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Journalism of Courage
As Elon Musk goes about making top-level changes at Twitter, he has gathered around himself a group of advisers that include, apart from venture capitalist David Sacks and several close business associates, an Indian American named Sriram Krishnan.
Krishnan, who used to work for Twitter earlier, is a partner at the Silicon Valley investment firm Andreesen Horowitz, also called a16z, which invested in Musk’s buyout of the social media company.
According to a report in The New York Times, Krishnan and others were on Sunday (October 30) holding the fort in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, while Musk himself had flown to New York. On October 31, Krishnan posted a picture of the office on Twitter, and said he was “helping out” Musk “temporarily”.
Roots in Chennai
Both Krishnan and his wife, Aarthi 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 neighbourhood, 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 NYT article.
Software fanboys
Krishnan held managerial positions at Yahoo!, Facebook, and Snap, besides Twitter. In 2021, he joined Andreesen Horowitz, which is a major investor in Clubhouse, a social audio app that was released in 2020. His wife, Ramamurthy, has worked in Netflix and Facebook, and introduced the start-ups True and Co. and Lumoid, according to the couple’s NYT profile.
“We really have been fanboys forever,” Krishnan told The NYT. “What else can we say? We just love tech.”
Musk connection
Musk appeared on Krishnan and Ramamurthy’s influential show on Clubhouse, ‘The Good Times Show’, in February 2021. They had met him earlier during a visit to the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, The NYT article said. Besides Musk, the couple got Mark Zuckerberg and the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh too on their show.
