Upendra Shardanand is 3x startup founder and 1x VC, now consulting with companies to develop new products and set up incubators.

His first startup, Firefly Network, created the web's first recommendation engine, portable web profiles, and social network. One of the most-trafficked sites on the web, Firefly was acquired by Microsoft in 1998.

Upendra co-founded The Accelerator Group, a VC / incubator based in NYC and LA. The fund developed or funded 15 early-stage businesses including Blogger (acq. by GOOG), Openwave (OPWV), and Insight First (acq. by TFSM).

After a stint as Director of Technology at Time Warner, Upendra co-founded Daylife, a news aggregator and publishing platform. Daylife served 100+ publishing clients across 6 continents, and was acqiured in 2012.

He now consults with startups and large companies (e.g. Facebook and Samung), to create or level up new products, set up R&D pipelines, and internal incubators, with a particular focus on information ecosystems and augmented reality.

Upendra is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, where he was one of the inventors of collaborative filtering (“if you like this, you’ll like that”). He's also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Samsung; guest-lectured at NYU and the City University of New York; and is an advisor to Bindle Systems, and in the past to StreetEasy (acq by ZG), Help Remedies (acq by Remedies, LLC), Treehugger (acq by DISCA) PeoplePC (acq by ELNK), MediaCode (acq by YHOO), RealNames, and InsightFirst (acq by TFSM).