Soroush Ghodsi is no ordinary teenager. At 13, his vision spells genius and he’s already treading the path to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Based in Canada, Soroush’s latest project Slik is meant to simplify the investors’ task of selecting the best start-ups to fund. Slik lets investors filter out the best start-ups anywhere in the world by segregating them on the basis of investment round, employee count, page visits and so on.
In a well-documented response about his latest start-up, how he went about it and the reaction of his classmates he said: “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.
“Startups are more of a niche thing that we think. Sure, they can shape the world and Google was once a startup, but it’s a small community. Most people at my school aren’t into that.”
Soroush was only 12 when he started to work on this project. Previously, he created a Twitter bot called Whispererly that lets people tweet anonymously. The bot ensures anonymity as the user’s identity is concealed behind an animal face.
Not just this, Soroush’s blog about how a 13-year-old uses social media was also well received by the critics. Apart from business, he is a regular teenager who loves Math at school and plays chess. He has developed quite a few computer applications.
His views about University education reflects the clarity and focus of his thoughts: “I think university depends on how the things I do go and how the world changes, right? Going to university, at a fundamental level it changes you. It’s proven from a social perspective. Statistically, university graduates do better.
“Too many people say ‘university is a stupid thing,’ but I do agree that the education system is broken. In an ideal education system, people would be learning 100% of the time. It’s still the best thing out there for most people to go to university.”
Well, we wish him all the luck!
