# He left ads after forecasting growth would stall below 100 million DAU

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/he-left-ads-after-forecasting-growth-would-stall-below-100/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Parag Agrawal](https://realalpha.app/builders/parag-agrawal/) · Parag Agrawal is Founder of Parallel Web Systems. · Founded Parallel Web Systems, which builds agentic web search for AI agents; former Twitter CEO.
- Host: [Nakul Mandan](https://realalpha.app/people/nakul-mandan/) · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul · General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build.
- Show: Knuckle Up with Nakul
- Episode: [Ex-Twitter CEO's $2B bet on search for AI agents | Parag Agrawal (Founder of Parallel)](https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/), Nov 10, 2026
- Moment: 16:34 to 19:04 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/he-left-ads-after-forecasting-growth-would-stall-below-100/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/?t=994

## Quote

> “it could stall out at **under a hundred million DAU**”
> — [Parag Agrawal](https://realalpha.app/builders/parag-agrawal/) at [17:27](https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/?t=1047) · Knuckle Up with Nakul

## Takeaways

1. The projection came from examining Twitter's growth engine.
2. He moved from ads to the core product to address durable growth.
3. Small-team execution helped turn the idea into company direction.

## About this segment

Looking at Twitter's growth engine, Parag Agrawal projected it could stall below 100 million daily users. He left ads to push machine learning into the consumer product, where a small team proved the case.

From “Ex-Twitter CEO's $2B bet on search for AI agents | Parag Agrawal (Founder of Parallel)”, Nov 10, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/)

## Transcript

From the transcript Knuckle Up with Nakul publishes with the episode.

[16:37](https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/?t=997) I think these were simple things. Like these are not like some crazy big deep insights, right? Like I used to work on ads. Ads was this separate siloed team. Slightly siloed, not fully siloed. And you build ads, you collect a bunch of, you build a bunch of interesting machine learning system because what is ads? It's like matchmaking with machine learning. Twitter at the time used to do a reverse chronological timeline.

[17:02](https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/?t=1022) And there was almost a religion at the company to not use too much machine learning when it came to the core product, right? Now, so we, I'm there sitting around building ads. I am, I was like a data geek, right? So, I am looking at Twitter is going public. We've built ads. Now you can see if you do the math on the growth engine of the company, it to me appeared that it could stall out at under a hundred million DAU, the growth engine of the business.

[17:36](https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/?t=1056) So we spent years dealing with, oh, Twitter is growing so fast. We can't roll servers in or keep the site up. And all of a sudden we were going to end up in a world where Oh God, the product is now flatlining in its growth potential, right? And it didn't get there, but you could forecast that in a year, that's where we would be if you looked at the data carefully enough, right? So I'm like, okay, no one seems to be paying attention to this.

[18:04](https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/?t=1084) There's religion against machine learning. I'm going to abandon ads. I'm going to figure out how to show up on the product side. And work with a collection of people where we would go transform the product to drive long-term durable growth. It's like very simple. It wasn't like the top-down strategic direction for the company yet. But a year later, that's what it sort of became. Right? So it's like these kind of obvious-ish ideas.

[18:40](https://realalpha.app/v/RfepEDxD0Lo/?t=1120) But the right people... Focused execution with a small group to prove and change the rest of the company around it. So I did that with other people and showed a lot of initiative there. Fought, as you can imagine, some internal battles because these cultural things are ingrained.