Friend Drop founder posed as Stanford student, accuses Date Drop of intellectual property infringement

Friend Drop founder Margarita “Maggie” Sanchez Parra has feigned being a Stanford student since February 2026, and now claims that Date Drop copied her business model. Date Drop had said they independently came up with the idea.

The University wrote to The Daily that Parra is not a matriculated student. In conversations with The Daily, she claimed to be a Stanford sophomore.

In Parra’s campus-wide email announcing Friend Drop, she claimed the startup’s founders to be Mark, Justin and Sean, “three Stanford engineers SICK of the campus dating scene.” These individuals were fabricated. The email claimed that Friend Drop is “strictly for students (@stanford.edu only).” 

In an email to The Daily, Parra claimed to have gone by male names to “present as a stereotypical male founding team.”

Parra also participated in TreeHacks, Stanford’s annual collegiate hackathon, as an unregistered attendee this February. During the hackathon, she claimed to be a sophomore living in Sally Ride, according to a Stanford student who interacted with Parra throughout the weekend.

“[Parra] said that she was a Stanford student. She claimed that she was a sophomore,” said a Stanford junior who interacted with Parra at TreeHacks. The source requested anonymity for fear of personal retaliation.

The junior met Parra while in line and, over time, noticed signs that Parra wasn’t a Stanford student. Parra wrote to The Daily that she “was invited by a friend to help with their build.”

According to emails obtained by The Daily, Parra reached out to TreeHacks organizers in December 2025, requesting access to participate despite missing the deadline to apply. The organizers denied her access, stating they “cannot accept [her] to the event after applications have closed. Only admitted students can participate in the event.”

The junior noticed Parra didn’t have a registered badge to scan for food at TreeHacks, and would try not to stand in line with Stanford students.

“Wherever they were scanning badges, she didn’t want to be there,” the junior said. “When I asked about it… [she wasn’t] very clear with [her] explanation. She did a very good job of fooling.”

The junior became more suspicious after Parra needed a map to navigate campus and wouldn’t provide her Stanford email. They later brought it up to the TreeHacks organizing committee.

Parra’s team went on to win the Ecopreneurship Prize, but TreeHacks ultimately disqualified them because she was not an “officially admitted hacker,” according to an email from the TreeHacks team obtained by The Daily.

“It’s unfair for not only our accepted participants but also those who were denied a spot in the hackathon,” the TreeHacks organizers wrote in a statement to The Daily. According to the organizers, all members must be accepted and checked in as a hacker, “which [they] found ZoneZero (the team that Margarita Parra joined) to be in violation of.”

Parra wrote to The Daily that the disqualification was due to an “administrative registration oversight,” and later claimed to be a past student and researcher at the Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions (SPARQ). According to the University registrar, Parra has taken courses only in Stanford’s 2025 Summer Session, which is open to students not affiliated with the University.

The Daily has reached out to SPARQ for comment.

Now, Parra works as the founder of Friend Drop, a matchmaking tool that caters to students looking for platonic connections. After Date Drop released a new “friend drop” feature last month, Parra accused Date Drop of intellectual property infringement.

Date Drop, a startup created by Henry Weng ’25 M.S. ’26, Madhav Prakash ’27, Lucas Gravina ’28 and Morgan Rangel ’28, launched in October as a matchmaking tool aimed at connecting students with potential romantic partners. Students fill out a personality questionnaire and the service’s algorithm matches them with a potential new date every week. It has been used by over 5,000 students since its launch. 

Friend Drop launched on March 17 and caters to students looking for platonic connections. After filling out a questionnaire, users are matched with a potential new friend every Wednesday. Pairs receive suggestions for places to meet and discounts at partner restaurants. To date, the service has attracted over 1,000 users seeking friendship, according to its website.

Friend Drop was not alone in its platonic niche for long. Less than two weeks after its launch, Date Drop released its own “friend drop” feature on March 30. 

Parra views the situation as a case of intellectual property infringement.

“What’s being copied is essentially the whole idea,” Parra said. “It’s a unique structure where you take a survey, you [receive a similarity] percentage.” She said she believes the platonic nature of Friend Drop is also proprietary.

Parra cites the timing of Date Drop’s “friend drop” feature as the primary reason for her suspicion. Date Drop co-founder Henry Weng ’25 M.S. ’26 was among the random sample of students to whom her team had sent an initial promotional email for Friend Drop, she said. “So essentially, what he did was he saw the email [and] then the next day was like, ‘Oh, this is a good idea,’” she said. 

But Weng says Date Drop has been working on the idea for a while now. “We started talking about it [in] early February,” he said. “It’s always been the intention for the platform to grow to all types of social relationships.” 

Weng showed Slack screenshots to The Daily from the feature’s developmental stage, which seem to indicate that the Date Drop team has been working on a friend drop feature since February.

Weng claimed that, prior to Friend Drop’s launch, Date Drop had already started rolling out its own friend drop at other universities, including Northwestern University’s Date Drop.

As for Parra’s claim that Friend Drop is the first at Stanford to offer platonic matches, Weng pointed to his previous project, Pairology. The website, launched in 2022, also involved filling out a questionnaire and receiving matches for potential friends. “I’ve been thinking about and building in the human connection space for years,” he wrote in a follow-up statement to The Daily. “I’m just really shocked to hear that they’re claiming that we are copying them.”

Intellectual property lawyer Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School, says a business model cannot be proprietary. “You can’t own a public business concept like that,” he wrote in a statement to The Daily – especially since the two are “similar but not identical.”

“That said, there do seem to be elements of the websites that are quite similar; copying those might be unlawful if they are copyrighted or if doing so confuses users,” he wrote.

That’s exactly what Weng believes has happened: he claims Friend Drop copied Date Drop’s website design and copy. “I think it’s a smoking gun… the logo is the same color they’re using. Section by section, the website is incredibly similar,” he said. Weng says the similarity is such that users have reached out to his team, confused as to whether Friend Drop was created by Date Drop.

Friend Drop believes Date Drop’s website is not distinctive. “The layout is a very generic layout,” Parra said. After Weng reached out to her team privately, Friend Drop added a line on their homepage clarifying that their website was not affiliated with Date Drop. But the decision didn’t come without tension. “I was like, ‘Why are you telling me to not use this name? But you just took the name and my whole invention and you put it on your website,” she said.

Parra believes the two friend-matchmaking platforms cannot coexist. “People are probably going to have to choose between one or the other, and it’s going to be this whole competition,” she said. She has already begun to register the relevant trademarks and look for legal representation. 

Parra has a clear demand for Date Drop. “Stop trying to diverge into our business model… We could have coexisted [if] they just stayed on their own route,” she said.

Weng similarly thinks the businesses should do their own thing. “I think it’s nice that people are working in this space,” he said. “It just [would] be nice if they put some effort into creating their own brand identity.”

Anna Yang contributed reporting.

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