Sri Ram Krishnan, a Chennai-born tech entrepreneur who was roped in by Elon Musk after he acquired Twitter in 2022, has shared his experience of working with the world's richest man and other top CEOs, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft's Satya Nadella. Mr Krishnan revealed this at a session titled 'What did I learn from Elon and Zuckerberg' at the World Government Summit in UAE. The entrepreneur said that he had a "working class upbringing" and grew up in Chennai.
"When I was a teenager, I taught myself to write code that led to a career in technology. I've been very fortunate and lucky. In 2007, I joined Microsoft. I worked for Satya for a bunch of years in Seattle, before he was the CEO of Microsoft. Then I was at Facebook, now Meta, working for Mark Zuckerberg. Then I've had the opportunity to kind of work with Elon on multiple occasions. Most recently, or infamously, during the takeover at Twitter (X). Currently, I am a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. We are a large venture capital firm," Mr Krishnan told Time magazine's Executive Editor Naina Bajekal during the session.
He pointed out that all successful CEOs have some common attributes. "If you look at Zuckerberg, Elon, all these CEOs, they don't delegate as much as they're into the details. And if I could be provocative, I would say delegation is overrated and micromanagement is underrated. All the great CEOs I've met are always micromanagers," he said.
Recalling the time he spent with Mr Zuckerberg, the tech entrepreneur said that Meta CEO is a stickler when it comes to details. "You would get a message from him in the morning about why is this number doing that. He would look at every single pixel. He would know things better than the 22-year-old engineer who's working on it. This was in 2013. My wife worked at Meta a couple of years ago and she was telling me that he is still the exact same way today," said Mr Krishnan.
He also mentioned that Mr Musk doesn't spend all his time sharing posts on X. "When I was there with him, when the Twitter acquisition happened, 95% of the meetings were with the junior most engineers. Like your 25-year-old people. And he would be whiteboarding out diagrams and being in the details," said Mr Krishnan.
Speaking about how his life changed when he transitioned from Chennai to the Silicon Valley, Mr Krishnan said, "I grew up in a very sort of traditional upbringing in India. I worked there for a short period of time in kind of a very traditional environment. And when I first went to Silicon Valley, it was honestly a huge culture shock because it operated so differently from where I had grown up."
Watch the whole interview:
Mr Krishnan was born in Chennai and completed his BTech in Information Technology from SRM Engineering College, Anna University. According to New York Times, he moved to the United States at the age of 21 in 2005. His father worked in the insurance sector, while his mother was a homemaker.
His tech career started in Microsoft in 2005, where he mostly worked for the Windows Azure division. At Twitter, he worked on projects including its main timeline, building new UI for the platform, search and audience growth among others. He also developed mobile ad products At Facebook (now Meta) and Snap.
