On Monday, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced that Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief technology officer and architect of the social media platform’s efforts to develop a decentralized and open standard or the social media industry, will take the helm at Twitter.
The 10-year Twitter veteran, who holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor’s degree from the very prominent Indian Institute of Technology, will now have to balance the projects the company is preparing for the future with the daily challenges of a social media platform that faces intense scrutiny from investors, lawmakers, and activists.
The shift to Agrawal’s leadership arrives at a critical time for the company, which is seeking significantly higher revenue and user growth goals for its investors.
Twitter’s financial goals include doubling annual revenue to at least $7.5 billion and making more than 100 million monetizable daily users available by 2023. Twitter now has 211 million daily users who can view ads.
Twitter is aggressively experimenting with new features and looking beyond ads to boost its revenue. In the US, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, the social media giant launched a new subscription service called Twitter Blue which allows users to undo tweets and read articles ad-free.