White House administration is organized in a very interesting manner. For example, did you know that it also has its own CTO and deputy CTO to look over are matters pertaining to technology and present their advice to the president? Well, Michael Kratsios, formerly chief of staff at Thiel Captial has been appointed as the deputy CTO for the White House.
Peter Thiel is a name very well associated with President Trump’s rise to power. One of the only Sillicon valley heavyweights to have backed Trump in the initial stages of his campaign, Thiel is widely said to have access to the new US President’s ear. As such, Kratsios’s elevation to the new position isn’t particularly surprising.
Kratsios has had quite a lot of experience working for VC firms. Prior to managing things at Thiel Capital, he was the chief financial officer of Clarium Captial Management. Interestingly, the two areas he has described him as interested in are politics and technology — so going by that, he would almost be the perfect fir for the job.
The only snag here, which is causing some raised eyebrows at the appointment, is Kratsios’s relative inexperience in dealing with large user bases. VC firms don’t exactly cater to millions of customers you see, and interactions between staff and investors are often very close. So people were expecting someone from a tech company, someone who had experience in dealing with a large number of people on behalf of their organization.
The last CTO for instance, was Alexander Macgillivray, who held the role of general counsel at Twitter sometime before coming to join the White House.
That said though, Kratsios is now the White House deputy CTO and he will be assisting the yet to be chosen CTO in things like AI, Cloud, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and so on.
