Ruchi Sanghvi likes to quote from the Daft Punk song "Giorgio by Moroder."
The song chronicles the life of disco icon Giorgio Moroder, who wants to capture the history and future of sound in a single album. Midway through the 9-minute overture, Giorgio says: "Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and music being correct, you can do whatever you want."
This, Sanghvi explains, is how she views the business world. She believes in letting go of preconceived notions of how things should be done and who should do them. She believes in tackling problems with creativity and an open mind.
The approach has paid off. As the first female engineer at Facebook, Sanghvi helped develop two of the company's more important creations: the iconic Newsfeed and the Facebook Platform, which lets outside coders build applications that plug into the world's most popular social network. Then, at Dropbox, she dreamed up a similar developer platform for the big-name file-sharing service---dubbed DBX---overseeing the company’s metamorphosis from a simple collaboration tool into a something that could potentially connect all the tidbits of your digital life.
But despite the obvious success of her approach to not only engineering but management, her experience in the tech industry wasn't without its extreme difficulties. Sometimes, an open mind gets you only so far in Silicon Valley, where the culture is largely dominated by men.
It's a problem that has received some much needed attention in recent months, with the biggest tech companies openly revealing the extent of the problems and many actively working to correct it. Alongside people like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, PayPal head of open source Danese Cooper, and Google's internal developer tools overlady Melody Meckfessel, Sanghvi is yet another prime example that the industry doesn't have to be a boys' club.
Now in-between jobs, Sangvi sat down with WIRED to discuss her career in tech. The conversation has been edited for flow and clarity.
WIRED: How did you end up in Silicon Valley? After college, you landed a job doing math modeling at a bank in New York.
__Sanghvi: __About three to four weeks before I was to start, I just had, like, a panic attack. I decided I would go check out my office space, and it was this little cubicle on this floor full of cubicles, and I just got so depressed. I was like: 'This is not where I want to be working.' I was on a visa, so I had to give an excuse and I essentially was like: 'I have Yellow Fever. I can’t make it.’ Because you can’t tell them that you're looking for another job or any such thing because your visa is dependent on your job.
So, I came out to California, and Oracle was the first company that gave me an interview, and within two weeks, I switched to Oracle. That was probably the best decision of my life. I was a programmer. Oracle does software products and technology. In a bank, you were building tools to support the core product, which was finance. You weren’t core to it.
It was about joining a company where your skill set was core to the company. I didn't realize that when I was applying for jobs.
__WIRED: __Clearly, that was the case with you at Facebook---and Dropbox. But also, when I spoke to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, he likened you to Sheryl Sandberg---someone who goes out of their way to motivate employees, especially women. He said you'd been a role model for others at Dropbox. Who has been a role model or mentor for you?
__Sanghvi: __I haven't had too many mentors per se, in that I haven’t had a mentorship-like relationship with many people, but I hold a lot of people in high regard. The usual people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and more recently Elon Musk.
I think there are a lot of inspiring individuals throughout history in the technology space because they’ve all overcome great odds to do what they wanted to do, but I've never really had, like, a mentorship relationship that in some ways I can leverage.
__WIRED: __Do you think that has hurt you in any way?
__Sanghvi: __Most definitely. I think that I, for some reason, always believed---and I was extremely naive in thinking so---that everything is a meritocracy and if you can do really good work, then that is what is going to carry you through, without placing enough emphasis on relationships and how important relationships are. You can be good, and you can do a lot of work, but without people and those relationships to support you, it's difficult to take that work up.
So, more than mentorship, I think it's the act of developing relationships that can help you along the way.
__WIRED: __How have you dealt with being in a very male-oriented profession?
__Sanghvi: __I think that things have changed drastically even in the short time that I have been working in the technology industry. When I started in college, I was one of five girls in a class of a 150, and then when I graduated, I happened to be the first female engineer at Facebook. But by then, I'd always lived in a male-dominated society, whether it was high school, college or work.
So my actions were very much attuned to that in that I was extremely opinionated. I was never afraid to ask questions. Lots of people called me aggressive---like if people were yelling at me, I was yelling back at them. I didn't have very many feminine characteristics, quite honestly. So that happened, and in some ways, I didn't have the same relationships with men that maybe other females have with men in that I was very much the aggressive, opinionated woman or person.
But then, there’s been so much awareness since then---like with [Sheryl Sandberg's book] Lean In, with the things that have been done, a lot of the movies and the books that have come out where people talk about about implicit biases. And implicit biases are really hard because they're implicit. People don't know they have them. Women don’t know they have them, and men don’t know they have them. So, just increasing awareness of the issue has helped tremendously.
I can look back at my career and I can say these things were really hard for me because of these implicit biases.
__WIRED: __Like what?
__Sanghvi: __Like a lot of things. I don’t like being called aggressive. And that reputation has stuck with me. Any company that I go to, any VC firm that I talk to, everybody thinks of me as the aggressive person who can get shit done, at all costs.
The other thing: I was never able to be buddies with folks around me. It was hard. My husband [Dropbox's Aditya Agarwal] has always worked with the same set of people [as me] because we’ve always worked at the same companies. He's always been friendlier. Yes, he is more extroverted than I am, so that helps. But on the other hand, it's always been very difficult for me to have those same kind of relationships with people. And the one thing to remember is that in any company, everything is based on trust. And trust is not just built in a professional environment or based on your work. It’s also built socially.
I've always had to work to earn that trust. I always had to overperform. I always had to do two times as many projects. I always had to do more things to earn that trust, rather than being given that trust to some degree based on my past performances, or my future potential. So that was hard.
__WIRED: __Was that because you weren’t engaging as much socially?
__Sanghvi: __I was around, but this is evolutionary. This has existed for eons and eons and eons. Men are just more comfortable with men than they are with women. I'm more comfortable grabbing a glass of wine with you than let’s say, hypothetically, grabbing a glass of wine with my CTO, even though I know you less. It’s just evolutionary. This is what I'm saying. Implicit biases are hard, but now people are talking about it. It’s nice to have these conversations out in the open now.
But the biggest change that I have seen is that all of a sudden there is a demand. There is a demand for women executives. It’s not okay to have an executive team without a woman. There is a demand for women board executives, which you didn’t see five to six to seven years ago. It wasn’t as welcome. There’s a demand for women engineers. Every single company has a concentrated effort to recruit women engineers, not just because they want to even out the ratio but because women engineers actually make the work environment better.
If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to bring more diverse opinions, but they also tend to build a collaborative culture. And as a result, things get done faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy, which makes for a better work environment. It’s just better all around.
__WIRED: __Do you think that a woman being appointed CEO or to a board is going to stop being news?
No, I don’t think so. Someone had done the math that if we wanted to have 40 percent of all boards---public boards---in this country to have women, it will take over 10 years because of how slow the board-seat turnaround is. If that is the case, I don’t think it’s going to change any time soon. I think that’s disappointing. There’s an awareness, but the movement is so slow that it’s disappointing.
__WIRED: __What barriers do you see at play?
__Sanghvi: __While I think that people are becoming more aware now, I don’t think it’s clear to them what they need to change or what they need to do to change those numbers. I don’t think many people talk about once you actually get women into these roles, are you doing the types of things you need to do to make them successful? Because in many ways, I’ve often felt lonely, even though I’ve had incredibly supportive CEOs and colleagues. I’ve often felt lonely. I’ve often felt misunderstood. I’ve always carried this reputation of being aggressive, which didn’t bother me when I was younger, but it does bother and hinder my work now. I don’t necessarily think we have the framework or the foundation to make sure these women actually succeed in these roles because more often than not, these women are the only women in a group of people.
__WIRED: __What made you feel lonely?
__Sanghvi: __I think the biggest thing that makes me feel lonely is that I feel as though I don’t connect with my colleagues the way that they connect with each other. I feel a little bit like an outsider, like in the peanut gallery, looking in. And that’s probably for multiple reasons — I may be the newest member on the team, and they’ve known each other a long time. But I bet if you talk to a lot of women, they feel the same way.
I would encourage us to ask ourselves this question: "Did we get more comfortable with the environment [or did the environment actually change]?"
__WIRED: __Why did you leave Dropbox?
__Sanghvi: __It was a combination of being burnt out---really wanting to take a break after 10 years and put things into perspective [as far as what I wanted to do next]---and also the company being in a really good place. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have left, because I have so much invested in it. I want to find the side of technology, products and platforms that will impact users in the next 10 years.
That brings me to: 'What would I do in a world where I have no constraints?' And I think my inspiration in this particular example is Elon Musk, because in many ways I think that’s what he’s done. After having done PayPal, when things like money, financing, teams, technology no longer became a constraint, I think he asked himself: 'What can I do in a constrain-free world to move technology in the next 10 years?'
__WIRED: __What's your SpaceX then?
__Sanghvi: __I don’t know yet, if I did I would be doing it.
__WIRED: __What advice would you want to impart on people?
__Sanghvi: __The first thing I would say is you need to live life with no regrets. Always ask yourself---when you’re doubting something or you’re afraid of something---ask yourself the question "What would you do if you weren’t afraid?" and do that? I say this because, for every decision in my life, everybody told me that I was a fool.
But each and every single time, I was asking myself, aside from the fear, "Is this what you really want to do?" And if you want to do it, go ahead and do it, and things will fall into place after that. Obviously you have to work for them, but they do fall into place.
