Xoogler.co Q&A with Aditya Agarwal

Aditya’s Career

Aditya joined the Xoogler community for a Q&A on his illustrious career and most recent experience as a partner-in-residence at South Park Commons. Aditya was one of the first five engineers at Facebook and helped build and launch the Facebook search engine as well as Messenger. After five years with Facebook, Aditya wanted to start something on his own and founded Cove, a communication software, with his future wife Ruchi Sanghavi. Cove was soon acquired by Dropbox and Aditya went on to become CTO of Dropbox for the next six years. Ruchi also worked at Dropbox during this period and when she decided to leave she did not want to commit to doing something specific as she wanted to take time to explore. Ruchi’s drive to learn and explore inspired South Park Commons which later became a fund as well.

South Park Commons

SPC started with 10–12 people around Aditya and Ruchi’s kitchen table. These small groups would participate in organized informal reading groups, find experts to lead conversations on new topics, and critique each others ideas. SPC is an early stage fund and is not thesis driven but looking for startups where software is accelerating a technology. Currently they have around 40–50 active people in their community, around five people “graduate” monthly, and 250 alumni. Their community ethos is for builders, tinkerers, and domain experts to come together and figure out how to challenge and encourage each other to build new ideas. Aditya believes that in order to think clearly about next steps it is important to distance yourself from your previous employment and asks that members are not full-time employees. To learn more about South Park Commons, visit their site at https://www.southparkcommons.com/.

Q&A Takeaways

• When thinking about moving from single product use caution. Most companies with a successful first product can become arrogant and falsely assume that the reasons their first product found success will make their next product successful.
• There has never been a better time in Silicon Valley history to create a billion dollar company but there has also never been a worst time to create a $100 billion company. The major tech companies are extremely difficult to compete against, doing so requires patience and perseverance.
• To find success you have to find the right combination of patience and perseverance while being realistic if something is not working out. Aditya suggests that founders look at their own internal biases to determine if they have been generally pessimistic or optimistic in the past. Once you have determined your internal biases, overcorrect for your future evaluations of your company.
• If you are willing to be patient it can take 10–12 years before users begin to switch to a new product especially if you are dealing with something less glamorous, it takes time. Investors and co-founders may come and go, what you can control is your own patience and pace.
• In early stages, it is important to be or have a leader that will stand by their decisions and lead the company. Aditya recalls a seminole moment as a small team launched Facebook’s newsfeed feature which was initially unpopular both internally and externally but Mark Zuckerberg stood by it. Zuckerberg knew that without this feature Facebook would not have much room to grow and now newsfeed is a feature that Facebook is known for.

Thank you Aditya for sharing your time and unique knowledge to over 40 Xooglers! We’re excited to see what you continue to do with South Park Commons.