Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Kevin Leneway
If you ever want to get a true sense of someone’s personality, try showing up 30 minutes late to an hour-long interview. When I finally showed up to meet Kalid Azad at Vivace’s on Capitol Hill (which to my credit had changed locations in not-too-distant past), not only was he still there, he greeted me with a warm smile and didn’t show a single sign of annoyance. In a town full of mild-mannered entrepreneurs, Kalid stands out as one of the nicest guys in the Seattle startup community. But behind the smile lies the drive and energy of a hungry young entrepreneur. He’s a ivy-leaguer who despite being a rising star at Microsoft, left the company after three years and has since started or been involved with four startups, including a summer spent with the prestigious Y-Combinator program. Not too shabby – especially considering the fact that Kalid is still in his twenties.
I first met Kalid at a Seattle Tech Startup meeting about two years ago where I was blown away by a presentation of his Javascript-based web calculator InstaCalc. InstaCalc was Kalid’s first startup, taking the plunge after three years of working at Microsoft as the first program manager working on the company’s anti-spyware strategy. Despite the money and security, Kalid astutely realized that now was his time in life to take some big risks, so in 2006 he carefully calculated his living expenses and eventually quit to pursue one of the more promising ideas in his ideas.txt file – a drop-dead simple online calculator that allowed users to create, embed, and share calculations on the fly. It’s a slick little program that fills the hole between the outdated MS calc app and Excel, and one that showed enough potential to land Kalid a spot in the 2007 Y Combinator summer program along with early-stage companies such as Disqus, DropBox, and Anywhere.FM. Besides the $5-$10K investment money and the chance to spend the summer back in his hometown of Boston, Y Combinator offers exposure to VC, angels, and a network other talented young entrepreneurs.
Although Kalid initially was invited to Y Combinator to build out InstaCalc, he and his co-founders quickly changed course when they came up with an idea called ContestMachine to simplify the task of adding a contest or sweepstakes to websites or blogs. The site has garnered rave reviews, and has become a surprise hit with beauty product bloggers. As someone who once ran a blog contest to give away $50, no strings attached, to anyone who would leave a comment and ended up with exactly zero entries, I know firsthand how helpful something like this could be.
After YC, Kalid launched his third startup, BetterExplained. The concept is a new style of learning that provides insights and techniques to teach the fundamentals of subjects like math, programming, business, and writing. There are about 75 articles posted to date, including a very popular intro to Ruby on Rails, an observation on combining simplicity and complexity, and a beginner’s guide to calculus. Currently everything is free on the site, but he is looking into combining the posts into an eBook or potentially a series of books. Longer term, Kalid is looking to build out the BetterExplained model along the same lines as Wikipedia. Instead of being a site for looking up facts about a subject, though, it could be the place to learn the methods and techniques for gaining a core understanding about practically any subject in the world.
Most recently, Kalid signed on as employee #1 of Sortuv, which recently came out of stealth mode to reveal a new way of searching for related information based on similar attributes. When I asked for a demo, Kalid unknowingly showed an example that is near and dear to my heart – the best coffee shops on Capitol Hill. When I first moved to Seattle about six years ago, I lived up on Capitol Hill and over time I built up a list of favorite coffee shops including Vivace’s, Bauhaus, and Top Pot. It’s hard to describe in words what these spots have in common, but when the Sortuv engine looked for coffee shops similar to Vivace’s, sure enough it pulled up both Bauhaus and Top Pot as the two coffee houses in Seattle that were “sort of” like Vivace. It’s impressive technology, and available now both on the web and on the iPhone and Facebook under the brand “Near + Now”. While it’s still too early to tell if this will be the one that puts Kalid on the map, he’s likely to be a major force in the Seattle startup scene for many years to come.
