When 14-year-old app developer Saroush Ghodsi cold-called famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman>The call that started it all
When Ghodsi and Stokic first began working on Slik, they were doing it all after school and on weekends. But after several months of work, the two realized that in order to scale, they'd need to garner a round of venture capital investment or enter an accelerator program.
President of Y Combinator, Sam Altman.Brian Ach | Getty Images
Ghodsi and Stokic were already somewhat connected in the industry. Months before collaborating on the browser extension, Stokic messaged Chris Sacca on Twitter with a link to a job board he had created for Sacca's venture capital firm, Lowercase. Sacca offered Stokic an internship at Lowercase in winter of 2016, and Stokic was soon hobnobbing online with other elite VCs, such as Homebrew's Hunter Walk and Haystack's Semil Shah.
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In order to drum up interest, the two teens put together a list of top VCs and entrepreneurs to cold-call and ask for a meeting.
"I was in Canada and Stefan was in Mississippi," Ghodsi said. "So we didn't talk about it much ahead of time. We were both just finding a bunch of people's numbers and calling as many as we could to try to set up meetings."
Ghodsi did some digging and found Sam Altman's personal cell phone number. Altman, a Silicon Valley "kingmaker" and President of Y Combinator, an elite Silicon Valley startup incubator, is an icon in Silicon Valley; many startup founders might be reluctant to cold-call him lest they start out on the wrong foot. Ghodsi, however, decided to give him a ring.
Altman was in the middle of dinner, but he answered the phone. Ghodsi spent over a full minute apologizing and explaining that he was just a kid, he said, before pitching Altman on Slik. To Ghodsi's surprise, Altman said he'd fly Ghodsi and Stokic out to San Francisco to tell him more about their product.
"I think people overestimate the downside risk of doing something like that," Ghodsi said. "The worst is that they're mad. Like, 'I'm spending time with my family! Stop bothering me.' That has happened to me, but you can't let it stop you from trying."
