SAN FRANCISCO — Ruchi Sanghvi was the first female engineer at Facebook, where she helped create the news feed that now serves as the primary window into the world’s largest social network. Then she built a start-up of her own and sold it to another rising Silicon Valley company, Dropbox, becoming one of its first female executives.
But as she left Dropbox in 2014, she didn’t know what she would do next.At 32, she wanted a better way of deciding where her career would go. She wanted an environment where she could freely explore new ideas among her peers without feeling the pressure to start another project immediately.
As the months passed, she never quite found that kind of personal think tank, but she came to realize that many old friends and colleagues felt much the same way. Her next project became an effort to help people find their next project.
The result is South Park Commons. Housed in an old townhouse on the oval park at the heart of the San Francisco tech scene, the Commons is a selected community of entrepreneurs, engineers, researchers and others. Ms. Sanghvi describes it as tech’s answer to the Bloomsbury Set or Benjamin Franklin’s Junto club, a means of shaping new ideas through conversation and shared experience.
It’s also a way of preparing for the future.
“You get a couple of shots in life to do something meaningful and impactful. Why not take the time to identify that?” Ms. Sanghvi said during a recent conversation inside the Commons, a high-ceilinged space decorated by local artists. “It is very easy to fall into the traps of Silicon Valley — ‘Let’s start a company,’ or ‘Let’s invest’ — without giving it a second thought.
”Founded a little more than 18 months ago, the Commons aims to fill a hole in the tech landscape. Northern California is littered with incubators and accelerators, organizations like Y Combinator and Techstars that help small companies develop and grow. This is something different, a community you can join before you have founded a company or even when you have little interest in founding one.
The Commons is a bit like the hacker spaces that have long thrived in the Valley — places where coders and makers gather to build new software and hardware — but it moves beyond that familiar concept. Its founder, for one thing, is a female engineer turned entrepreneur turned executive.
The group, which includes 25 to 30 people at any given time, is one small piece of the Northern California tech scene, but it arrives at a crucial moment. Silicon Valley is a place in transition, thanks to a shifting economic landscape, the rise of artificial intelligence and other technologies, and new pressure to embrace a more diverse range of people.
Today’s tech industry also provides an extra degree of economic freedom, said Ms. Sanghvi, whose husband, Aditya Agarwal, also has a long history in Silicon Valley and is now the chief technology officer at Dropbox.
Many tech workers were stuck with their companies for years, waiting for an initial public offering….
The post The South Park Commons Fills a Hole in the Tech Landscape appeared first on FeedBox.