Business
When Sriram Krishnan, the techie helping Elon Musk revamp Twitter, talked tech with AR Rahman
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After firing CEO Parag Agarwal and his core team, Elon Musk’s choice of yet another Indian-origin engineer to help him revamp the microblogging site, Sriram Krishnan, has an interesting connection with Academy Award winning Indian musician AR Rahman – When Krishnan and his wife talked tech with the Mozart of Madras.
Krishnan, who invests in crypto/web3 ventures as a General Partner at Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), co-hosts a podcast on product and technologies called Aarthi and Sriram’s Good Time Show along with San Francisco-based entrepreneur and his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy since January 2021.
The two, considered a Silicon Valley power couple, quizzed Rahman in an hour-long interview on August 4 mainly about his musical journey but also about how he uses technology in his music, Artificial Intelligence and on Indians building technology companies.
To a question on how he applies AI in music, the music maestro said: “If you take mixing, there are certain frequencies we don’t hear. AI helps identify which frequencies are disturbing, what is lacking in a mix, so we can get all that stuff. Some of the organic stuff is really cool. And sorting of samples. It does all those things which took ages to compile. There are many uses of it. Maybe one or two compositions may come out of AI, but any stuff that is cohesive needs to come from a human, so far. That’s a job which can’t be taken away hopefully.”
Rahman spoke about a doing a course in MIT on imaging and AI when he babysitting his kids during a summer course at Berkeley. “I am a synthesiser and work with algorithm and operators and all this stuff for the past 35 years now. So, it’s just a one-step away thing, not a new thing and I have been dealing with microprocessors, synthesizers and computers and samplers,” he told Krishnan and Aarthi.
The show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube has also had co-founder Marc Andrreessen of Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Oculus founder Palmer Lucky, Indian comedian Tanmay Bhat, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck as guests.
In the early part of 2021. Krishnan and his wife launched a Clubhouse talk show that focused on organic conversations on start-ups, venture capitalism and cryptocurrencies. The show featured prominent guests like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Hawk, Diane von Furstenberg, Kanye West, and social media influencer MrBeast. The Good Time Show moved to YouTube from Clubhouse in 2022.
An alumnus of SRM Engineering College in Chennai’s Anna University, Krishnan has held jobs at Snap and Twitter before. On October 31, he tweeted:
“Now that the word is out: I’m helping out @elonmusk with Twitter temporarily with some other great people. I (and a16z) believe this is a hugely important company and can have great impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen.
PS. Still very much in my day job at @a16zcrypto. If you’re a crypto founder, you know how to find me,” he said in a Twitter thread on Monday.
Krishnan started working with Microsoft in 2007 as a program manager for Visual Studio. He later moved to Facebook where he helped building the Facebook Audience Network, a competitive platform to Google’s ad technologies. He also worked with Snapchat where he built the social media platform’s ad tech platform shortly before the company’s IPO.
After serving at some of the top Silicon Valley companies, Krishnan moved to Twitter where he served as senior director of product and contributed to the core user experience and launching a redesigned home page and events experience.
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