In a bit of shockingly familiar-sounding news, twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have invested a cool million dollars in a social media startup company that’s been created and developed by a Harvard student. No, this isn’t a synopsis of the 2010 David Fincher film The Social Network, nor is it a mistaken re-telling of the actual events upon which the film was based. The Winklevoss twins, hopefully only repeating a part of their well-told history, are in fact investing in yet another social media platform being developed at their alma mater.
SumZero is the newest social media to emerge in the increasingly competitive race to best the juggernaut that Facebook became. This network definitely carries with it some of the exclusivity that made Facebook so popular in the early days, and is geared specifically towards professional investors. In fact, SumZero is dedicated only to those on what’s referred to as the “buy” side of investments, meaning institutions like banks and other Wall Street organizations can’t get in on the newest Winklevoss investment.
The one-million-dollar investment, which was reported last Friday by the Wall Street Journal will help the two founders continue to flesh out and develop their fledgling network, which already has around 7,500 individual members. The company’s founders are Divya Narendra (who helped Mark Zuckerberg develop some of Facebook’s earliest iteration) and Alap Mahadevia, who expect the network to continue growing and expanding, especially now that they have the Winklevoss’ latest investment behind them.
This recent investment is just one of many interesting developments in the social media sphere, as SumZero joins a host of newly-established networks popping up at a time when the social media market had seemed all but cornered. Indeed, it seems counterintuitive that many of these new networks allow you to use your Facebook profile to log in, but this second wave of networks is priming itself to take advantage of the current ubiquity of its larger competitors.
Networks like Facebook and Google+ might have made it seem like nothing new was going to happen in terms of social media for a while, but the rise of sites like Pinterest and the newly-established SumZero seem to be showing us that social media is far from finished growing. In fact, there seems to have never been a better time to add a new social network to the menu of options, as some of the newest offerings have been the most popular social media networks in history.
As innovators and architects of the internet discover more and more ways to bring information and connectivity to the masses, it becomes more and more imperative for start ups to secure the funding they need. These smaller companies have never been more important to both the economy and the flow of information as we know it. Startup companies and innovative new firms are the future of commerce and connectivity. Whether it’s cost management solutions or just a large lump of cash, there have never been more ways to start ups to create the solutions of the future.
