These Club Hosts Keep the Party Alive


To download Elon Musk appearing on it Clubhouse program last February, the couple texted him. They had met Mr. Musk on a private tour a few years ago. Space XHeadquartered in Hawthorne, California.

One week later, Mark Zuckerberg Called to discuss the future of augmented reality. The Facebook founder got another easy fix: He was a colleague at the time.

And to lock Virgil AblohGoing on their show in April to discuss the impact of internet culture on the Off-White brand, the duo went to their mutual friend, Imran Amed, the founder of The Business of Fashion.

Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy,Good Time Show” is arguably the most influential show on social voice app Clubhouse, at least among Silicon Valley movers and shakers.

The show, which started in December, has 175,000 subscribers. His fans include anyone who wants to hear Calvin Harris and Paris Hilton discuss their tech entrepreneurs’ cryptocurrency purchases or the latest wrinkles in human-robot relationships.

Three nights a week (schedule random), nearly an hour of audio streaming combines the convenience of a conference call between tech giants with the friendly little chat of happy hour. The show starts around 10pm West Coast time or whenever they put their 2-year-old daughter, Indra, to bed.

Shows are lively and prone to technical glitches. In a January episode, the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer needed to be reminded to turn down the volume due to background noise. It turned out that Mr. Ballmer made a phone call from his hot tub. “I don’t know if you can hear the water splashing, but I have to say, this is a pretty good way to have a discussion,” he said.

Personally, Mr. Krishnan, who is 6 feet-6, and Ms. Ramamurthy, who is 5 feet-3, have an attractively mismatched visual appearance. But they share the same age (both 37 years old) and share a friendly bedside demeanor that makes even the clumsiest bedside executives feel right at home.

On a crisp April afternoon in San Francisco, the couple settled outside at a picnic table. La Boulangerie, a French cafe near their home in the city’s Noe Valley district.

“We’re always obsessed with stories that make people,” said Mr. Krishnan, wearing a hoodie with the diamond logo. Jemi is a free website builder. (Bothers, naturally, are startup angel investors.)

Wearing an ankle-length camel-coloured coat from the Comptoir des Cotonniers, Miss Ramamurthy nodded. “We get a lot of DMs and responses from people starting their careers in India or another country where it’s really important to see someone like me or Sriram,” he said. “You know, you look like me and you have an accent.”

Both were born in Chennai in South India and were raised “with the typical middle-class Indian upbringing.”

A mutual friend called them a Yahoo! Chat room to help with a coding project. The collaboration was unsuccessful, but the couple continued to exchange messages even though the other had no idea what they looked like.

“When we tell people we meet online, everybody thinks it’s a dating app,” Miss Ramamurthy sighed with delight.

Mr. Krishnan said, “This is a much more geeky story.”

“Oh, he’s so tall, I remember thinking,” said Mrs. Ramamurthy when they finally got together a year later.

It soon caught the attention of the couple. S. Somasegar, the famous Indian-American technology executive who was at Microsoft at the time. Influenced by smug digital scholars, Mr. Somasegar hired them both in 2005.

“Many people in the industry join companies like Facebook or Twitter and are happy to have been there for decades,” said Mr. Somasegar, who spent 27 years at Microsoft before joining the Madrona Venture Group in 2015. “But Sriram and Aarthi are not like that. satisfied with the status quo. They have an uneasiness and a need to ask questions that spark their curiosity.”

The couple entered into a romantic relationship in 2006. The following year, they moved to Microsoft’s American headquarters in Seattle. They escaped in 2010 and moved to Palo Alto a year later.

Mr. Krishnan has held executive positions at Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook and Snap. Earlier this year, he was hired as a general partner at the powerful venture capital firm. Andreessen Horowitz, one of Clubhouse’s leading investors. “Now when I meet the founders, they think they already ‘know’ me while listening to the show, and that really helps,” he said.

Ms. Ramamurthy worked at Netflix before promoting two new ventures: True and Co.In 2012, an underwear e-commerce site; and lumoid, a service that allows people to try gadgets before they buy them. He took to Facebook as product director in 2017 before leaving in May to head the Clubhouse’s efforts to expand into other countries. Like the other 40 of Clubhouse’s employees, he will receive shares.

Clubhouse currently has a market cap of $4 billion, but its metrics are fluctuating wildly. At its peak in February, it reached nearly 10 million global downloads, according to the app analytics firm. Sensor Tower, largely thanks to the appearances of Mr. Musk and Mr. Zuckerberg on “The Good Time Show”. This trick did a nose dive Nearly 900,000 downloads in April – a free fall of about 90 percent. release Android The May release helped turn the slide, with nearly seven million downloads in June. Sensor Tower.

The couple isn’t alarmed by the headlines proclaiming:clubhouse party over” or competition from companies like Spotify, which recently announced its own live audio hub, Green Room.

“If you look at Facebook 16 years ago or Twitter 12 years ago, these platforms will be unrecognizable from today,” Ramamurthy said between sips of tea. “Clubhouse is only a year old. I have so much faith in the platform that I literally quit my job to work there.”

The couple have always been true believers in technology. Mr. Krishnan explained that “big weekend events” often involve walking around. apple park or taking curious runs next to the once Tudor-style house Steve Jobs.

“We used to take a few laps around her house – I’m sure people thought we were sick,” said Miss Ramamurthy, looking a little embarrassed.

Mr. Krishnan put his hand on his wife’s shoulder with a big smile. “We’ve really been fanboys forever,” he said. “What else can we say? We just love technology.”



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *