Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, announced his resignation as CEO, more than a year after surviving an activist investor’s attempt to oust him.
Elliott Management put pressure on Dorsey, who is also the CEO of payments company Square, in 2020, over fears that he had split himself too thin by overseeing both companies.
“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders,” Dorsey said in a statement.
Twitter’s chief technical officer, Parag Agrawal, will succeed Dorsey as CEO, according the company.
“My trust in Parag as Twitter’s CEO is deep… It’s his time to lead,” Dorsey said.
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Dorsey will continue on the board until the 2022 annual meeting of stockholders, when his tenure will end.
Removal Avoided
In March 2020, Twitter reached an agreement with important investors to stop a campaign to replace the CEO, establishing a new board of directors committee to oversee the company’s leadership.
Dorsey, like many other Silicon Valley heavyweights, like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell, dropped out of college and never graduated from either of the universities he attended, one in Missouri and the other in New York.
When future co-founder Evan Williams encouraged staff at blogging startup Odeo two weeks to work on entertaining new projects as a means to break up the daily routine, Dorsey is credited with coming up with the idea for Twitter.
He was the CEO of Twitter from 2007 to 2008, but he returned after Dick Costolo quit in June 2015.
Dorsey was ousted out of the CEO position the first time around, and was thought to be a better engineer than boss at the time, leaving early for leisure activities like sewing or yoga sessions.
Meanwhile, Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 and has been the company’s chief technology officer since October 2017, where he was in charge of the network’s technical strategy.
Agrawal graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
