Jack Dorsey has announced that he's stepping down as the CEO of Twitter after 16 years at the company. The change is effective immediately, and starting today, Parag Agrawal, Chief Technical Office (CTO) at Twitter up until this point, is taking over as CEO.In addition to leaving the role of CEO, Dorsey also announced that he'll be leaving the board of directors at Twitter in May. Dorsey will be serving the rest of his term as a member of the board of directors to help Parag with the transition to the role of CEO. On that front, Bret Taylor will be taking on the role of chairman of the board of directors once Dorsey leaves.Explaining his reasoning for the decision, Dorsey claims that being "founder-led" can be limiting for any given company and that being free from its founders has always been the goal for Twitter. Dorsey believes now is the right time for a change in leadership, especially with Parag Agrawal taking the helm at the company. The leaving CEO says Agrawal has been behind every critical decision that helped turn Twitter around. Similar praise was headed towards Bret Taylor, who's been a member of the board since Dorsey became CEO of the company.

Twitter has been making a number of big changes in order to become more profitable. The company recently launched its Twitter Blue subscription service, which gives members access to ad-free articles and exclusive features like an Undo button for tweets, app theming, and more.As part of this effort, Twitter has also made some acquisitions, such as Scroll - which enables the ad-free articles feature - and most recently Threader, an app that turns long Twitter threads into one digestible article. From a business perspective, Twiter has become significantly different since it's been founded, so it makes sense for there to be a change in direction as well.Jack Dorsey isn't the first CEO of a major tech company to step down this year - Jeff Bezos famously left his role as CEO of Amazon this summer.