Tyler Winklevoss
Tyler Howard Winklevoss (August 21, 1981) is an American entrepreneur, principal of Winklevoss Capital Management, co-founder of social network HarvardConnection (later renamed ConnectU), and co-founder and CEO of Gemini (digital currency exchange). Together with his identical twin brother Cameron Winklevoss, he launched WinkDex, a bitcoin price index that will price the ETF. Winklevoss brothers represented the USA at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in the men’s pair rowing. In 2004, Tyler and Cameron sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their ConnectU idea to create much more popular Facebook.
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Early life
Tyler was born in Southampton, New York, and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut (USA). His parents are Carol and Howard Winklevoss, a founder of Winklevoss Consultants and Winklevoss Technologies, professor of actuarial science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Pension Mathematics With Numerical Illustrations.
Winklevoss studied at Greenwich Country Day School and graduated from the Brunswick School. He studied classical piano for 12 years beginning at the age of 6, and Latin and Ancient Greek in high school.
He entered Harvard College in 2000 and majored in economics. Tyler earned an A.B. and graduated in 2004.
In 2009 Winklevoss began the graduate business study at the University of Oxford and completed an MBA in 2010. While at Oxford, he rowed in the Blue Boat in the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race.
Career
ConnectU
In January 2003, they invited Sanjay Mavinkurve their fellow Harvard student and programmer to begin building HarvardConnection. Mavinkurve started working on HarvardConnection but left the project in spring 2003 when he graduated and went to work for Google.
After Mavinkurve’s departure, the Winklevosses and Narendra hired Narendra’s friend, programmer Victor Gao, to work on HarvardConnection. Gao refused to become a partner in this venture but agreed to be paid in work for hire capacity. He was paid $400 for his work on the website code, and in autumn 2003 he left the project.
In November 2003, according to Victor Gao suggestion, the Winklevosses and Narendra offered Mark Zuckerberg to join the HarvardConnection team.
On January 11, 2004, after two months of Zuckerberg’s work postponing and long disappearance, he registered the domain name thefacebook.com. On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com, a social network for Harvard students.
Having learned about that Winklevosses and Narendra sent Zuckerberg a cease and desist letter. In 2004, ConnectU filed a lawsuit against Facebook alleging that Zuckerberg had copied ConnectU’s idea and illegally used source code intended for website Zuckerberg was hired to develop.
An agreement was reached only in February 2008, with the Winklevoss party receiving $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook stock.
Winklevoss Capital Management
In 2012, Tyler and Cameron founded Winklevoss Capital Management. Headquartered in New York, a firm invests across multiple asset classes with an emphasis on providing seed funding and infrastructure to early-stage startups.
Winkdex
Moreover, The Winklevoss twins have launched Winkdex (Winklevoss Index) a blended bitcoin price index, which reflects the true price of the digital currency. The Winkdex offered by Math-based Asset Index LLC, a company operated by the Winklevosses.
Gemini
In 2014, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss shifted their focus to the world of blockchain and founded Gemini, the world’s first cryptocurrency exchange and custodian, which allows users to buy, sell, and store cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Olympic Games
In 2008, Winklevoss was elected to the United States Olympic Team and competed at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China. He and his brother ended up sixth out of the fourteen countries which had qualified for the Olympics.
Popular life
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss names, identical twins and Olympic athletes, were portrayed in the film “The Social Network” by actor Armie Hammer in The Social Network, a movie about the founding of Facebook. In 2012 The twins were depicted on the cartoon comedy show The Simpsons in the eleventh episode of Season 23.
Bitcoin Pizza Moment
In January 2014, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss bought space travel tickets on Virgin Galactic with bitcoin. “I won’t make that mistake again,” tweeted Tyler Winklevoss, because the price of a single bitcoin at the time was $800. On Friday, bitcoin was trading at $9,914.66. A Virgin Galactic ticket is valued at $250,000. At that price, Tyler would have spent roughly 312.5 bitcoin on his ticket, which today is valued at nearly $3.1 million.
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