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Jack Dorsey, the longest-serving chief executive in the company's 15-plus-year history, is stepping down.
The most well-known of the names inside and outside of the micro-blogging site is Agrawal. He has been with the company for over a decade, working his way up from an engineer to become its top executive. The first recipient of the company's "Distinguished Engineer" title was Agrawal, who started at the company with a focus on ad products. He was appointed chief technology officer in October of last year, and he jumped in to address high-profile problems, like a large-scale password security issue, and take on some of the company's bolder initiatives. Despite his long tenure, Agrawal hasn't spent much time in the public eye, something that will change with his new role.
There are a few things that can be gleaned from the history of Agrawal as the CTO. Evan Williams co-founded the company with Jack Dorsey and served as CEO from 2008 to 2010), and Dick Costolo was the company's former COO.
It has been a long time since Argrawal has spent much time in the public eye.
One of the biggest projects that Agrawal has been involved in is the company's Bluesky platform, which was first announced in December. Bluesky is a pet project of Dorsey that is intended to be an open and undecipherable standard for social media that will eventually transition to using.
After a long period of silence, the Bluesky group published a review of existing social media systems at the beginning of the year, and finally put Jay Graber in charge of the project in August. Bluesky's development and its potential impact in replacing the underpinnings of the platform will be a major project for the CEO, as it will continue to be a major project.
It is not clear if that will continue following his promotion, but the newly founded team that was announced earlier in November also reported directly to him. Bluesky is also set to work closely with that team, which shows a possible direction for the future of the company.
The years-long effort to try and move some of the products from the company's own server to more robust cloud services from companies like Amazon and Google could be related to that experience with Bluesky.
In an interview with The Information earlier this year, it was noted that Agrawal spearheaded the effort to advance the internal technology of the company in an effort to try and help speed up the pace of feature development and deployment. When people say that it's slow at shipping, that hurts, and that's what motivates us.
In May of last year, the partnership with Google Cloud was announced, as well as the ongoing effort to switch over to Amazon Web Services, which is expected to be complete in 2023. People are starting to see that we are going faster. It feels good because it feels like a bunch of work from the past is starting to pay off. We are nowhere close to done. I think we have a lot of opportunities to go even faster.
In his time as the CTO, he was involved in the effort to address the problematic racial cropping issues with photo previews, as well as handling the public explanation for the company's 2018 password bug.
One of the biggest challenges of the micro-messaging service is moderation. In a 2020 interview with MIT Technology Review, Agrawal said that the role of the company is to build a healthy place for conversing online, suggesting that it could come at the expense of allowing people to say whatever they want. He said that their role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but to serve a healthy public conversation.
It doesn't mean moderation of all misinformation. The goal of the service is to avoid the specific harm that misleading information can cause, rather than being an arbiter of what is true or false on the internet. Defining misinformation is really, really hard.
Decentralization, moderation, and more are related.
Many Republican politicians are already opposed to the moderation policies and ban of former President Donald Trump. The House Judiciary GOP account referred to the new CEO of Twitter as much worse than the previous one after quoting a joke from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. A recent study from Twitter found that the platform favored right-wing views, despite the fact that there was no empirical proof of bias against conservative content.
It is one of many hurdles that will have to be overcome by Agrawal. While he takes over a company that has been growing its daily user figures and rolling out products at a faster-than-ever clip, it still faces ongoing issues with user growth at home, ad products stymied by recent privacy changes, and faster-growing social networks. Although he is not the most well-known candidate for the job, his years of experience with the company, deep experience with the product, and past work in helping modernize the tech stack makes him an interesting choice for CEO.
