Foursquare Co-Founder Naveen Selvadurai Joins Expa Startup Studio As NY Partner

Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai is joining the Expa startup studio, founded in May 2013 by former Uber and StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp.

Selvadurai joins Expa as a partner focused on New York operations for the organization, which is not to be confused with your standard accelerator, incubator, or investment firm. Instead, Expa runs much more similarly to a betaworks, home-growing companies from within and investing anywhere between $500k and $1 million to get them off the ground.

Expa is focused mostly on very early stage products without any set structure as to whose ideas join the program.

“It’s a relatively even split between our own ideas, mine and Naveen, as well as smart engineers and entrepreneurs we know who have demonstrated an interesting prototype that we’re excited to build out,” said Camp.

Here’s what Selvadurai had to say about it in his own memo:

I am excited to announce that I am joining Expa as a partner based in New York City. Expa (Expa.com) is a startup studio that works with founders to develop and launch new companies. We have a few things in the works already at Expa HQ in SoMa. I will be helping on all these existing projects. And soon, I will launch some new products based in SoHo. We plan to work on just a few companies at a time, with our focus directed at areas we love and in which we have deep experience: mobile, platforms and marketplaces.

I spent much of the last year tinkering, reading and learning as much asI could from others. In all these explorations and sketches, one desire stood out: I want to create things that are good for the web. I want to leave the internet in a better place than I found it. With this new model in Expa and with a great team behind us, I hope to bring a lot of these ideas to life.

We’re always looking for great engineers, designers and product minds to come join us. I’d love to work with you on our new projects both here in New York as well as in San Francisco, so please get in touch at join@expa.com.

Selvadurai, a co-founder at foursquare after spending time at Nokia, SunMicrosystems, etc., was pushed out of the location-based company in 2012 in what was reported as a painful breakup. Since, he’s been (as he said) tinkering and reading, as well as building out the initial mobile application at a Thrive Capital-backed health insurance startup called Oscar, led by Josh Kushner.

He still holds an advisory role at Oscar, but is now focused on building out some of his own ideas and working with other smart people in NYC to build a better internet, on mobile and otherwise.

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and playing with the notion of personal health data and personal wellness, and I think there’s something there, but I’m not sure what yet,” said Selvadurai.

Selvadurai has also done some angel investing, including participation in a $1.10M seed round for TimeHop.

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