Vijaya Gadde

Gadde was born in India to a Telugu family and moved to the United States at age 3.[4][5] Her father pursued graduate studies in the United States and initially did not have the financial means to send for his wife and daughter until Gadde turned three.[6] Her family moved to Beaumont, Texas.[7] She has described her childhood as having been affected by the Ku Klux Klan presence in Beaumont, so much that her Indian father was required to get permission from the local Klan before he could go door-to-door for soliciting insurance.[4]

Gadde received a BS in industrial and labor relations from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and her JD from New York University School of Law in 2000.[8][5][2]

Before joining Twitter in 2011, Gadde spent nearly a decade working at the Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, then spent time as Senior Director in the legal department of Silicon Valley technology firm Juniper Networks.[8][6] While at WSGR, Gadde worked on the 2006 $4.1 billion McClatchy Co.-Knight Ridder Inc. acquisition and acted as counsel to the New York Stock Exchange’s Proxy Working Group and Committee on Corporate Governance.[7][8]

At Twitter, Gadde has made protecting privacy and opposing the censorship of Twitter internationally policy priorities, notably by filing suit to oppose the 2014 Turkish ban of Twitter.[7] She has also announced Twitter's hiring of researchers to study the health of discourse on the platform.[9]

She has 350 people at Twitter under her supervision.[2] In 2014, she was described by Fortune as the only woman on Twitter's executive team, though she was later joined by Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland.[5][10] She convinced Jack Dorsey not to sell Twitter adverts during the 2020 presidential election.[2] She has spoken in defence of the decision by stating, “It wasn’t about anything other than, ‘This is the right thing to do for us as a company.’”[2]