Ruchi Sanghvi (born 20 January 1982) is an Indian computer engineer and businesswoman. She was the first female
engineer
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the l ...
hired by
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
.
In late 2010, she quit Facebook and in 2011,
she started her own company Cove, with two other co-founders. The company was sold to
Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropb ...
in 2012 and Sanghvi joined
Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropb ...
as VP of Operations. She left Dropbox in October 2013.
[
In 2016, Sanghvi established South Park Commons, a residential and professional tech space that functions similarly to a ]hackerspace
A hackerspace (also referred to as a hacklab, hackspace, or makerspace) is a community-operated, often "not for profit" (501(c)(3) in the United States), workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, sc ...
.
Early life and education
Sanghvi was raised in Pune
Pune (; ; also known as Poona, (List of renamed Indian cities and states#Maharashtra, the official name from 1818 until 1978) is one of the most important industrial and educational hubs of India, with an estimated population of 7.4 million ...
, India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. When she was young, she intended to join her father's business after completing her studies. Sanghvi pursued her bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
.
Career
Facebook
After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004, Sanghvi initially planned to work in New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, but says that she was horrified by the small cubicle size. She decided instead to move to Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
where her former CMU colleague Aditya Agarwal Aditya Agarwal (born 30 May 1982) is a software engineer and venture investor. Agarwal was an early engineer at Facebook where he wrote the Facebook Search Engine. He was also Facebook's first Director of Product Engineering. After leaving Facebook ...
, whom she was dating, worked. She got a job at the Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...
.[
In 2005, Sanghvi and Agarwal both started working at ]Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
. Sanghvi was Facebook's first female engineer.[Kirkpatrick, David (2010-06-08). The Facebook Effect (pp. 132). Simon & Schuster.]
Sanghvi was one of the main people working on the first version of Facebook's News Feed
On the World Wide Web, a web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors ''syndicate'' a web feed, thereby allowing users to ''subscribe'' a channel to it by adding the feed ...
product, first launched in September 2006, and she wrote the blog post announcing its launch. The original news feed was an algorithmically generated and constantly refreshing summary of updates about the activities of one's friends. The concept was relatively new at the time, with Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
having launched only a few months in advance.
The News Feed feature was greeted with a lot of pushback and criticism, including some that was directed personally at Sanghvi. The criticism was dealt with through the introduction of new privacy controls in terms of what personal data would appear in friends' news feeds. These privacy controls were coded in a hectic 48-hour coding session by Sanghvi and other Facebook engineers including Chris Cox and Andrew Bosworth
Andrew "Boz" Bosworth is an American business executive who has been Chief Technology Officer of Meta since 2022.
After graduating from Harvard University in 2004, he worked as a developer on Microsoft Visio for almost two years, then joined Mar ...
, and announced in a contrite blog post by Facebook's principal founder Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...
.
In 2006, Sanghvi became the product lead for Facebook Platform
The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook.
The current Faceboo ...
.
Cove and Dropbox
In late 2010, Sanghvi left Facebook and in 2011, co-founded a stealth collaboration startup called Cove along with Aditya Agarwal.[ In February 2012, ]Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropb ...
, the file synchronization and backup service company, announced that it had acquired Cove and that Sanghvi and Agarwal would be joining Dropbox. Sanghvi later became the Vice President of Operations at Dropbox, managing product, marketing, communications and other functions. In October 2013, Sanghvi left Dropbox, but continued to retain an advisory role at the company.[
]
South Park Commons
In 2015, Sanghvi founded South Park Commons (SPC), a technical community and co-working space located in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco. The community describes itself as an "anti-incubator" and includes entrepreneurs, engineers, researchers, and others. SPC has since grown to include physical spaces in San Francisco and New York City, with over 450 active members and alumni globally. In 2018, SPC raised a $40 million seed fund backed by community members. SPC raised a second fund of $150 million in 2021. Sanghvi serves as both co-head of the SPC community and general partner in the SPC Fund.
Board memberships
Sanghvi is an investor and adviser in a number of Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
companies. She is on the board o
UCSF
and was previously on Paytm's board of directors.
Philanthropy
Sanghvi was listed as one of the founders of FWD.us
FWD.us is a 501(c)(4) pro-immigration lobbying group based in the United States that advocates for prison reform, status for undocumented immigrants, particularly for DACA recipients, and higher levels of immigration visas, particularly for H-1 ...
, a 501(c)(4) lobbying group formed in Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
to promote immigration reform
Immigration reform is change to the current immigration policy of a country. In its strict definition, ''reform'' means "to change into an improved form or condition, by amending or removing faults or abuses". In the political sense, "immigration ...
, improve education, and facilitate technological breakthroughs in the United States. The group launched on 11 April 2013.
Sanghvi's personal story was featured on the FWD.us website's "Stories" section.
In an interview with ''Mint
MiNT is Now TOS (MiNT) is a free software alternative operating system kernel for the Atari ST system and its successors. It is a multi-tasking alternative to TOS and MagiC. Together with the free system components fVDI device drivers, XaA ...
'' in November 2013, Sanghvi described her involvement with FWD.us as follows: "Silicon Valley is a very idealistic society. So FWD.us is a mission to step down from the idealistic world and do some real work. The mission is to boost the knowledge economy. Immigration is only one part of it, the other part of it is to figure out bipartisan policies to help include STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) studies in the education system. Immigration is a really hot topic and I am very satisfied with the senate Bill. I am hopeful that immigration reform will pass, even though right now Washington is divided."[
]
Personal life
Sanghvi is married to Aditya Agarwal, who was her colleague at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
and later at Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
, Cove, and Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropb ...
.
Awards and honors
Sanghvi was awarded a TechFellow "Best Engineering Leadership Award" in 2011 for her work at Facebook.
In 2018, Sanghvi was a keynote speaker for HackMIT.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sanghvi, Ruchi
1982 births
21st-century Indian engineers
21st-century Indian women scientists
21st-century American women
American Jains
American technology company founders
American women company founders
American company founders
American women business executives
American business executives
American women engineers
Carnegie Mellon University alumni
Computer engineers
Engineers from Maharashtra
Facebook employees
Indian women computer scientists
Indian women engineers
Living people
Scientists from Pune
Women scientists from Maharashtra
21st-century American scientists
21st-century women engineers