Shravan Reddy was a 14-year-old in high school in India when he started coding. “They gave some test in school, and if you did well you got an internship for the summer,” he explains. That summer, he worked at Infosys building a recruiting application that pre-screened the company’s job applicants.

Most of the kids who went to his high school were funneled into one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Shravan’s dad, who went that route, advised him to go to Stanford instead. “It’s a pressure cooker,” Shravan says of the IITs. The students who do come to the U.S. for college generally want to attend MIT, but Shravan visited and didn’t like it—not least because of the weather. “It’s exclusively engineering, which is what my high school was like,” he says. At Stanford, he’s taken what he calls “fuzzy” and “fun” classes in fields like organizational behavior and human-computer interaction.

Shravan has interned at both Cisco and Apple but says he’d rather create something from scratch. The start-up he’s working on now with classmates Lo Min Ming and James Hsi uses photo-tagging data to identify and segregate social groups. “You have a bunch of different people in your life—high school friends, college friends,” he says. “Right now your newsfeed is a mess of every single person you’ve ever met…we want to automatically create different groups for you so you can share things with the people you want to, like your college friends but not your mom.” The three of them spend a lot of time working at Stanford’s d.school, and plan on having an alpha version out to friends and family by June 2011.

Shravan, who was actually born in Palo Alto and lived in Fremont  until he was six years old, misses India and wants to go back in a few years. “You have this common identity…it’s a very small group of people you know very well,” he says. “Here, you go outside your house and you don’t even know your neighbors. And, obviously, I miss the food.” (Perhaps it’s fitting, for someone who grew up in both the U.S. and India, that his favorite Indian restaurant in the area is Tasty Indian Pizza in Sunnyvale.)

But he does foresee some challenges in moving back to India, especially as he plans on being a serial entrepreneur: “It’s difficult to find high-caliber talent,” he says. “I guess I could outsource part of it, or travel back and forth.” His dad, after all, commuted to and from California for ten years after the family moved back to India.

Shravan was impacted when David Hansson, who wrote Ruby on Rails, spoke at Stanford during his sophomore year. “[Hansson] started this culture that you can create small companies that are highly profitable,” he says. “If you keep your company small and focus on getting revenues early, that’s better than trying to expand. We’re initially trying to bootstrap as much as possible, so we’re not using other people’s money.”

In his free time, Shravan, who is 6’5”, likes to play basketball. He used to play Halo all day long, but has recently taken up tennis and golf, and is learning Hindi film dancing—which he wouldn’t let us film because, he says, “it’s embarrassing—I’m a terrible dancer.”