It All Starts at IC: From a Walk in Central Park to the Future of Social Media

Sophia Green and Ayen Monasha didn't plan to start a company together when they met briefly at Business Today's 50th International Conference in November 2024. The unlikely duo of a biochemistry student from Toronto attending her first conference, and the other, a founder, in the middle of exiting his first startup. They exchanged a conversation, connected on LinkedIn, and went their separate ways.

A few months later, Sophia was back in New York, picking up where their earlier connection left off. She opened the IC50 LinkedIn group chat and started reaching out to people she'd met, including Ayen. They met up, walked through Central Park for two hours, and spent the rest of the day talking. "That really stuck out as solidifying a friendship," Sophia recalled, "which acts as the foundation to further engage in any business endeavors with a person." By the time they both returned–this time as alumni–for the 51st conference in November 2025, they had a startup.

The pair aimed to solve a very personal problem. Social media, Ayen argues, has drifted far from what it was supposed to be. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook were built around connection, but today they're optimized for attention instead. "My friends know more about an influencer they've never met than their own friends," he said. Meanwhile, the loneliness epidemic continues to climb. "We are social creatures," he added. "And somehow we've built tools that make us less social."

Their solution? TheNetwork. Ayen describes the platform as a "people-first social directory," a platform that uses AI agents to suggest real people to meet, not content to consume. The core insight is about data. Rather than asking users to fill out a profile describing their interests, the Network pulls from what people already do online: YouTube watch history, TikTok engagement, and Instagram saves and shares. Sophia notes that they would use the information “when you're going, and you're interacting online” to create a live portrait of their users' interests and engagement, to best synthesize and match with others. "What you watch on YouTube, you watch because you like it," Ayen explained. "The algorithm is good enough that it's a reliable signal."

From there, the platform's social agents handle platonic matchmaking. Finding two people at the same university who both watch the same obscure YouTube channel, and suggesting they visit a museum together, for instance. The goal is to offload the friction of discovery and planning entirely, so that meaningful in-person connections can just happen. Ayen notes their core question: "How much of these moments can be created?"

TheNetwork is currently in beta live across several other New York City colleges. The platform acquired around 700 in its first two weeks, almost entirely through word of mouth. An event activation at a McMaster University fraternity party in early February gave them early traction on another front: by offering event ticketing through the platform, they planted the seed of what the Network could offer before users had even signed up.

Past the launch of TheNetwork, the team's longer-term goals are broad. Ayen is working on a project at MIT focused on what they call the "agentic web," an infrastructure layer for AI agents to communicate, transact, and interact autonomously. TheNetwork, he believes, could become a foundational consumer piece of that web: a platform where your personal agent knows you well enough to navigate an increasingly automated internet on your behalf. "We won't just be a social platform,” we would be “building the infrastructure of the agentic web."

When reflecting on the 50th IC, where it all started, Sophia notes that the event “broadened [her] perspective,” presenting her with “opportunities that I genuinely never would have had.” She concludes, noting how gathering all these “ambitious [and] motivated" students together in New York City can truly create something innovative