IIT Bombay alumni in US celebrate Agrawal’s appointment as Twitter CEO – Times of India

“Things have changed since I was trying to break through. Brand IIT and Brand India are well established here. With Sunder Pichai [CEO of Google & Alphabet], Satya Nadella [CEO of Microsoft], Shantanu Narayen [CEO of Adobe Systems], and Arvind Krishna [CEO of IBM] as CEOs of top American tech companies, these appointments don’t make big news here in the Silicon Valley anymore,” distinguished IIT-B alumnus Kanwal Rekhi, who is considered to be the first Indian-American founder and CEO to take a venture-backed company, Excelan, public on the NASDAQ in 1982, told TIMESOFINDIA.com in an exclusive interview from Silicon Valley. He added that several Indian Americans such as Indra Nooyi [former CEO of PepsiCo], Vikram Pandit [former CEO of Citigroup], Rajiv L Gupta [former CEO of Rohm & Haas] and Ajay Banga [executive chairman of Mastercard] had made their mark in the US East Coast, too, as power CEOs, adding to the respect garnered by the community.

Even though Rekhi, who graduated from IIT-B way back in 1967, doesn’t personally know Agrawal, he feels that the 37-year-old IIT-B alum, who is also a PhD from Stanford University, must be ‘sharp as a nail’. “He has been at Twitter for a long time and was CTO. My sense is that he has been very influential and was responsible for shutting down President Trump’s account. I am sure he will be able to handle Twitter well, it is really a simple advertising driven business,” Rekhi said.
Suresh P. Sethi, professor and director of the Center for Intelligent Supply Networks at The University of Texas at Dallas and a distinguished IIT-B alumnus, is happy to see another IITian join the long line of successful IIT-B alums, beginning with his batchmates Rajiv Gupta and Kanwal Rekhi in business and several top scholars in academia. “With excellent education from IIT-B and Stanford and a decade-long experience at Twitter, Agrawal should do well. Given that the world is taking note of what Twitter does and how influential the platform is, it needs a rational, thoughtful, and sensitive person at its helm and evidently, it found that in him.”

Several senior IIT-ians in the US, who don’t know Agrawal personally because he’s their junior by many years, nevertheless share the excitement of the young Indian American being named the CEO of Twitter. “It is the entire ecosystem at IIT-B of a merit-based entrance examination; talented faculty; the residential system and an environment that promotes innovation; followed by an educational pathway to top American universities such as Stanford that is behind the success of tech leaders like Agrawal,” says Pratim Biswas, dean, engineering; University of Miami and board member of the IITB Heritage Foundation. He adds that the strong alum network of IIT-B, which was established in the early 90s in the San Francisco Bay Area, helps in connecting members across US states and across generations. “It’s not just leadership roles in top corporates and cutting-edge start-ups; IIT-B alumni now form a strong academic network as well, with more than 250 in senior faculty positions across US universities,” he said.

Sarita Adve, professor at the Siebel Center for Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, too, is proud that Agrawal is from IIT-B, her alma mater. “There are many aspects about his appointment as the CEO of Twitter that are heart-warming to me. I am delighted to see that he has a PhD and started his career in research. The importance of the rigorous training provided by research has been the driver behind all the visible changes from technology,” she said. She also highlights the many ways in which technology today is hurting society through inadvertent use of biased algorithms or malicious propagation of disinformation and invasion of privacy. “Social media companies have a particularly large role to play here. While I am thrilled to see first generation Indian Americans leading the tech sector, but there is so much more to be done to ensure we have a plurality of viewpoints that represent all of society that are brought to bear on the tech we create,” she said. The current tech leadership including Agrawal, she believes, has a huge responsibility in enabling a faster change.