solution to the problems of moderation in social networks, less expensive than human moderation.
It will also have to face the other challenge: that of income, which is quite low compared to those of Google or Facebook. The monetization of its 211 million users exposed to advertisements is a necessary stake to increase the margins of the company, improve moderation and develop new services.
Jack Dorsey’s “spiritual successor”
Will the engineer be able to imagine solutions different from those adopted by Twitter so far, insufficient by the admission of its founder ? According to New York Times, some observers point out that Parag Agrawal is a “Spiritual successor” by Jack Dorsey. They are both calm, polite, technically savvy, and enthusiastic that control of the Internet can be returned to its users. Analyst Carolina Milanesi, however, anticipates a possible change, telling AFP that with this appointment, we would “Perhaps also see more rigor and rationality in decision-making methods”.
Parag Agrawal is married to Stanford medical professor Vineeta Agrawal. Their son, Ansh Agrawal, born in 2018, already has a private Twitter account. The annual salary of the new CEO of Twitter will amount to $ 1 million, excluding bonuses, definitely setting him up as one of the leading figures of the American dream in Silicon Valley.
Among large US technology companies, he is the fifth CEO to be born and educated in India, after those of Google, Microsoft, Adobe and IBM. “It’s great to see the astonishing success of Indians in the tech world, and a good reminder of the opportunities that the US offers to immigrants,” noted, on November 29, Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, an online payment specialist.