Vijay Pandurangan is a Canadian computer scientist and internet entrepreneur and expert on online privacy. He was an early engineer at Google from 2002-2009 and published papers on data storage technologies. He co-founded Mitro in 2013 which was then sold to Twitter. Pandurangan then became head of the Twitter New York engineering office. In this role at Twitter he was responsible for the launch of Twitter products such as the highly anticipated Twitter Moments. He also posted about the high use of Google Hangouts inside Twitter and their usefulness to remote teams. His teams also contributed bug fixes to the Linux kernel. He departed Twitter in 2016 along with several other senior Twitter executives as the company struggled to turn itself around in the face of declining user growth. In October 2016 Pandurangan was hired as entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark and he relocated from New York to San Francisco. He is an occasional guest writer for Wired and has written on topics such as the success of Snapchat's success in the context of Twitter's stumbles.
Pandurangan is regularly cited in the press for his various projects in big data. These projects included a 2014 successful attempt at de-anonymizing New York City taxicab data which led to New York City then tightening up access to the taxicab data. This data was used to identify possible religious backgrounds of particular drivers as well as to determine the tipping behaviors of celebrities. He also conducted an exposé in 2016 showing that Google's SMS-based account recovery can reduce the security of a Google account. In 2012 he also used big data to analyze color composition of movie posters since the inception of the film industry, showing the evolution of psychological factors and perception over time. He also in 2012 conducted a conceptual project to peer editonline dating profiles and was interviewed by ABC News as part of the project. Pandurangan also invests in early-stage startups. His investments include Celo, Avochato, Rossum and Seed&Spark.
