Dune Road Purchase In Quogue May Raise Village's Collective IQ

It was already pretty high, but the IQ in Quogue just got a little bit higher thanks to the recent closing of a property on Dune Road. The buyer, who paid $6.23 million, is Divya Narendra. Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Narendra was part of a circle of friends at Harvard University who were connected to varying degrees to the founding of Facebook.

The property is 2-plus acres of vacant land right on the ocean and also has a view of the bay behind it. There are already approvals in place for an 8-bedroom, 5.5-bath house with an in-ground swimming pool, substantial decking, and a tennis court. There is no word on how soon the new owner plans to get going on construction.

The Bronx-born Mr. Narendra entered Harvard University in 2000 (after notching a near-perfect SAT score), and two years later he and fellow students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss founded ConnectU, a social networking web site. Users could add people as friends, send them messages, and update their personal profiles. The previous year, in November 2003, the trio had approached another student, Mark Zuckerberg, about joining what was then called the HarvardConnection. He agreed to finish the programming necessary for the launch of ConnectU. The following January, Mr. Zuckerberg registered the domain name thefacebook.com, and the site launched the next month. Mr. Narendra and the Winklevosses learned of the site via a press release published in the campus newspaper, and the approached the Harvard administration with the complaint that Mr. Zuckerberg had violated the university’s honor code and student handbook. The response was to take the matter to court. This the aggrieved trio did.

As we know now through several accounts including the 2010 feature film “The Social Network” (Mr. Narendra was portrayed by the actor Max Minghella), there was plenty of litigation to go around in the ensuing years. Most, if not all, of the lawsuits were eventually dismissed or settled. In the meantime, Mr. Narendra continued in business with the Winklevoss twins and he is the CEO and co-founder, with Aalap Mahadevia, another Harvard classmate, of SumZero. He has described it as “a simple, centralized, and searchable platform in which professional investors working at hedge funds, mutual funds, and private equity funds could share rigorous investment ideas and network with one another.”

Along the way, Mr. Narendra found time to graduate from Northwestern University School of Law and the Kellogg School of Management with J.D. and MBA degrees. Sure sounds like he has earned some down time on Dune Road.