Ruchi Sanghvi

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004, Sanghvi initially planned to work in New York City, but says that she was horrified by the small cubicle size. She decided instead to move to Silicon Valley where her former CMU colleague Aditya Agarwal, whom she was dating, worked. She got a job at the Oracle Corporation.[7]

In 2005, Sanghvi and Agarwal both started working at Facebook. Sanghvi was Facebook's first female engineer.[3][12][13]

Sanghvi was one of the main people working on the first version of Facebook's News Feed product, first launched in September 2006, and she wrote the blog post announcing its launch.[14] 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 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.[13][15] 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, and announced in a contrite blog post by Facebook's principal founder Mark Zuckerberg.[13][16]

In 2006, Sanghvi became the product lead for Facebook Platform.

In late 2010, Sanghvi left Facebook and in 2011, co-founded a stealth collaboration startup called Cove along with Aditya Agarwal.[5] In February 2012, Dropbox, the file synchronization and backup service company, announced that it had acquired Cove and that Sanghvi and Agarwal would be joining Dropbox.[17] 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.[6][7]

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.[9] SPC has since grown to include physical spaces in San Francisco and New York City, with over 450 active members and alumni globally.[18] In 2018, SPC raised a $40 million seed fund backed by community members.[8] 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.[19]