Divya Narendra on Facebook controversy and his current venture

Now a JD/MBA student at Northwestern University in the United States, Divya Narendra has already started two social networks.  His latest venture is SumZero, an online network that allows hedge fund and mutual fund managers across the world to swap information about the companies they track.

But his first startup brought him unexpected fame.

In 2002, when he was just 20 years old, Narendra came up with the idea for an online social network that would allow students at his college, Harvard, to swap information and look at each other's online profiles.  He called his proposed Web site HarvardConnection*, and his team hired a young Mark Zuckerberg to write the website's code.
When Zuckerberg later started Facebook, Narendra and his team sued, and the legal battle became the subject of the 2010 award-winning film The Social Network.

He spoke to BT's Anika Gupta on the sidelines of India Today's Youth Summit 2011 about how he became an entrepreneur, the Facebook controversy and what he hopes SumZero will accomplish.


*an earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Narendra's first site as HarvardConnect; it was HarvardConnection.