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Twitter announced that CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down as the company’s chief. He will be replaced by Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Shares dipped 2% on Monday with this news.
Jack Dorsey will continue working on Square, his digital payments company, and other projects. He will remain a member of the board on Twitter until the 2022 meeting of stockholders, when his term expires. Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor will replace Patrick Pichette, a former Google executive, as chairman of the board. Pichette will remain on the board as chair of the audit committee.
Jack announced his departure from the company via a tweet. “not sure anyone has heard but,” he captioned, “I resigned from Twitter.”
He said in the statement, “There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led.’ 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. There are 3 reasons I believe now is the right time.”
He detailed the 3 reasons in the tweet, the first being his trust in his successor, Parag Agrawal. “Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around. He’s curious, probing, rational, creative, demanding, self-aware, and humble. He leads with heart and soul, and is someone I learn from daily. My trust in him as our CEO is bone deep.”
The second was Bret Taylor agreeing to be the board chair. “I asked Bret to join our board when I became CEO, and he’s been excellent in every way. He understands entrepreneurship, taking risks, companies at massive scale, technology, product, and he’s an engineer. All of the things the board and the company deserve right now. Having Bret in this leadership role gives me a lot of confidence in the strength of our board going forward.”
The third, he says, is all the employees on Twitter. “All of you have the potential to change the course of this company for the better. I believe this with all my heart!”
With these heart-felt words, Jack relinquishes his CEO post from the company he co-founded a decade and a half ago, in 2016.
