Mehtaphysics ॐ

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.

Source

 

On November 30^th last year, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain unveiled this crude image as part of his “vision for foreign policy and national security” on hermancain.com. Coming from a businessman who boasts his disregard for the “president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan,” this graphic based on a map of worldwide Facebook connections might not be a surprise. But my first inclination upon seeing this map was toward realism and interstate conflict in international relations. Cain states in his platform a desire to “re-examine [the US’s] role within the UN,” and takes a decidedly state-centric view of the world—labeling certain countries as “dangers” and others as “friends.” Cain is a silly man, but these views hint at grander ignorance of international relations theory in the most powerful nation in the world; and by extension, a possibly graver ideological situation in developing regions and extremist-prone states. It's dangerous that discussions of which country to attack or befriend are often ideologically-driven.

 

How did we get in such a bad place? The study of IR has existed as a formal academic discipline since 1918, and isn't as well-formed as other social sciences like economics or psychology. But most interestingly and possibly importantly, it's been evident for a while that gender is deeply embedded in international politics. States are mostly made in the image of Man, and not necessarily Woman. They seek power and growth, are aggressive, and strive for independence beyond rational means. And once you start digging, it goes all the way down. 

 

For a fitting parable on the power of gender in global institutions, one must look no further than Iceland’s collapse four years ago in 2008. Starting in 2003, the previously miniscule fishing nation underwent “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind,” and catapulted to No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index before culminating in the now-infamous unprecedented spectacular bankruptcy of the tiny island state. What led a well-adjusted, well-educated, and historically rational populace with no previous experience in finance to create a debt crisis at 850 percent of G.D.P. and start blowing up their Range Rovers for the insurance money? The answer can be found in the predominantly young business-schooled males who moved from studying fishing economics to the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, and whose eyes became bigger than their stomachs from examples of Wall Street excess. After Icelandic nationals placed two women in charge of the largest nationalized banks, a government minister was quoted as saying: “Now the women are taking over. It’s typical, the men make the mess and the women come in to clean it up.”

 

We only measure a society's progress by resources and production. Materialism is the exclusive emphasis in politics and economics, and men in society generally control production, work, exchange, and distribution. History, and therefore international relations study, is centered around these same metrics -- as Foucault argued, history simply exposes "the endlessly repeated play of dominations."

 

But sometimes, we can learn a lot more by focusing around social issues rather than material growth. Instead of focusing on war itself, Katharine Moon interviewed Korean prostitutes serving American soldiers during the Korean War. As the South Korean government undertook a policy of policing sexual health and work conduct of prostitutes, military prostitution interacted with “US-Korean security policy at the highest level.” What will be learned by "finding the woman" always will be significant.

 

It's not something I ever thought about before. But now, when I read something about history or current world politics events, I can't help but try to follow the motivations. If you look at assumptions held in articles about conflict, religious extremism, and war -- they're all centered around the male perspective. By pure definition, half of us humans are women. If you don't consider how the women of the world are faring in any particular foreign policy decision, you're making a huge myopic mistake. And once you peel back the layers, it becomes obvious how many of our thoughts on international politics are based in purely male-centric bounds.

That was Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess remixing Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow" at last night's Candidate Survivor event. And it wasn't even the most ridiculous thing at the quasi-political event.

 

If you ever wanted to see a bunch of old part-time politicans proclaiming their support for marijuana legalization and rapping in Japanese, Candidate Survivor was crafted for you. It's organized by the great organization Washington Bus (who I've been volunteering with at the Capitol Hill Block Party and elsewhere) and Seattle stalwart indie newspaper The Stranger. It was essentially a debate, talent show, and popularity contest all rolled into one. Skinny dipping was admitted to, cookies were made and thrown out on stage, and 60+ year old councilpeople talked about sexting and danced around to disco music.

 

The pictures on the "Hella Bus" blog are great, so check them out. And man, this city council is refreshingly liberal. When there's 0/20 people on stage who are against same sex marriage, and our mayor is actively advocating marijuana legalization, I'm glad to be living in Seattle. The biggest arguments were about tunnels and trains -- they were functional and economic in nature, rather than emotional or partisan. I was happy to see the different breeds of progressive, rarely noticed in national politics.

Other cities should learn from Candidate Survivor and lighten things up. The humor and playful competition make our political system feel in touch, active, and actually likeable. We need more of that.

I just came back from watching Page One: Inside the New York Times, a new doc about our nation's "paper of record." The narrative mostly stayed out of any posturing, except for setting up the Times as a public institution by delving into history through the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, etc. Fortunately, it was mostly fly-on-the-wall; watching real journalists argue about Twitter, fret over unclear messages from Washington, and ship off to Iraq. 

 

As a younger media consumer, I'm not so into the whole David Carr narrative that everyone seems to focus on. He's hilarious and has a great story behind him, but the environment surrounding the Times was much more interesting to me -- it's how my generation knows and understands news. The scenes in the Gawker offices interviewing Nick Denton were emblematic of that: I recognized all the desks (and especially the "big board") from interning there a few months ago. The short (5min) interlude at SXSW also hit home -- I spotted Ev from Twitter and Dennis from Foursquare. Although they had one or two lines in the film, to younger media consumers like me they are the central movers and shakers in the story that Page One is attempting to tell. Through the lens of the Times, the film takes a flawed perspective on modern media.

 

For example, the film spent a ton of time with two tough issues: the Times coping with Wikileaks and also breaking the news of the Tribune Company going out of business. Sure, I liked Carr exposing the sexual harrassment and gross mismanagement at the Tribune with an air of NYC superiority, but it's stuff we've seen before and understand. The reason the Times is in such dire straits is because they're arguably too rigid and old to deal with stuff we haven't seen before, and don't understand, like dealing with renegade justice-dealer Julian Assange. Even the young, social media-savvy Brian Stelter couldn't decide whether to deal with Wikileaks as a source or a fellow publisher -- these are the rough areas that the Times has to solve in an age of increasingly open information.

 

Inter-media gossip and intrigue is interesting, but the grand trends of the internet, openness, and audiences being used to getting content for free aren't going away. The movie touched on them and tried to address them, but viewed it through the old world lens of the Times. Sure, they got Clay Shirky as a talking head, but it felt as if viewpoints like his were an afterthought. I hope the Times survives, but after seeing Page One, I'm not so sure it deserves to.