Anand Rajaraman & Venky Harinarayan
Coheads, WalmartLabs
How To Connect People And Products Via Social Media
"A lot of companies take existing e-commerce sites and try to replicate that experience within Facebook; that doesn't make much sense, because there's nothing new there," says Anand Rajaraman, one half of an Indian duo building social- and mobile-powered commerce products for Walmart (the division prefers the Twitter-style moniker @WalmartLabs). Their Shopycat app looks at Facebook as a huge stream of data to predict what gifts your friends will like. It works (very roughly) like this:
Click here to read tips on how to work as a pair from Rajaraman & Harinarayan and Flavio Pripas & Renato Steinberg, No. 54 on our Most Creative People list.
Timeline
1996
Both earn PhDs in computer science at Stanford University
1996
Cofound Junglee, a shopping comparison site that Amazon acquires two years later for $250 million
1998
Help create Amazon’s third-party marketplace
2000
Found Cambrian Ventures, a venture capital firm that would invest in Yousendit, theFind, Mobissimo, and other tech companies
2005
Cofound Kosmix, a social media search engine that Walmart acquires in 2011
A version of this article appears in the June 2012 issue of Fast Company.
Tips on how to work as a pair from WalmartLabs coheads Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan (No. 53) and Fashion.me cofounders Flavio Pripas and Renato Steinberg (No. 54).