Slik
p/slik-2
Find the best startups in the world
Karel Vuong
Slik — Find the best startups in the world
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Karel Vuong
Slik's maker, Soroush Godhi (@soroushg_), is considered to be a local celebrity in the Kitchener-Waterloo Region in Ontario, Canada. Having started programming when he was 8, he's been honing his tech skills from an early age. Now at 13, he has become fully immersed in strong tech and entrepreneurial culture in the Waterloo – what some consider to be Canada's center of tech. Slik is one of Soroush's latest projects that aims to help you find out everything you would possible want to know about any startup in the world. Quoting this from a recent article on August 29, 2015 from The Next Web (http://thenextweb.com/entreprene...), the genesis of Slik originated from Soroush's desire to build a cheaper alternative to the Bloomberg Terminal: "I used to trade stocks. My uncle works in the financial district (Ed: In Waterloo, Canada where Ghodsi is based) and he told me about the Bloomberg terminal. So my little naive self tried to build something. I built a scraper that did something similar to the terminal, but obviously nowhere close because Bloomberg costs thousands of dollars and does searches in milliseconds. I traded stocks for a while and it was fun, but in October last year I got introduced to startups. I realized there were a lot of them and the code I was working on could apply to understanding them." The passion and drive to make this a success shows from his willingness to bootstrap the startup – something that is usually pretty difficult for regular founders, but for a founder who is 13? Almost impossible. "Slik is a really back-end heavy startup. It’ll take a few hundred of dollars a month for me to keep running. I used to be way more obsessed with money. I’d stash it every Christmas and birthday and save the money I earned from trading. I bought gold and was into commodities. But those savings were burned up doing things like setting up the company email, getting a CRM, implementing sign-up forms… I could raise a ‘friends and family’ round, but if I take their money, the company wouldn’t be what I built – it would be me being subsidised." I'm looking forward to seeing how Slik compares to products like Index - https://index.co/, CrunchBase - https://www.crunchbase.com/, and Mattermark - http://mattermark.com/.