For his $44 billion dramatic takeover of Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk has turned toward old friends for advice. And in in the first few days of his Twitter ownership, he has been in talks with several experts who are reportedly advising Musk on how to take the micro-blogging platform forward under new leadership.
Sriram Krishnan, a former Twitter executive and current general partner at the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, was one Musk associate who tweeted about his involvement. Washington Post reported that the firm, Andreessen Horowitz, invested $400 million in Twitter. The firm had pledged back in the spring to chip in to Musk's plan to buy the company and take it private.
So who is Krishnan?
Based on Krishnan’s Twitter bio, the 38-year-old is primarily a tech and crypto investor with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Sriram serves on the boards of Bitski, Hopin, and Polywork.
Krishnan worked in senior product roles at Snap and Meta (then Facebook), and oversaw various mobile ad products such as Snap’s Direct Response ads business and the Facebook Audience Network.
The techie started his career at Microsoft in the early 2000s.
Krishnan was born in Chennai, as was his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy who he met in 2003 while both were in college. Both of them were raised in, NYT reported, “typical middle-class Indian upbringings”. They have two children - daughter Indra, and son Vishnu.
Moving from India to the US
The software engineer couple, now American citizens, worked together at Microsoft as project managers for six years, moving from India to Seattle for the job. The pair said, in a YouTube video released this week, that it was their dream job, and were paid $100,000 each annually.
However, in 2012, they left Microsoft and moved to Silicon Valley in California. “We literally knew nobody…”, Krishnan said of the move, but they considered it worth the risk because of their combined interest in investing in startups and being around tech founders.
The Good Time Show
Krishnan and his wife host a well-known podcast called the “The Good Time Show”. Having interviewed some of the biggest tech entrepreneurs, athletes and entertainment figures, the show and its hosts were featured in a 2021 NYT article, which called it ‘arguably the most influential show on the social audio app Clubhouse.’
At the time of the NYT report the show had 175,000 subscribers on ClubHouse. Their YouTube channel, Aarthi and Sriram's Good Time Show, has video footage of the interviews along with other content, and counts nearly 12,000 subscribers now.
On the show, in 2021, the couple interviewed tech big wigs including Tesla’s and now Twitter’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, music maestro AR Rahman, and many others.
Firm Musk supporter
"Now that the word is out: I'm helping out @elonmusk with Twitter temporarily with some other great people," Krishnan said in a tweet on October 31.
He added that Twitter is ``a hugely important company and can have great impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen.”
On whether he will join Twitter’s leadership, Krishnan tweeted that he's still "very much in my day job” at Andreessen Horowitz.
Others helping Musk
Musk has been meeting regularly with David Sacks, a venture capitalist and friend from his PayPal days, Jason Calacanis, a friend and investor, along with Krishnan. The group has been discussing Twitter's product strategy, though it's unknown if any of them will be full-time leaders at the company. Both Calacanis and Sacks have Twitter email addresses in the company's internal directory.
One possible full-time leader is Kayvon Beykpour, the former head of Twitter product who was fired earlier this year by the prior CEO. While Beykpour was seen in the office after the deal closed and has been approached about a return, nothing has been finalized, according to people familiar with the matter.
