United States President-elect Donald Trump has named Indian American Sriram Krishnan as Senior Policy Adviser for Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
Krishnan will be working with venture capitalist David Sacks, whom Trump has described as the incoming “White House AI & Crypto Czar”. Trump also announced a few other appointments, which Sacks said was an “extraordinary team” of “amazing talent”.
Some important announcements today by President Trump on his Tech Team! 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. Lynne… https://t.co/zai4a61VVC— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) December 22, 2024
Krishnan thanked Trump on X, and said he was honoured to be a part of Sacks’s team and its mission.
🇺🇸 I’m honored to be able to serve our country and ensure continued American leadership in AI working closely with @DavidSacks.
Thank you @realDonaldTrump for this opportunity. pic.twitter.com/kw1n0IKK2a
— Sriram Krishnan (@sriramk) December 22, 2024
Who is Sriram Krishnan, the Indian boy who went on to make it big in America?
A Chennai couple in California
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 2021.
The couple were then hosting a show called ‘The Good Time Show’ on Clubhouse, a social audio app that was launched and became very popular during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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.
They eloped in 2010, and moved to Palo Alto from Seattle the following year, according to The NYT article. In 2021, the couple, both 37 years old at the time, lived in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighbourhood with their daughter, who was then 2.
Many years in tech companies
Krishnan held managerial positions at Yahoo!, Facebook, and Snap, besides X, then called Twitter. (More on this in the next section of this article.)
In 2021, Krishnan joined the Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, also known as a16z, as a general partner. Andreesen Horowitz was a major investor in Clubhouse.
Krishnan’s 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.”
Krishnan’s X profile now describes him as “ex” a16z. The couple have a podcast and YouTube show called The Aarthi and Sriram Show, which they describe as being “long form conversations with people who have “made” it to the inside”.
The latest episode of the show, on December 2, featured Mark Pincus, founder of the video game developer Zynga. Other recent guests on the show have been Ishan Mukherjee, co-founder and CEO of the software company Rox, Anil Varanasi, co-founder of the Internet infrastructure firm Meter, and Silicon Valley investor Gokul Rajaram.
A close connection with Elon Musk
Krishnan has had a significant bond with Elon Musk, co-chair (along with former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy) of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration’s proposed presidential advisory commission on reducing costs and making the American government more efficient.
Krishnan’s links with the world’s richest man, now a close aide of President-elect Trump, first came to be known widely in October 2022, when Musk, then in the process of making top-level changes at Twitter, gathered around himself a group of advisers that included both Sacks and Krishnan. Krishnan, who used to work for Twitter earlier, was then at a16z.
On October 30, 2022, The New York Times reported that Krishnan and others were holding the fort in 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 out” Musk “temporarily”.
Musk had appeared on Krishnan and Ramamurthy’s show on Clubhouse in February 2021. The couple had met him earlier during a visit to the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, The NYT article from 2021 said. Besides Musk, the couple had got Mark Zuckerberg and the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh too on their show.
More recently, both Musk and Ramaswamy appeared on the couple’s podcast as well. On an episode of the show put on air after the election result and announcement of DOGE, Krishnan and Ramamurthy gushed about the bright future of tech in particular under the incoming Trump administration. Ramamurthy spoke of “new blood, new energy, and new momentum”, and said it was “hard not to get caught up in this exuberance”.
Parts of this explainer have been adapted from an earlier explainer on Krishnan published on November 1, 2022.
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