Naveen Selvadurai

Biography

Naveen Selvadurai (born 1981, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India) is a US internet entrepreneur and co-founder of location-based social networking site Foursquare.com. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the US, and went to work with Lucent, Sony, Nokia and Sun Microsystems before he started his mobile social networking venture Foursquare.

Career

Naveen founded Foursquare with partner Dennis Crowley to simply help him and also his friends explore more things in New York City. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application. Today, Foursquare has become a leader in location based networking, helping to spring numerous other startups looking to capture a similar model. The company has a valuation near $600million with 15million+ users.  Naveen and Dennis’ celebrity has even brought them appearances in Gap advertisements. Prior the founding of foursquare, he was also the Lead Architect of Socialight and Senior Software Architect with Global Digital Business group at Sony Music Entertainment. His joint venture has an estimated value of $600 million. He has recently been listed in the 'World's New Young Millionaires' released by AOL Small Business.