Ashwin Navin
Ashwin Navin is a prominent entrepreneur known for cofounding BitTorrent, Inc. in 2004 alongside brothers Bram and Ross Cohen. Serving as the company's first president, he played a crucial role in commercializing the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol developed by Bram Cohen, which revolutionized the way large files are shared online. Prior to his work with BitTorrent, Navin had a successful background in finance, with roles at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, and contributed to founding Epoch Partners, a financial services firm. Following his departure from BitTorrent in 2008, he shifted his focus to new ventures, becoming CEO of Flingo (now Samba TV), where he developed applications for smart televisions, and co-founding i/o Ventures, a venture capital firm that supports start-ups. Navin's efforts helped BitTorrent establish relationships with major film studios and navigate complex copyright issues, ultimately promoting the software as a legitimate distribution method for media content. Outside of his professional life, Navin enjoys skiing, board games, and adheres to a vegetarian lifestyle.
Subject Terms
Ashwin Navin
Cofounder of BitTorrent
- Born: 1977
- Place of Birth: Sacramento, California
Primary Company/Organization: BitTorrent
Introduction
Ashwin Navin cofounded BitTorrent, Inc., in 2004 with brothers Bram and Ross Cohen to maintain and promote the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol developed by Bram. Navin served as the company's first president, handling business matters, while the Cohens dealt with product development. In 2008, Navin resigned from BitTorrent to focus on other businesses, Flingo and i/o Ventures.
Early Life
Ashwin Navin was born in 1977 in Sacramento, California, and graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 1999 with a double major in economics and government. He worked on Wall Street as an analyst and investment banker for Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch and was instrumental in founding the financial services company Epoch Partners. Epoch provided investment banking services for online investment brokerages such as TD Waterhouse, Ameritrade, and Charles Schwab. It was founded in 2000 and acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2001. Navin went to work for Yahoo!'s Corporate Development group in 2002, handling corporate strategy. It was in that capacity that he first came in contact with BitTorrent, presenting an evaluation on the recently released software.
Life's Work
Bram Cohen developed the BitTorrent application in 2001, in nine months of coding, after he left his job working on the software for Mojo Nation, peer-to-peer (P2P), open source system for sharing everything from resources to digital cash. It was a leap forward in P2P file sharing, allowing files to be downloaded from multiple sources at once—with those sources being fellow users, rather than a centralized server that might crash under the demand. The protocol was ideally suited to the problem of transferring large very large files—from gigabyte-big movies and exact copies of DVDs. Prior P2P clients had scaled poorly, doing a considerably worse job if files were larger than a hundred megabytes or so (roughly the size of an album's worth of MP3 music files). BitTorrent handled more, handled them more quickly, and handled them using less bandwidth on the part of the uploader, which made the service ideal for sharing large amounts of data without incurring significant bandwidth usage fees.
Navin's role in cofounding the company in 2004 was to help at the business end to commercialize and mainstream it, while the brothers worked to maintain the BitTorrent protocol (and related works). BitTorrent's capacity to transfer large files had alarmed the film industry, which now faced the dilemma the music industry had faced with Napster. Learning from Napster's example, Navin continued Cohen's work in clearly delineating the difference between the software's possible uses and its intended uses. In 2005, an agreement was reached with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) whereby the official BitTorrent site would abide by the procedures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and no copyright-infringing files would be listed on the site. Because BitTorrent provided only software, not servers, it could not monitor how that software was used.
Furthermore, Navin dealt with movie executives carefully, pointing out that BitTorrent is simply a means of distributing data—one that could be used commercially, particularly as digital distribution of commercial media became more common. Just as iTunes became the legal, commercial successor to early MP3-sharing programs, a legitimate movie distribution system could follow the illegal pirate sites. Through Navin's work, BitTorrent cultivated relationships with most of the major studios, notably Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Paramount.
Navin was also behind BitTorrent's acquisition of uTorrent, the most popular BitTorrent client, and the launch of the BitTorrent software developer's kit for consumer electronics, the BitTorrent DNA package for websites, and the BitTorrent Entertainment Network. He negotiated BitTorrent's critical deal with Comcast over net neutrality issues and traffic management policy.
In late 2008, Navin resigned from BitTorrent, having given several months' notice, in order to help the company make a transition while hiring a new management team. He continued to support and advocate the software, and the departure seems to have been amicable. He moved on to two new ventures: Flingo and i/o Ventures. Flingo (now known as Samba TV), of which he became chief executive officer (CEO), was founded in 2008 to develop apps for smart televisions, working with the major TV studios and networks—contacts Navin had made at BitTorrent—to develop apps for their content. In March 2019, Samba partnered with the Google Marketing Platform (GMP) to allow television networks and other content providers to measure television viewer tune-in by tracking advertising on YouTube and the GMP portfolio. Samba filed for an IPO in 2021. Investors included BofA Securities, Evercore ISI, and Oppenheimer & Co.
Navin founded i/o Ventures in 2009 with Aber Whitcomb (cofounder of Myspace), Paul Bragiel (cofounder of Lefora), and Jim Young (cofounder of Hot or Not). Based in San Francisco, i/o Ventures provides venture capital and a six-month business incubation program to start-ups. Mentors involved with the program include founders of Digg, Mint.com, Myspace, YouTube, Yelp, and TechCrunch.
Personal Life
Navin is an avid skier, a fan of board games, and a vegetarian. His childhood dream was to work at Apple.
Bibliography
Aigrain, Philippe. Sharing: Culture and Economy in the Internet Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2012. Print.
Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rose of Collaborative Consumption. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. Print.
Gold, Lorna. The Sharing Economy: Solidarity Networks Transforming Globalization. Burlington: Ashgate, 2004. Print.
Roth, Daniel. “Torrential Reign.” Fortune 31 Oct. 2005: n. pag. Print.
"Streaming Analytics: Samba TV CEO and Co-founder, Ashwin Navin, Life from NYSE." Yahoo! Finance, 5 Feb. 2024, finance.yahoo.com/news/streaming-analytics-samba-tv-ceo-200803948.html. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.