Four months ago I was a PhD Student in the King Abdullah University of Science and Technollogy (KAUST), learning and doing some research in Coral Reef Ecological Genomics and Bioinformatics. I was part also of a very small seed-stage startup in Saudi Arabia named “Almacode”, where basically we were building a Biogeographic Information System. For those who know me from some time this was already something a little bit weird and new, since I am originally a Mexican guy who is a software engineer who decided to move to the US and then to Saudi Arabia to do some weird computational biology stuff and who is happily married to an amazing Syrian woman. However, last June something even more unexpected happen.
My previous company was awarded a seed fund from KAUST and were being helped to develop the start up by the innovation center of the university. People from the innovation center invited one of our team members to join an entrepreneurship workshop for the summer organized by Younoodle. Logically our team’s CEO (My friend Fahmi Machda) would attend it, however we were informed about this one week before the course so only a team member with a valid US visa could go there (since the workshop was in the Silicon Valley). It turned out that I was the only one in our team who had a valid US visa, so I got the chance to go there; a chance moment that changed my life completely.
During this course that lasted for almost all June and part of July I learned so many things regarding startups, business and the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem (Next post will have some important parts of these lessons). I met great people, had great networking experiences, worked a lot, but mostly had a lot of fun! Even though I met many CEO’s and very successful entrepreneurs, the most amazing person I met was Saryong Kang a.k.a. “Francis” , “Daniel” or “Shiryu”.
Francis is a Japanese-Korean software engineer who is very smart, very calmed, very simple, funny and has a smile on his face almost all the time. He is 8 years older than me and has much more experience in management and software than me (since I was in universities all the time) and also has great dreams. Francis used to work at a Japanese software company named “Acrodea” where he was in charge of 36 software engineers and designers, but something inside him told him that he needed to do something else, something more than this. He tried seeking his true passion and place, but nothing really seemed to be the right reason. For some reason he heard about the Younoodle workshop, and he decided to attend it and go to San Francisco in search of this dream.
Me and Francis were the only software engineers attending the workshop, however at the beginning we chose different teams and projects at the beginning of it. Many things happened along the way with each of our teams and projects, and one of these days I felt like developing something new. I’ve developed all my life in Java and PHP, almost exclusively for web, but the ideas that I was having included mobiles all the time, thus I decided to learn a bit about iOs development. Since Francis was the only other software engineer there, and happened to know some things about iOs we went to code a little bit together to code in a small Starbucks near Van Ness Ave. and California St. We talked very little, but decided to meet again next day at YakiniQ coffe shop at Japan Tow. This was the first time that we actually talked more than just a couple of sentences. We exchanged a lot of ideas, dreams and we simply made click. We had much more in common than we thought, we had a lot of chemistry, and we were working as a great team. I found my co-founder.
After this, Francis and I worked in a lot of possible ideas, project development and other stuff almost since waking up until going to sleep. We worked with some other friends that ultimately didn’t make part of the final company, but ultimately we managed to come up with a strong project that was greatly supported by Professor Tom Kosnik and Rebeca Hwang (Younoodle’s CEO).
- Me (left) and Francis (right) during the last days of the Younoodle workshop. You could tell how little we were sleeping by looking at us lol.
Since then, Francis and me decided to leave everything behind (excep our amazingly supportive families of course) to work in this new company, SeedShock. We are now a Delaware incorporated company and we are working temporarily in Suwon, Korea 24/7 until we finish processing our working visas for the US and the prototype of our first product: Stadioom (Briefly web/mobile service so people can register their competitive sports matches and share them through social networks). SeedShock also has now an amazing software engineer named Bok Yeon a.k.a. “Wegra” (who quit Samsung to join us making this come true after working 8 years there) and a great graphic designer Won Seok a.k.a. “Alex” (who made the logo at the beginning of this post). We are all working really great and having a lot of fun (I’ll share more about them in another post later).
So here I am now an official PhD Dropout, as the CEO of SeedShock, working full of passion until we reach the skies. I’ll keep you updated of this great journey that we living and I am looking forward to meet a lot of entrepreneurs and great people out there.
You can follow us liking our Facebook Page or in twitter @SeedShock and @Stadioom . You can follow me as well in twitter @norumoreno .
