Pinned
Building at the frontier?
Exploring what's worth building?
Both are good reasons to apply to @southpkcommons.
Aditya Agarwal
4,037 posts
Aditya Agarwal
@adityaag
General Partner @SouthPkCommons, Co-Founder @Bevel_Health | Ex: Early Eng @facebook, CTO @Dropbox, Board @Flipkart | Optimist, Builder, Dad
Joined March 2007
- I "upgraded" from the iPhone 14 Pro to the iPhone 16 Pro. I literally cannot tell the difference. It took me 24 hours to set up the new phone properly etc. It just feels like a waste of time. And I do not understand where this "Apple Intelligence" is????
- We are currently in the midst of the largest rightward-shift in Silicon Valley politics that I have seen in my 20 years here. Some of this is on the surface, a lot is below it.
- 1/ Weekly 1:1s with direct reports are a staple of Silicon Valley management. The idea is to check in, see how they're doing, and provide feedback. I did this for 10+ years at Facebook & Dropbox. Frankly, I hated it and found it useless. But it's what "good" managers did.
- At Facebook (in the early days), the code paths required to make the site run for whales (>5000 friends) was quite distinct from the code paths for the average user (<300 friends). @elonmusk The twitter experience is over-fitting for your issues and degrading for others.
- I have been using Waymo every day for 2 weeks now and before that used Uber ~every day for 10+ years. Some thoughts on this transition and on my own behavioral changes:
- In the early days of Facebook, I would interview potential candidates and they would tell me that Facebook was just a simple CRUD interface on top of a database. Or that it was a glorified blog. Or a contact list. And yea, a blockchain is just a slow database. Probably nothing.
- 1/ One of the interesting and weird things about Silicon Valley is that no one really cares about what you did 10/20/30 years ago… unless you’re also doing something interesting today.
- ANTI-patterns for startup engineering hiring. Finding amazing engineers has *always* been hard but now feels like it is harder than ever. I have spent a lot of time hiring engineers for Facebook, Dropbox and ~200 startups that we work with at @southpkcommons. 🧵👇
- 1/ I’m coming to understand it’s not actually possible to significantly inflect someone’s baseline ambition. You can sharpen it, bring it into focus, and harness it—but fundamentally changing how ambitious someone naturally is hard. My job is to recognize the hidden ambition
- Replying to @adityaag10/ There is no way we are going to use humans for driving cars in the future.
- In unsurprising news -- computer science majors are finding it impossible to get software engineering internships Doesn't matter if you are at Stanford -- an AI coding agent is better at being an intern Totally tracks -- if I were a senior dev, I'd prefer an agent to a 20yr old
- 1/ I'm thrilled to share something close to my heart: I'm co-founding Bevel (@bevel_health) with @benjyang_ and @greynguyen. It's born from my personal journey to better health. Here's my story...
