While speaking at the World Government Summit in UAE, Indian-origin tech entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan shared his experience working with top CEOs including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Satya Nadella and X (previously Twitter)'s Elon Musk .
During the session titled 'What did I learn from Elon and Zuckerberg', which Krishnan candidly admitted was a bit click-bait, the venture capitalist said that he had a 'working class upbringing' and grew up in Chennai.
"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.
Krishnan shared he got a culture shock when he moved from Chennai to 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.
Krishnan claimed that most successful CEOs had 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 added.
Krishnan recounted how the Facebook founder was a stickler when it came to details. "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."
Krishnan, who worked with Elon Musk during the Twitter acquisition, saw that the SpaceX founder operated similarly.
"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.
Krishnan went on to clarify what he meant when he said all great CEOs were micromanagers.
"When you think micromanager, you often think somebody's looking over your shoulder, who is messing with whatever you want and overturning decisions. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you in an environment where you're aligned behind a mission. You have fantastic people to work with. And if that's, not for everybody you can go find something else. That's also perfect," he said.
Kirshnan shared an interesting facet to Mark Zuckerberg's style of working. "When I was at Facebook, there used to be this kind of joke that you can tell how much Mark cared about your project based on your physical distance to him. Basically, what he would do is the teams he liked and he cared about, he would put them in tables around him, and the further out you were, he sort of trusted you to do your own thing or maybe he didn't care about you," Krishnan said.
About Elon Musk being a polarising figure, Krishnan said: "If you want to do something amazing it is going to p*** a lot of people off, if you can pardon my language. I think what is more important to figure out is what you want to accomplish, what is your mission, your vision, how do you inspire and motivate the team around you."
"In fact, in some ways, sometimes having a polarising mission is good because you want only the true believers, you don't want the person who's going to leave your team the first time there is some bad press, or the first time something doesn't work because the nature of these projects means that it's going to take a long time, there'll be a lot of failure."
Krishnan revealed what transpired in the Twitter office on the first day of Musk's takeover.
"In the first day when Elon took over Twitter right, I was there. Elon was like 'Hey I want to upload podcast videos on Twitter, which is now X, which is not possible by the way."
"He was like 'why can't I upload a 60-minute video?' and somebody was like 'we don't know'. And they were like 'well, can we find how many how many minutes we can upload?' And they were like 'Twitter's limit is 10'. 'Well, okay, that limit is 10. How much can I actually upload?'
"We called an engineer from the room and they said 'the minute limit is 42'. Why is it 42? And he kind of keeps going down. And, it's always an organisational issue, some engineering issue. He just kept asking like why can't I upload more. That unlocked so many organisational questions."
"If you look at all the great CEOs Elon, Zuck. They all are very good at keeping things very simple," Krishnan said.
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