Happy Birthday to Facebook’s first female engineer- Ruchi Sanghvi
Meet Ruchi Sanghvi – the female power in Silicon Valley
Ruchi Sanghvi, the first female engineer hired by Facebook was born in Pune, India on 20th January 1982. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. She graduated in Electrical & Computer Engineering. Following her then friend and later husband – Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi moved to work in Silicon Valley and got herself a job in Oracle Corporation.
In 2005, both Ruchi and Aditya started working for Facebook. Ruchi Sanghvi hence became the first female engineer at Facebook. Ruchi worked on the first version of Facebook’s news feed product and wrote about the same in her blog post. This was in 2006 and back then a lot of protests had come upon the introduction of the News Feed feature. Many of these backlashes landed on Sanghvi as well. However, the News Feed feature of Facebook is now an integral part of it. It is what helps people on Facebook connect with each other.
In 2007, Ruchi got married to her long-time friend Aditya Agarwal. In the late 2010s, Ruchi and Aditya left Facebook and co-founded a start-up called Cove which was a stealth collaboration. Cove was later acquired by Dropbox and Ruchi became the Vice President of Operations at Dropbox. She left Dropbox in 2013 but continued as an advisory for the company.
Ruchi is an investor and adviser in several Silicon Valley companies. She is also on Paytm’s board of directors.
In 2016, she founded South Park Commons (SPC), which is a technical community and co-working space. The community helps technologists and builders to figure out their future ventures. But this is not the only way in which Ruchi Sanghvi is making changes to the world. She is also a part of ‘FWD.us’ along with leaders like Mark Zuckerberg. FWD.us is a pro-immigration lobbying group that works for prison reform and the status of undocumented immigrants.
So a very happy birthday to Ruchi and wishing best wishes for all of her future endeavors.
Poorna is from Trivandrum, Kerala and likes to write novels and poems. She is a graduate of ‘The Film and Television Institute of India’, Pune.
