On Monday, Jack Dorsey said he'd be stepping down as chief of Twitter (TWTR  ), handing the reins of the world-famous microblogging site to its current CTO, Parag Agrawal.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Dorsey's departure was partially driven by investors' discomfort with his role at the helm of two prominent publicly traded companies: Twitter and Square (SQ  ).

Last year the tie-dye-wearing, nose-ring-having, hiply bearded CEO fended off a leadership challenge led by activist hedge fund Elliott Management Group. At the time, Dorsey's divided interest between his two companies was the Elliot Group's chief complaint.

Dorsey managed to fend off the push with a deal that saw Jesse Cohn, the key figure who pushed for Dorsey's ouster, gain a board seat, among other things. In November, Twitter updated its CEO succession plan just as talks began for Dorsey to step down "relatively soon," the Journal reports.

Adjunct to Agrawal's elevation to CEO was the promotion of Bret Taylor, co-CEO at Salesforce (CRM  ), to Twitter's chairman of the board.

"I've worked hard to ensure that this company can break away from its founding and its founders," wrote Dorsey in an email to employees. "I believe it's critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder's influence or direction," he added.

Dorsey said that now was his time to step away, citing his trust in Agrawal and Taylor to steer the company into the future.

"Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around," the email continues. "My trust in him as our CEO is bone-deep," adding that Taylor, as chairman, is "all of the things the board and the company deserve right now."

In a joint statement, Cohn and Marc Steinberg of Elliott Management said, "We are confident that they [Agrawal and Taylor] are the right leaders for Twitter at this pivotal moment in the company."

Agrawal inherits a company hampered by sluggish growth, sputtering product roll-outs, and political controversy.

Twitter is just as much a household name as Facebook (FB  ), yet the former still struggles with just a fraction of the latter's users. For instance, since Dorsey took over in 2015, Twitter has seen its share price grow 62%. Meanwhile, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has seen its shares rise 260%.

Twitter hopes to rectify the disparity by rolling out an increasing number of products under an ever-tightening series of deadlines.

In February, Twitter announced plans to swell its user base to 315 million per day by no later than 2023. At the time, the company laid forth plans to "double its development velocity" during that same time to help achieve this goal.

"We recently updated our strategy to hit ambitious goals, and I believe that strategy to be bold and right," Agrawal wrote in an email to employees. "But our critical challenge is how we work to execute against it and deliver results."

As CTO, Agrawal has spearheaded many of Twitter's latest and not-so greatest efforts to monetize its platform. Highlights include Twitter's new subscription feature and live audio chat features like Twitter Spaces. Lowlights include Twitter's answer to Snapchat (SNAP  ), Fleets, which was quietly put out to pasture by the company in July.

However, Twitter's challenges aren't just technical but social; it is a social media company, after all.

Nevertheless, since the company's pivotal decision to permanently suspend former President Donald Trump's account, Twitter has become a favorite strawman among Republican politicians who complain about social media censorship. At the same time, Twitter's "left-leaning" user base claims the platform doesn't do enough to protect its users from hate speech.

Twitter's solution is Bluesky, an open-source project that will link different social media platforms together, allowing posts censored on one platform to appear on the other. As CTO, Agrawal helped incubate the idea internally before Twitter hired an external lead for the project.

Bluesky is a technical approach to a social problem, an approach that might be indicative those that Agrawal might take when his term as CEO begins in May 2022.