Twitter CEO steps down

Jack Dorsey, Chief of a social media company, Twitter, is stepping down effective immediately. Parag Agrawal, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, will take over the helm, according to a statement released by the company.

In an email to Twitter's staff, which he also tweeted, Dorsey said, “There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led." He further added, “Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure. I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.”In the same email, he said that Agrawal has been his choice to lead the company “for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs.

Agrawal has been with Twitter for over a decade and served as CTO since 2017. He had been in charge of strategies involving artificial intelligence and machine learning.

An alumnus of IIT Bombay, prior to joining Twitter, Agrawal held research internships at AT&T, Microsoft and Yahoo. While at Twitter, he led projects to make tweets in users’ timelines more relevant to them using AI.

Dorsey was serving as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company. Dorsey will remain a member of the Board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders. Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor will become the Chairman of the Board, replacing Patrick Pichette, a former Google executive, who will remain on the board as Chair of the Audit committee.

Dorsey faced eviction last year when Twitter stakeholder Elliott Management had sought to replace him. Elliott Management’s Founder and investor Paul Singer had wondered whether Dorsey should run both of the public companies, asking him to step down as CEO of one of them before the investment firm reached a deal with the company’s management.

Dorsey, who co-founded the social media giant in 2006, served as CEO until 2008 before being pushed out of the role. Co-founder Ev Williams and board member Fred Wilson pushed out Dorsey as the social media site gained steam with users and they determined he was unfit to lead the company. He returned to Twitter as the boss in 2015 after former CEO Dick Costolo stepped down.

Here is the email by Dorsey which he also posted on Twitter.