Chennai-Born Techie Shares Valuable Lessons From Working With Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg & Satya Nadella

Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-origin tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, shared insights from his experience working with prominent CEOs such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and X (formerly Twitter)'s Elon Musk, during the World Government Summit in the UAE.

During a session titled 'What did I learn from Elon and Zuckerberg', Krishnan reflected on his journey in the world of technology.

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"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," he told Time magazine's Executive Editor Naina Bajekal during the session.

Sriram Krishnan Also Spoke About His Transition From Chennai To The Silicon Valley

"So, 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," he said.

Learnings From Most Successful CEOs Like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk And Satya Nadella.

Krishnan insisted 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.

Mark Zuckerberg Has A Keen Eye For Details

Reuters

"I was working with Zuckerberg in 2013. We had a time when we were going to miss our revenue numbers for the quarter, or we were in trajectory to. What Zuck would do is: He would have daily meetings where he would be in the details. When I say details, I'm not just talking about somebody will pull up a Power Point and make a presentation. No, he would be in the dashboards."

"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."

Elon Musk Doesn¡¯t Spend All His Time Tweeting On X

AP

"Same with Elon. For those of you who know of Elon, you might think he spends a lot of time on Twitter tweeting. He doesn't. 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," Krishnan said.

Sriram Krishnan shared a lot of interesting learnings from his work experience. The most common thing amongst them all is that all the CEOs are very good at keeping things ¡®simple¡¯.

Check out the whole interview right here:

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