Indian-origin entrepreneur shares experience of working with top tech executives
Indian-origin entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan, who ‘helped out’ Elon Musk ‘temporarily’ post the billionaire’s October 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now called X), has shared his experience of working with top tech leaders, including Musk, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (previously Facebook).
Krishnan, a US citizen who was born in Chennai, narrated his experience at the recent World Government Summit in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Musk, he said, ‘doesn’t spend all his time sharing posts on X.’
“When the Twitter acquisition happened, 95% of the meetings were with the junior most engineers. Like your 25-year-old people. And he (Musk) would be whiteboarding out diagrams and being in the details,” Krishnan noted.
Sriram Krishnan on Zuckerberg
He described the Meta chief executive as 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,” the venture capitalist-author remarked.
Krishnan added that his wife was at Meta ‘a couple of years ago’ and told him that Zuckerberg is ‘still the exact same way today.’
Sriram Krishnan on Nadella
Krishnan, who joined Microsoft in 2007, also recalled his time with Nadella.
“In 2007, I joined Microsoft. I worked for Satya for a bunch of years in Seattle, before he was the CEO,” he said.
Nadella has held the coveted post since February 2014, when he succeeded Steve Ballmer, the tech giant’s second CEO, and the successor to Bill Gates, the co-founder.
‘All CEOs have common attributes’
According to Krishnan, who has worked with Musk ‘on multiple occasions, including most recently at Twitter, and is now a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, all 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 stated.
