Ruchi Sanghvi

Ruchi Sanghvi (born 20 January 1982) is an Indian-American computer engineer and businesswoman. She was the first female engineer hired by Facebook. 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 in 2012 and Sanghvi joined Dropbox 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.

Early life and education Sanghvi was raised in Pune, India. 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.

Career Facebook After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004, Sanghvi initially planned to work in New York City, but 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.

Sanghvi was one of the primary engineers on the first version of Facebook's News Feed product, 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 having launched only a few months earlier.

The News Feed feature faced significant initial criticism, including some directed personally at Sanghvi. This was addressed through the introduction of new privacy controls regarding what personal data would appear in friends' news feeds.

Cove and Dropbox In late 2010, Sanghvi left Facebook and in 2011, co-founded a stealth collaboration startup called Cove along with Aditya Agarwal. Sanghvi later became the Vice President of Operations at Dropbox. In October 2013, she left Dropbox, but continued to retain an advisory role at the company.

Board memberships Sanghvi is on the board of UCSF and was previously on Paytm's board of directors.

Philanthropy Sanghvi was listed as one of the founders of FWD.us, a 501(c)(4) lobbying group formed in Silicon Valley to promote immigration reform, 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.

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.