Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s first female engineer, didn’t use a computer regularly until her freshman year of college. But she’s clearly got the smarts. Born in Pune, India, Ruchi got her bachelor’s and master’s in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. During her five years at Facebook, she launched News Feed, Platform (which allows third-party developers to build Facebook apps) and Connect (enabling people to link their Facebook identities to almost any other website).
She offers good advice for working women: ”My philosophy is that you should go full force ahead until you are ready for the next step. A lot of women decide to take a back seat in their professional careers even before they are pregnant or are ready to have children.”
Sounds like she’s got the same mentality as another well-known female Facebooker, Sheryl Sandberg, the COO who speaks regularly about why we have so few female leaders.
Ruchi was one of the first 10 engineers at Facebook, and knows what it’s like to be a female in the male-dominated engineering field.
“It was difficult to break into the boys’ club,” Ruchi said. “I wish that females had a similar culture or support network.”
She left Facebook in 2010 to start her own company, Cove. In February, Dropbox acquired Cove and made Ruchi their VP of Operations.
Maybe it’s the Silicon Valley kool-aid getting to us, but we at AbFob love entrepreneurs (especially female ones!) like Ruchi who make a name for themselves with their brains and hard work. As Ruchi says, the tech industry “is the closest thing to a meritocracy in the working world.”
