Parag Agarwal since fired from Twitter has been low key, but recently with his AI startup getting 30 million funding from the early backers of Open AI is all over the news.
The funding was led by Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures along with venture firms including Index Ventures and First Round Capital.
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What the Startup is about?
Parag’s Artificial Intelligence based startup is reportedly similar to Open AI’s ChatGPT, the startup is aiming at building a company to focus on software tailored for language models (LLM) developers and consumers of the tech as well.
There are no statements from Parag’s or Startup’s side in regards to product specifics or the name of the startup.
Parag’s Twitter Journey
An interesting career graph, Parag has had all, 2011 when he joined Twitter had close to 1,000 employees, he gracefully took the role of chief technology officer (CTO) in 2017, where majorly he was involved in forming technical strategy, advancing AI, and implementing machine learning. and in November 2021, became Twitter’s first Indian-origin CEO replacing Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey.
However, Agrawal was replaced as Elon Musk took over Twitter, firing 75 per cent of Twitter Inc’s employees and later rebranding the company and its logo.
Elon Musk and Parag
Reportedly it is said that Musk met Parag months before the acquisition over dinner, and it is said that Musk had a pre noted must have qualities in his mind that Parag didn’t possess. According to details shared by Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography ‘Elon Musk,’ Musk felt that Twitter needed a leader with a more assertive approach, which he described as a “fire-breathing dragon,”.
Moreover in this controversy, Parag along with two other former executives took the Musk to court for the non-payment of personal legal expenses amounting to over $1 million.
He had a “golden parachute” clause in his employee contract and also held 128,000 Twitter shares, which were valued close to $7 million, at the time he left the firm.
Agarwal’s Early Journey
Agrawal holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in computer science and engineering from IIT Bombay and did PhD in science at Stanford University.
Initially, as his first job, he did research internships at Microsoft Research and Yahoo Research.
With increasing interest in AI Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is gaining massive attention across the globe and being backed by noteworthy venture capital entities, Parag is all set to bounce back and start his new venture in this domain.