Silicon Valley-based Startup Co-founded by Facebook’s First Woman Engineer Expanding to India
Silicon Valley-based South Park Commons (SPC), founded by the husband-wife duo of Ruchi Sanghvi and Aditya Agarwal is expanding to India and is working with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. SPC is a community of technologists and builders dedicated to helping each other share ideas, explore directions, and realize opportunities. The SPC is also working on its New York expansion.
The Economic Times noted that the news “comes when Bansal stepped down from the board of Flipkart in January, “citing a conflict of interest between the e-commerce major and his new venture.”
Bansal resigned from the e-commerce group’s board in January. His brother Sachin, the co-founder of the Bengaluru-headquartered startup, left the board in 2018 after a scuffle with the investors. In addition to being an entrepreneur, Bansal is also an active investor in several startups including VideoVerse, Curefoods, and SuperK, among others. Also, he launched B2B startup XTo10X Technologies to help startups with product-market fit and initial business momentum.
Sanghvi, known for being the first woman engineer at Facebook at age 23, launched SPC in 2016, named after a San Francisco neighborhood. Since then, SPC has grown from being a learning group to a platform that has raised two funds to back entrepreneurs with very early-stage ideas. After Facebook, she started her own software company, Cove, and sold it to Dropbox two years later. Her husband was the chief technology officer at a file-sharing company till 2018.
Speaking about the plans for India, Agarwal told the Economic Times that their long-term goal at SPC had always been to “extend their philosophy of transitioning from the ‘negative one to zero’ phase to any location harboring talent, ambition, and a desire to explore new opportunities and build companies” According to him, “India is perhaps the most dynamic and interesting country for technology entrepreneurship in the world.” They are also “evaluating the UK to expand into,” he said.
Agarwal also serves as an advisor to the leadership at ADL (Adani Digital Labs), “contributing to the development of a product roadmap,” he told ET. “I’ll be offering guidance, perspective, and strategic insight across different functions and verticals, in particular, from my time as the lead independent director of Flipkart.”