When 14-year-old app developer Saroush Ghodsi cold-called famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman on a Friday night in January, he had no idea that he and his friend Stefan Stokic, then 16, would go on to become the youngest founders in Y Combinator history.
At the time, Ghodsi and Stokic were just high school sophomores in Waterloo, Canada, and Jackson, Mississippi, respectively. They had become friends online and in 2016 decided to partner up on building a startup called Slik.
Slik is an enterprise software system that allows salespeople to more effectively generate leads. The product began as a simple browser extension to collect email addresses, but when Ghodsi and Stokic realized how valuable their tool was to salespeople, they decided to build the product into what they hope will become a full-fledged Salesforce competitor.
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.
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.