Aditya Agarwal (born 30 May 1982) is a

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

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 in early 2011, he started Cove, a modern collaboration software company. Agarwal is also on the board of Flipkart.

Early life and education

Agarwal was born in India. His father was a chemical engineer and his mother was a homemaker. Agarwal moved with his family to many countries:

Cameroon Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west- central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; th ...

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

and

Thailand Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is b ...

, and eventually settled in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

. He was interested in computers and programming since a young age, and took programming classes while in Indonesia. After completing high school, Agarwal went to

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 ...

to pursue computer science. Agarwal obtained a Bachelor's and master's degree in Computer Science. Agarwal's post-graduate research focused on automatic clustering and segmentation of email corpora.

Career

Facebook

After graduating CMU in 2004, Agarwal saw many of his classmates move to

Wall Street Wall Street is an eight-block-long street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs between Broadway in the west to South Street and the East River in the east. The term "Wall Street" has become a metonym for ...

(the financial sector), but he wanted to enter the technology sector, so he began work at Oracle Inc in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Gov ...

. In 2005, he met

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.), of ...

after being introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Zuckerberg, who had started

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 ...

in 2004, impressed Agarwal, leading Agarwal to begin work at Facebook. Agarwal also persuaded his former CMU colleague and future wife Ruchi Sanghvi to work at Facebook. Agarwal and Sanghvi worked at Facebook till 2010.

Cove and Dropbox

After leaving Facebook, Agarwal and his wife Ruchi Sanghvi, co-founded Cove, a stealth collaboration startup. In February 2012, it was announced that Dropbox was acquiring Cove, and that both Agarwal and Sanghvi were joining Dropbox. In October 2016, Agarwal was promoted from vice-president of engineering to chief technology officer (CTO), replacing co-founder

Arash Ferdowsi Arash Ferdowsi ( fa, آرش فردوسی, born October 7, 1985) is an Iranian-American billionaire entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Dropbox. Early life and education Ferdowsi was born in Overland Park, Kansas, United States on 7 October 198 ...

. In July 2017, Agarwal announced in a Facebook post that he was leaving Dropbox, while expressing excitement about its trajectory.

South Park Commons Fund and Iconiq

Agarwal is a partner at South Park Commons Fund, an early-stage venture firm. He is also a partner at ICONIQ Capital, a growth stage venture firm.

Other

In 2019, Agarwal

announced An announcement (ANN) is a Usenet, mailing list or e-mail message sent to notify subscribers that a software project has made a new release version. Newsgroup announcement recipients often have a name like "comp.''somegroup''.announce". Mailing l ...

that he is a senior advisor and Chair of the Technology Committee for the upcoming 2022 Fifa Football World Cup in Qatar. Agarwal recently published a book on Technical Hiring and Recruiting.

Board Memberships

Philanthropy

Agarwal 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 Count ...

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. 24 The group launched on 11 April 2013. 25 He was also on the board of the Anita Borg Institute, the leading organization advocating for gender equality in the technology workforce. He also serves on the advisory board of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Personal life

Agarwal is married to engineer Ruchi Sanghvi, who was also his co-worker at

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 software. Dropbox was founded in 2 ...

and co-founder with him of Cove (which was acquired by Dropbox). The couple married in 2010 in India, with

attending the wedding.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Agarwal, Aditya 21st-century Indian engineers Living people Computer engineers Facebook employees 1982 births