United States President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Indian American Sriram Krishnan as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
Krishnan will work with venture capitalist David Sachs, whom Trump has described as the incoming “White House AI and crypto czar.” Trump also announced some other appointments, which Sachs called an “extraordinary team” of “amazing talent.”
Some important announcements by President Trump on his tech team today! I look forward to working with:
– Michael Kratsios – Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and an Assistant to the President for Science and Technology.
— Dr. Lin… https://t.co/zai4a61VVC— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) December 22, 2024
Krishnan thanked Trump at X, and said he was honored to be a part of Sacks’ team and its mission.
🇺🇸 I am honored to serve our country and work closely with continued American leadership in AI. @DavidSacks.
thank you @realDonaldTrump For this occasion. pic.twitter.com/kw1n0IKK2a
– Sriram Krishnan (@sriramk) December 22, 2024
Who is Sriram Krishnan, the Indian boy who made it big in America?
A Chennai couple in California
Krishnan and his wife Aarti Ramamurthy were both born in Chennai, where they grew up in a “typical middle-class Indian upbringing,” according to a profile of the couple published in The New York Times In July 2021.
The couple was then hosting a show at the clubhouse called ‘The Good Time Show’, a social audio app that was launched during the Covid-19 pandemic and became very popular.
The article quoted Ramamurthy as saying that the couple met in college in 2003, when they were studying software engineering. They almost met before at Yahoo! Set up a chatroom for a coding project.
They eloped in 2010, and moved from Seattle to Palo Alto the following year, according to NYT Article. In 2021, the couple, both 37 years old, lived in San Francisco’s No Valley neighborhood with their daughter, who was then 2 years old.
Many years in tech companies
In addition to X, Krishnan held managerial positions at Yahoo!, Facebook and Snap, then called Twitter. (More on this in the next section of this article.)
In 2021, Krishnan joined Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, as a general partner. Andreesen Horowitz was a major investor in the clubhouse.
Krishnan’s wife, Ramamurthy, has worked at Netflix and Facebook, and introduced start-ups True & Company and Lumoid, according to a NYT profile of the couple.
Krishnan said, “We are really fanboys forever NYT. “What else can we say? We just love technology.”
Krishnan’s X profile now describes him as “ex” a16z. The couple have a podcast and YouTube show called The Aarti and Sriram Show, which they describe as “long conversations with insiders”.
The show’s latest episode, on December 2, featured Mark Pincus, founder of video game developer Zynga. Other recent guests at the event were Ishaan Mukherjee, co-founder and CEO of software company Rocks, Anil Varanasi, co-founder of internet infrastructure firm Meter, and Silicon Valley investor Gokul Rajaram.
Close relationship with Elon Musk
Krishnan has a significant relationship with Elon Musk, co-chairman (along with former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy) of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration’s proposed presidential advisory commission to cut costs and make the US government more efficient. .
Krishnan’s relationship with the world’s richest man, now a close ally of President-elect Trump, first became widely known in October 2022, when Musk, then in the process of making top-level changes at Twitter, gathered a group around him. Advisors included both Back and Krishnan. Krishnan, who previously worked at Twitter, was at a16z at the time.
On October 30, 2022, The New York Times Krishnan and others were holding down the fort at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, while Musk himself was in New York. On October 31, Krishnan posted a picture of the office on Twitter and said he was helping Musk “temporarily.”
Musk appeared at Krishnan and Ramamurthy’s event at the Clubhouse in February 2021. The couple had previously met him during a visit to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. NYT As stated in the 2021 article. Apart from Musk, the couple also had Mark Zuckerberg and the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh on their show.
Recently, both Musk and Ramaswamy also appeared on the duo’s podcast. In an episode of the show that aired after the election results and DOGE’s announcement, Krishnan and Ramamurthy talked about the bright future of tech, especially under the incoming Trump administration. Ramamurthy spoke of “new blood, new energy, and new momentum”, and said that “it’s hard not to get carried away”.
Portions of this explainer have been adapted from An earlier expositor about Krishnan Published on November 1, 2022.
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