Back when they were students at Harvard, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, along with their fellow alum Divya Narendra, had a vision for a hoity-toity social networking site that would only be available to the Harvard elite. To realize this vision, the story goes, they outsourced building the site to fellow student Mark Zuckerberg, who famously took the Winklevoss twins’ idea and transformed it into the largest social networking site in the world. But The Wall Street Journal reports that after the Winklevosses settled their lawsuit with Zuckerberg for $65 million, they began plugging it into a social networking site that looks a lot more like their original idea than what Facebook (FB) turned into.
Updated to clarify that Narendra, not the Winklevoss twins, founded SumZero in 2008.
According to the Journal, the Winklevosses are investing some of their winnings from the Zuckerberg suit into SumZero, a social network founded by Narendra and fellow Harvard alum Aalap Mahadevia in 2008 that is exclusively for buy-side investors at hedge funds, mutual funds and private-equity firms looking to network with one another and share investment advice. And just like Narendra’s original conception of the Harvard Connection social network, SumZero doesn’t let any unworthy rabble join, as the site believes that exclusivity is “the key to ensuring high-quality ideas.” Needless to say, then, SumZero may become successful but it certainly won’t ever become the household name Facebook is.
