We’re extremely excited to be kicking off our fall event series with Vaidhy Murti, a seasoned entrepreneur, who has built two amazing mobile startups: Friendsy and Wit. Along with our fireside chat, there will be a moderated Q&A, refreshments, and tons of tactical insight. (You must bring a valid ID to enter)

Vaidhy Murti is the co-founder and CEO of both Friendsy and Wit. As a sophomore at Princeton University in 2012, Vaidhy founded Friendsy, a college-based social networking platform designed to connect students, enabling them to meet new friends, hookups, or dates on their campus. After building the app out of his dorm room, Friendsy launched at Princeton, followed by a huge success at Dartmouth, and ended up with 10,000 users within a year. Replicating their early success, they strategically expanded into other campuses, and had around 100,000 total users by the end of 2015. Friendsy ended up raising a total of $1M from Princeton’s accelerator, Lerer Hippeau, and Slow Ventures. 3 million matches, 100K MAU, and 300K total users later, the team decided to close the service in 2017. 

Vaidhy’s latest venture, Wit, is a winner-take-all social video app that has raised $250k from Fitz Gate Ventures. The video platform runs weekly contests and rewards users with cash prizes for their funny videos, and has started to roll out sponsored video contests with brands. Besides building his two mobile startups, Vaidhy also served as CTO of philanthropic platform DonorUP and founded a successful product development company.

In our chat with Vaidhy we’ll be deep diving into:

• How he launched Friendsy out of his dorm room

• Building a team: the ups and downs

• The power of platform exclusivity: How Facebook & Friendsy used it, and how you can too

• Expansion strategies that allowed Friendsy to grow over 100K MAU

• How Friendsy optimized for network effects

• The future of social networking and short-form content

Show Flow:

6:00 - 6:15: Networking and Refreshments

6:15 - 6:45: Fireside chat with Vaidhy Murti

6:45 - 7:15: Moderated Q&A 

7:15 - 7:30: Closing and Networking