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Knuckle Up with Nakul · 3 min · Nov 10, 2026
A CEO should shape the company around how they lead
Parag Agrawal
Parag Agrawal says a CEO must stop adapting themselves to fit the existing leadership and instead shape the company around their own strengths and vision.
The episode’s best minutes
Full analysis- 39:02Agents need search built for different inputs and latency5 min
- 19:01A CEO should shape the company around how they lead3 min
- 51:41Agent-scale web access needs a way to pay for contentPro pick 7 min
- 5 more moments in the full episode
“Try to adapt yourself. You challenge yourself. But you adapt the company. To who you are.”
Parag Agrawalat 20:26 · Knuckle Up with Nakul
Takeaways
- A CEO's personality and mental model should shape the organization.
- Build a leadership team that complements the CEO.
- Fitting into someone else's shoes can limit the company.
About this segment
Parag Agrawal says a CEO must stop adapting themselves to fit the existing leadership and instead shape the company around their own strengths and vision. That shift lets the business pursue its best version.
Parag Agrawal is Founder of Parallel Web Systems.
Founded Parallel Web Systems, which builds agentic web search for AI agents; former Twitter CEO.
Nakul Mandan, Host · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul
General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build.
From “Ex-Twitter CEO's $2B bet on search for AI agents | Parag Agrawal (Founder of Parallel)”, Nov 10, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
From the transcript Knuckle Up with Nakul publishes with the episode.
- 19:04
And I think there were a few more of these kinds of things. What did you change in the first three to six months once you became the CEO then? Plenty. Some popular, some not popular. Biggest picture, right?
- 19:23
When you, I had worked at the company for almost 10 years by then, right? Or more than 10 years, 10 years. I always saw my job as looking at the At the people around me, the problems around me, and figuring out how I could maximally contribute, right? So there were periods where I would be a solo IC. That was my preference, even while in leadership. There were periods where I would manage reasonable size organizations, trying to figure out how to hire somebody better to do that so I could go do something else.
- 20:01
And so, but I mostly wanted to be flexible. In adapting myself to the best of my ability to maximally contribute to the company or the team. The phase shift you have to go through when you become the CEO is, at least for me, the advice I gave and like what I internalized for myself was that you no longer adapt. Try to adapt yourself. You challenge yourself. But you adapt the company. To who you are.
- 20:38
Because it is If you are trying to fit into somebody else's shoes, you're not going to create the best version of the company. And that is a bad thing to do. You're doing injustice to the potential of the company.
- 20:51
When you say that, actually, this is a great point you've made. Is that a personality thing? Like, what are you trying to shape the company to do with your personality, towards your vision, all of it? All of it, right?
- 21:03
I think it's like your personality, your vision, how you like, how you, your mental model of the company. Are you a product first person? Are you an edge first person? Are you a data person? Are you being counter? The three types of CEOs should organize their teams differently. They should hire differently. They should have different kinds of executive team, executive team meetings. Who they hire is a function of them.
- 21:29
It should be a compliment to you. Previously, I was trying to shapeshift myself to be most incrementally valuable around the CEO or the rest of the leadership team are the needs of the business, right? Now, all of a sudden, if you take a five-year view, you have to transform the business. The Twitter job was, Twitter was not a done deal. Like there was like a real business to build and scale. And the only way that would happen is for me, To transform it into what I thought it would be.
- 22:01
So you have to own the thing and own yourself.