Ex-Facebook Engineer & Former Dropbox CTO: Is the Superintelligence Era Here?

Aditya Agarwal (0:00)

I actually believe that superintelligence is already here. What are you gonna call it? AGI, ASI. But the more exciting vector for me is that the number of people who truly know how to use these systems today is like, maybe like 0.1% of the population.

Derek Andersen (0:11)

A lot of these AI leaders have been talking about slowing down and being measured. Where do you stand on that?

Aditya Agarwal (0:16)

Let's assume we decided we were going to slow it down. How would that even work? The answer is that we will just not do it through excessive top-down regulation. Then I think that we were just essentially kind of cutting off what might possibly be the biggest source of alleviation of human suffering. Most startups don't work, right? No matter how methodical you are. So I tell people that you should really be asking yourself, will I learn and will I have fun? And it's an underrated way, I think, of making career choices because startups are just so risky.

Derek Andersen (0:56)

This episode is brought to you by Google for Startups. Welcome to Divot, where each week I interview interesting and amazing people. Make sure to like and subscribe wherever you watch or listen. Today we're in San Francisco with Aditya Agarwal.

He helped build Facebook Search, the News Feed and Messenger before becoming its first Director of Product Engineering. At Dropbox, he scaled engineering from 25 people all the way to 1,000, as the platform passed 500 million users. Now Aditya backs founders from minus one to zero. In 2026, South Park Commons raised a $575 million fourth fund, bringing assets under management to roughly $2 billion.

Its ecosystem includes $48 billion Cognition, $13 billion Baseten, $9 billion Replit. Today we explore his lessons from Facebook and Dropbox. How he is rewriting the business playbook and what it takes to turn uncertainty into a generation defining company. Hope you enjoy our conversation. You moved around a lot growing up. I think I read somewhere that you had lived in India, you lived in Singapore, you lived in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, eventually came to the United States.

Aditya Agarwal (2:13)

You forgot China, but yes.

Derek Andersen (2:14)

And you lived in China. Where in China did you live?

Aditya Agarwal (2:16)

It's... Two places, Shanghai, which obviously everyone is familiar with, and then also Nanning, which is on the southwestern border, so like kind of bordering Vietnam and China. Not a place that many people go to, but I think if you want to see the real China, you kind of have to get out of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and so on.

Derek Andersen (2:33)

Yeah, when I went a few years ago, I went to Chongqing. Have you ever been there?

Aditya Agarwal (2:37)

I haven't been, but I've heard, yes. It's kind of the futuristic city, right?

Derek Andersen (2:40)

And it's like four hours from, it's like inland, and it just felt like a totally different experience. I was the only Westerner there.

Aditya Agarwal (2:49)

It's interesting. It's kind of hard to, you know, I often tell people this about India. India is hard to hold as one concept in your head, right? Like with the variety of languages, cuisine, people, cultures, customs, India is just many different things. So when we talk about China as like one thing, I often think we tend to reduce it down, but you know, Chongqing, pretty different from Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, yeah.

Derek Andersen (3:15)

Yeah, they're all, they're kind of, yeah, they're almost like their own little countries and they have, and the people in those places too, they're building very different things, right?

Aditya Agarwal (3:23)

Absolutely.

Derek Andersen (3:24)

What did you learn moving around in all these places? I mean, it must have been very difficult.

Aditya Agarwal (3:27)

It's interesting. So my children, all three of them born in San Francisco, they're all kind of, if you call them San Francisco babies, all intimately familiar with Carl the Fog. So when I tell my kids about my own childhood, they're kind of confused. They're like, dad, what do you mean? Like you've lived in all these different countries and houses. And the first question that people often have is that it must have been really hard. And what I come back to is that most children, most of the time you don't have a frame of reference about what is easy or hard, except for your own frame of reference. So when I was growing up, this was just the life that I had, right?

And you just make the best of it. And I thought it was awesome. Like, you know, what did I learn? I think that you learn that it's interesting. If I think about what makes Silicon Valley great, it's our comfort with change. It's like we're not going to be holding to the way we used to do things. So one of the big things I learned is that, you know, home is where it is today.