Aditya Agarwal had one of the most legible careers in tech, and now backs people at the stage where nothing is legible yet

Read the first half of the resume and it looks like someone playing a game with the answers in front of them. Carnegie Mellon for a bachelor's and a master's in computer science. Facebook in 2005, early enough to be one of a handful of engineers, where he built the first search engine for the platform and became its first Director of Product Engineering. A startup called Cove with Ruchi Sanghvi, acquired by Dropbox in 2012. VP of Engineering there, then Chief Technology Officer in 2016.

That is about as legible as a technology career gets. Every step is the obvious next one, and every institution on it is a name people recognise instantly. Which is exactly why what he does now is worth a second look.

Minus one to zero

South Park Commons, where he is a General Partner, is built around a stage most venture firms do not touch and do not have a name for. They call it minus one to zero: the period before you have a company, before you have an idea worth defending, when you are a capable person who has left something good and does not yet know what is next.

Zero to one is already a cliché. Minus one to zero is a genuinely different proposition, because there is nothing to underwrite. No traction, no deck, sometimes not even a sector. What SPC is actually funding is a community of about 1,200 people thinking in the open, on the theory that the useful ideas fall out of that rather than out of a pitch meeting. Fund IV came in at $575 million in 2026, taking the firm past $2 billion in assets, which is a lot of conviction in a stage that resists measurement.

The phrase he used announcing it was helping founders find their life's work, which is a strikingly unbusinesslike thing for a venture announcement. It is also the tell. A man whose own path never required searching has organised his second act entirely around the search.

The part that is not on the resume

The other thing worth knowing is that SPC was founded by his wife, Ruchi Sanghvi, who was Facebook's first female engineer and his co-founder at Cove. They have now built three things together across twenty years, which is a longer track record than most partnerships in this industry manage.

And underneath the fund there is still an engineer. He co-authored a guide to technical recruiting and hiring, which is the least glamorous subject available and the one that actually determines whether a company works. He sits on Flipkart's board and co-founded Bevel Health.

If you are between things and slightly embarrassed about it, read what SPC has published about minus one to zero. Someone with an unbroken record of obvious next steps built an entire institution around the idea that not knowing is a legitimate place to be.

$575M to help founders find their life's work.

Aditya, announcing SPC Fund IV in 2026