Ten years ago, Aditya Agarwal, who was chief technology officer and vice president of engineering at the San Francisco-based cloud storage company Dropbox, met Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal by chance. What was supposed to be a 45-minute meeting ended up lasting nearly three hours.
“We did a deep dive into everything from technology to products that Flipkart was developing,” Agarwal recalls. “It was during one of those meetings that I felt there was a lot of potential in this relationship, and I joined the Flipkart board.”
Click here to connect with us on WhatsApp
A decade later, Bansal joined SouthPark Commons, an early-stage venture fund where Agarwal is a partner.
what’s that?
South Park Commons (SPC) is named after a neighborhood in San Francisco and was founded in 2015 by Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s first female engineer, who later joined Dropbox when the company acquired Cove, the company she founded in 2011, and ran product, marketing, communications and recruiting.
Agarwal is her husband. Conceived as a group of founders, researchers, engineers and others interested in startups, SPC has been raising funds to support early-stage founders, but with a twist.
Bansal says SPC differs from other early-stage funds by focusing on technologists who have a dream to build something and helping them get started and test their ventures. “There’s nothing like that out there,” he says.
It seems as though aspiring entrepreneurs can knock on SPC’s door even before they have a solid idea; most other funds prefer an idea and some sort of plan, even if it’s early-stage.
This is exactly what SPC’s founders meant when they spoke about “a journey that starts from minus one.”
“We help founders who are in the minus one to zero stage where they have no support,” Sanghvi says. “If a founder has an idea that makes sense, if there’s some kind of product-market fit, there are a lot of people who want to invest. But when founders are figuring out what they want to build, there’s no support. And that’s what we try to provide.”
Industry experts say it’s a bold belief that people who join the SPC community can launch startups. Many of the founders and technologists who come to SPC come before they have an idea or even before they’ve launched a startup. This is the minus one to zero stage.
A leading technologist who recently met with SPC and understood the company’s programme corroborates this: “There are many incubators and accelerators out there, but they all focus on the zero to one part of the startup journey and pick the right entrepreneurs who already have an idea or are very early stage companies,” he says. “At SPC, we focus on the minus one to zero stage, which is unheard of in India.”
Born from experience
“When I left Dropbox, I wanted to start another company, but when people asked me what I was doing, I felt embarrassed to say I wasn’t doing anything. It took me 18 months to tell people I was thinking about what I wanted to do next,” Sanghvi says.
So she started a community of peers and technologists in her state, and “we created an environment where it was okay to fail, and as a result we were able to throw away good ideas and create great ones,” she says.
Prior to SPC, he was an angel investor in companies such as Gusto, Pinterest, Paytm, Brex, Figma and Stemcentrx.
Agarwal joined SPC’s first fund in 2018.
In India, SPC is building a reputation in the community as a destination for early-stage artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and founders. SPC’s earliest members included future founders of companies like Anthropic and Imbue, as well as early engineers at OpenAI.
“We want to bridge the gap between the AI communities here in India and San Francisco, and we think we’re uniquely positioned to make that happen,” Sanghvi says.
SPCs typically invest $1 million in two installments. About 150 companies have been founded, raising a total of $1.5 billion at a combined valuation of more than $40 billion, Agarwal said. He added that 98 percent of these companies are still in business, which is important given the high failure rate of startups.
India’s Y-Combinator?
The founder’s negative one-to-zero journey has attracted the attention of others.
IndianVCs, a decentralized venture community, recently launched its platform, which aims to help startups build their foundations by addressing the challenges of fundraising and hiring. Founded by a group of former and current venture capitalists, IndianVCs aims to be India’s “mini Y-Combinator”. Its objective is to solve the demand and supply of talent and capital.
Y Combinator is a Silicon Valley startup incubator and accelerator that has produced companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Reddit, etc. Also known as the Startup School, Y Combinator has an alumni network worth over $600 billion.
“Founders only go through early stage fundraising once, so it’s not worth their time to become an expert on the entire ecosystem,” says Pavithran Chidambaram, founder of IndianVCs. “We built the repository to save them time. That’s our job, not theirs.”
The platform provides a database of investors, a VC job board, and templates for managing fundraising.
“IndianVCs is an incredible community that deeply understands and addresses the unique challenges faced by Indian founders, providing the right support to the country’s nascent startup ecosystem,” said Akshay Kothari, COO at Silicon Valley-based productivity startup Notion.
Rahul Agarwala, managing partner at SenseAI Ventures, which invests in companies cultivating India’s artificial intelligence ecosystem, says Indian venture capital firms have streamlined the process of finding the right investors and talent, making them an invaluable resource for first-time entrepreneurs.
Less common
South Park Commons is a technology startup community and early stage venture fund.
We are dedicated to helping founders, engineers, researchers and builders figure out what to do next in their careers from -1 to 0.
It was founded in late 2015 by Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s first female engineer and former VP of Operations at Dropbox.
Sanghvi founded SPC Fund in 2018 with Aditya Agarwal, former CTO of Dropbox.
The community is based in San Francisco and New York City.
Bengaluru will be the community’s first base outside the US.
