Amir Efrati, co-executive editor at The Information, sent out the following to the staff:
Team,
We’re pleased to introduce several talented reporters who are joining The Information.
Kevin McLaughlin is returning as a senior reporter to help our team cover the biggest stories in enterprise technology, artificial intelligence and the cloud, and serve as a resource for our newsroom. Catherine Perloff is coming from AdWeek to cover the intersection of media, advertising and AI. And Sri Muppidi is joining us from Business Insider to cover venture capital and startups.
Kevin needs little introduction. He shaped the collaborative culture of The Information and wrote some of its most impactful stories during his 2016-2023 tenure. For instance, his sleuthy reporting forced DataRobot’s CEO and executive staff to resign. He brought readers deep inside Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers to uncover problems with products and data center practices.
Kevin also has a knack for making predictions that come true, like when he wrote that Slack would be acquired or the CEO of Google Cloud would get the boot. He was instrumental in our early coverage of OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, alongside Aaron. And just before he left last summer, he told our AI Huddle crew how the relationship between Nvidia and its biggest customers was going to get a lot more complicated (and it did).
Kevin then did his best Greg Brockman impression by taking a leave of absence while staying in close touch with us, regularly texting tips to several of us over the last year-plus. We couldn’t be happier to have him back, starting Monday Oct. 28 in San Francisco.
Catherine joins us from Adweek, where over the past three years she has broken a multitude of scoops on subjects ranging from Google sales reps encouraging advertisers to target teens against their own policies to Oracle’s plans for exiting the ad business, and financial services giant Intuit entering the advertising market. She also wrote features including one on the rise of “the rogue social media manager” character in social advertising strategies.
Before Adweek, Catherine covered bankruptcy and distressed debt for Debtwire, where she learned the art of cold calling people in finance, and earlier interned at Forbes, where she crossed paths with Laura! Catherine is a graduate of Tufts. She starts Nov. 11 in New York.
Sri, as a reporting fellow at Business Insider, recently scooped Index Ventures’ layoffs and numerous funding rounds for AI startups including Abnormal Security, Kong, Chainguard and Vanta. Previously she was a Marjorie Deane fellow at The Economist, where she wrote about Scale AI and other topics. In a rare feat for a fellow, she pitched and penned a “leader” on technology companies’ struggle to develop software or devices suitable for women. Her writing on defense tech was also shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize.
She knows the world of startups and VC particularly well. While working on her Master’s in management science and engineering at Stanford, Sri co-founded Wordsmith AI, a startup developing an AI writing copilot, in 2018. She later worked as a product manager at fintech Capchase and spent four years as an investor at Emerson Collective and Sierra Ventures before realizing she would rather chase news than deals, as well as return to writing. As an undergrad majoring in economics, she wrote a novella on the 2007 recession as her honors thesis.
Sri is a Bay Area native and lives in San Francisco with her new husband. In her free time, Sri enjoys exploring California, reading fiction, and throwing pottery. She starts Nov. 4.
—Amir, Martin and Laura
