We've had a good amount of press for launching FamilyLeaf lately, but I never thought it would be picked up by Exeter's newspaper, The Exonian. Unfortunately, they've hidden it behind a login screen -- so I thought I'd republish it here. The headline is omitted, because it's embarassingly bad.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Ajay Mehta ’10, the co-founder of a new social media site FamilyLeaf, has been put on the spotlight for the site’s innovative way that allows families to connect. FamilyLeaf was founded nine weeks ago, and has already been mentioned in The New York Times, The Times of India, Gawker, Forbes and TechCrunch.
FamilyLeaf is designed to allow relatives to privately share photos and other information.
“We came up with the idea for FamilyLeaf from our own global families,” Mehta said. “We grew up with Facebook and were very used to using it with our friends, but as we left for college or Exeter and Facebook became more open, our parents and then random family members started adding us. We realized that family is so important to us, but also is such a separate part of our lives from friends and acquaintances.”
FamilyLeaf is a solution to the problem of finding relatives online. “The Internet has done a lot to bring together friends, work colleagues, even strangers—but it surprisingly hasn't done much to bring families closer together,” Mehta said. “So FamilyLeaf lets you share photos, contact information and updates with your whole family in one central place, and fully privately. FamilyLeaf is already operable in over 10 languages, and we have users in 95-plus countries.”
Mehta hopes that the site will continue to help families interact, even when they are thousands of miles apart. “Future goals for FamilyLeaf are simple: bring families around the world closer together online.”
Mehta, a one-year senior, graduated cum laude and entered the NYU Stern Business School with a dream to start an Internet company. Science instructor Townley Chisholm said he enjoyed getting to know Mehta as a member of the Williams House dorm. “As a student, he drank deeply from the Exeter well in the one year that he was here,” Chisholm said. “He also had a wonderful sense of humor and was a superb student.”
At the Academy, Mehta participated in the Boston Fed Challenge, and Economics competition. “Given what I saw then of his knowledge, interests and passion, I was deeply impressed when I heard the news that he had founded a new social network which caught the attention of The New York Times,” Mehta’s teammate senior Evan Soltas said.
Mehta also worked with History instructor Georgio Secondi in the competition. “He did a wonderful job: he loves a challenge, works very hard, learns very quickly and brings a lot of energy and a great sense of humor to everything he does,” Secondi said. “He has enormous potential as a tech-entrepreneur.”
Soltas was not very surprised by Mehta’s success. “I don't think I was surprised—maybe only to the extent that he had attained such a success so quickly—because this is very much in character for the Ajay I knew at Exeter and now continue to keep in touch with,” Soltas said. “I can only expect to hear of more achievements and read bigger headlines in the years to come.”
Starting last winter, Mehta began to work on web developments with co-founder Wesley Zhao. “We didn't know how to code at all, but we did weekend projects until we decided they were good enough to release to the public,” Mehta said. “They were simple, like a way to map out your Facebook friends around the world, but slowly they became more successful and spread virally.”
Mehta and Zhao soon attracted the attention of Y Combinator, a prestigious seed fund in Silicon Valley. Y Combinator provided Mehta and Zhao with the funds and direction they needed to launch FamilyLeaf.
“We applied, interviewed and were accepted into the Winter 2012 batch of Y Combinator—they accept two batches a year,” Mehta said. “They interview thousands of teams and pick about 3 percent of them to fund.”
Mehta credits many different aspects of Exeter as inspiration for the development of FamilyLeaf.
“I think an important special thing about Exeter is the ingrained nature of its students to deviate from the norm, and the desire to build or accomplish something that will truly affect the world,” he said.
Specifically, Mehta credited Mark Zuckerberg ’02 as an inspiration to him, as well as “every other Internet entrepreneur.”
“Zuck was clearly motivated by that in his quest for Facebook world domination, and while I might not be quite that ambitious, I hope that FamilyLeaf will start to make families happier and more connected on a large scale,” Mehta said.
Lower Tyler Weitzman, who recently garnered recognition for his own app development, thinks that FamilyLeaf could be beneficial to families.
“Having an entirely separate, standalone website specifically for families has its pros and cons,” Weitzman said. “From one point, it's distinctively separate from the social network you use with your friends (Facebook). On the other hand, it might be tiresome to switch between the two.”
by Sarah Hannigan, staff writer.