Hand of the Chief Twit: Indian American Investor Sriram Krishnan Helping Musk With Twitter Overhaul
- A former employee of the microblogging site, he is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
As he begins his overhaul of Twitter, Elon Musk has gathered around himself a group of advisers that include an Indian American investor. Sriram Krishnan, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is among the allies helping Musk. The firm invested $400 million in Musk’s Twitter acquisition, reported The Washington Post.
In another tweet, Krishnan clarified that he is “still very much in my day job” at his present company. “If you’re a crypto founder, you know how to find me!” he added.
Musk finalized his deal with Twitter last week, and arrived at the company headquarters in San Francisco with a sink — as a pun on his acquisition. He tweeted a video saying, “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
Right after taking over the company on Oct. 27, Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal, legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, and CFO Ned Segal. “He had accused them of misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the platform,” as reported by Reuters. In an email to the news agency, Equilar, known for its research on executive compensation, valued Agrawal’s so-called compensation or “golden parachute” at $57.4 million,” while Gadde’s was $20 million.
He is now relying on Krishnan and venture capitalist David Sacks to work on layoff plans and how to swiftly change Twitter’s product, The New York Times noted.
At Andreessen Horowitz, Krishnan focuses on investing across consumer and crypto startups, his company profile says. He leads the firm’s stake in companies like Hopin and Bitski and was a personal early investor in ventures including the celebrity cash-generator Cameo, Figma and Notion.
Before joining Andreessen Horowitz, Krishnan held numerous senior product roles. Most recently, he led core consumer teams at Twitter where he was responsible for products including the home timeline, new user experience, search, discovery, and audience growth.
Before this, he created and oversaw various mobile ad products for both Snap and Facebook, including Snap’s Direct Response ads business and the Facebook Audience Network, one of the largest networks in display advertising. He started his career at Microsoft where he touched numerous projects related to Windows Azure.
He is the author of “Programming Windows Azure,” published by O’Reilly.
On his website, Krishnan describes himself as “an investor, technologist and engineer.” He hosts a podcast, “The Good Time Show,” on Clubhouse with his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, Head of International at Clubhouse.
This January, the couple was signed by WME, a well-known talent agency. Variety reported that the WME will work with the couple “in areas including film and television development, as well as publishing and podcasting projects.”
Both Krishnan and Ramamurthy were born in Chennai, where they were raised in “typical middle-class Indian upbringings,” according to a profile of the couple published in The New York Times in July last year. The article quoted Ramamurthy as saying the couple met in college in 2003, when they were studying software engineering. They had met virtually earlier in a Yahoo! chatroom set up for a coding project. The couple, both 37 years old, live in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood, and have a daughter who is 2, the article said. They eloped in 2010, and moved to Palo Alto from Seattle the following year, according to The Times.