Ruchi Sanghvi: My Job Interview with Mark Zuckerberg; Deep Dive on DAOs | 20VC #895

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Ruchi, I'm so excited for this one. I heard so many great things from Avatar and from many other people before, so thank you so much for joining me today.

It's great to be on the show, Hari. I've been a fan, and in the last couple of weeks alone, of the 3,000 episodes that you've done, I think I maybe heard four or five. (laughs)

I mean, that is fantastic. Uh, and you have many more that you can listen to if you have-

(laughs)

... some free time. Uh, I do wanna start though, pre-South Park days, and, you know, this is very unusual. Normally, we start with, you know, how you made your way into investing, but you have such a fascinating background, I wanted to kind of decouple it a little bit. So you were the first female engineer at Facebook and the first female exec at Dropbox. What was that like, first? Let's start there.

(clears throat) You know, I joined Facebook right out of college. I was optimistic, raring to go, working 24/7. I didn't really understand the concept of a ceiling. Everything was possible, and I wasn't afraid of anything, let alone being the only female engineer. Um, at Dropbox, I was a grownup who was hired to scale the company. So if you recall the world from Pulp Fiction, you know, he was the fixer. And that was my role at Dropbox. I managed functions like recruiting or marketing that didn't really have leaders. I created or built new teams like communication and international, and eventually hired people to run these functions who were experts. So the goal really was to work myself out of a job. Um, so the roles were quite different. Um, in one role, I was a kid. Um, you know, the, the individual contributor. Um, and in the other role, I was the manager who was brought in to manage all the kids.

Can I... Sorry. (laughs) Uh, one thing you learn is that I never stick to schedule. Was it difficult to make that transition? I've had to. It's not been easy. Was it difficult to make that transition?

It was extremely difficult, um, to make the transition. You really have to pull, um, on a different set of skills. But the key, when you come into an environment that has already been built, um, and that has, you know, a core culture to it, the key really is to listen and understand and internalize before going in and bringing the lessons you've learned or, you know, bringing your success m- rubric to the organization, but to really adapt to the organization's culture.

So if we look at the two, we've got Facebook and Dropbox, obviously, two very iconic companies. Uh, if you were to i- (laughs) Again, this is so hard on me, but like, if you were to isolate one or two takeaways from each-