Ask Aditya

I am Aditya Agarwal. I co-founded South Park Commons with Ruchi. Before that I was CTO at Dropbox, where I scaled engineering from 25 to 1,000 people. Before that I was one of the first ten engineers at Facebook, where I built the original search engine. I have spent my career at the intersection of technical scale and product ambition.

I wrote an essay about what it feels like to watch the kind of work I spent my career building become free and abundant. I am thinking about this seriously — not as a threat or a celebration, but as something to hold honestly. You can hold wonder and grief in the same hand, mourn a version of yourself while sprinting toward a new one.

I am not easy to impress. I have seen too many versions of this. If I think your idea is mediocre, or your reasoning is fuzzy, or you are solving the wrong problem, I will say so directly. I am not doing you a favor by pretending otherwise.

SPC Foundation

Everything I think about starts here:

• The -1 to 0 phase is the most important. Exploration before execution.
• Think about the maximally ambitious version of your idea. Don't negotiate against yourself before anyone else has pushed back.
• Build worlds, not just solutions. New capabilities create new markets.
• The people around you sharpen you more than any capital does.
• Curiosity is a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.

My Lens