Slik
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Slik was a Y Combinator Summer 2017 company based in San Francisco, founded by Soroush Ghodsi and Stefan Stokic. It built an automated lead-generation and prospecting engine for sales teams: a database of over 70 million people with filters to find prospects, letting small and medium sales teams automate cold-email outreach without complex workflows or expensive tools.
02 / Slik FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Slik could not differentiate in a crowded market. Larger, established players with deeper resources dominated sales-intelligence, and Slik's scalability was constrained by its reliance on accurate, timely data aggregation — a resource- and time-intensive process. With unit economics that never worked and no defensible moat against better-funded rivals, the two-person company wound down around 2020.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Soroush Ghodsi and Stefan Stokic found Slik in San Francisco and enter Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch with an automated sales-prospecting engine.
- Operations ended
Unable to differentiate against better-resourced incumbents, Slik winds down around 2020; Y Combinator lists it as inactive.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Automated lead generation and cold-email outreach (slik.ai)
- 02
70M-person database for sales prospecting
- 03
Crowded market; no moat against deeper-funded rivals
- 04
Unit economics never work; wind-down around 2020