Making Events More Accessible with AI - Ali Khader

On this edition of Coffee with Developers - recorded live from the Corgi Cafe in San Francisco - we sit down with the CEO of Synk, Ali Khader, to hear how a Reddit comment ended up being the inspiration he needed to build software to make events more accessible.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, welcome back to the Corgi Cafe here in San Francisco. Um, I'm here with Ali. Uh we just bumped into each other. Uh we had a little talk about what you're building before we started recording. So uh what is it? Tell us all about it.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Yeah, so we built a platform where you AI generate dirty environments, you join as avatars with proximity-based voice chat, and you host events online. And I'm sure that sounds super peculiar, like out of left field. But you know what's super interesting is that four years ago when I was 16, I was actually doing AI research at Rice University, got invited to present online at an online symposium. And you can imagine I'm 16, excited to meet all these PhDs and professors from around the world, until I joined this Zoom call with like 30 people. It turns into a webinar. You can't actually have a conversation with anyone, you can't have you know any collaboration or any connection. And you know, what I've realized is like a space like this, we're at Corgi Cafe right now, which is like a 24-7 founder cafe. You know, me and you are having a conversation here. There's people over there having a conversation, there's people in all sorts in all corners of the room having conversations parallelly. You can walk up to someone, you can have that spontaneity. I walked up to you, and now we're doing this. How do you recreate an experience like this virtually? How do you recreate an expo, a trade show, a networking event? How do you do something like that online when the current technology only permits stuff like webinars?

SPEAKER_00 1:19

That's really interesting. I mean, there's so much I want to get into, and I I do just want to very quickly point out you said four years ago when I was 16. So you're 20 years old, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Uh I am 20 years old.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Well, you did you always have the kind of entrepreneur entrepreneurial spirit, or was it something that you you I don't know, in you know, since COVID or something like this, what what was it that kicked it in?

SPEAKER_01 1:37

COVID, COVID is a good pull. You know, I was uh when I was like eight years old, I used to spam watch those Boston Dynamics MIT robot videos all the time. And I used to play Minecraft a lot too, like the whole redstone gimmicks type of thing. And I remember during forensic, I I don't know, like a midlife crisis is not the right thing to call it. Like I guess like a preteen crisis where I was playing Fortnite for like three days in a row, and I was like, dude, I had all those dreams as an eight-year-old. What am I doing with my life? I mean, albeit I was 14 years old, but I think there was a large disconnect between the life that I had imagined for myself and the life I was living. So from there it was kind of let me start doing things, let me start emailing people. Like it was just random stuff. Like I was emailing my mayor or whatever it is. I started emailing like random people. I started having like breakfast with like the mayor and stuff, like some crazy things. And it started, you know, piling and piling up. And uh I began running events for founders and other student entrepreneurs, uh, meeting all these people. I ended up running uh stuffing, uh I ended up running a staffing business for a long time too. So that's kind of the background.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

That's interesting. I mean, to be to be this young, I mean, and be doing this, it's amazing. And I mean, you're certainly in the best place for it, right? You know, the the kind of energy you feel around. Um, so so you said about the the the actual project that you're working on. Um, does it have a name yet?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Or is it yeah, it's called Sync, S-Y-N-K.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Okay, nice. Yeah. And and so what was it that sort of drew you towards like events then? I know you were sort of doing things yourself, small scale, but was there sort of a problem that you could see that wasn't being solved, or was there was there a gap in the market, or was it just something that you thought, well, I'll build and I'll explore through building?

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Yeah, I I think it's definitely an interesting story. I mean, there was the first question of how do you actually throw an event online, how do you recreate an experience like this online? I mean, just the other day I was at the YC Startup School Conference where 3,000 students from all over the world flew down to meet all these people and whatever. And sure, a lot of people came down for the speaker sessions here, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang. But dude, I knew so many people that skipped that because a large reason for going to this event was meeting other people, other builders, other students, guys from MIT, Harvard, people who have raised millions of dollars, having these connections, and that's personally why I went too. But that second and arguably more important part, which is actually talking to people, you can't really do that virtually. And you know, like for us, you know, I started in this whole founder space because I ran a staffing business, staffed for a hundred plus clients, startups, and I had a pool of like 10,000 students across the US. So I had an unfair advantage when it came to these founder communities, engineer communities, investor communities. And yes, they paid us, right? But was what what happened, what was super interesting, is that um I came down to San Francisco for like two days, right? And I was telling people about the product and whatever. And I think this one YC founder was like, Have you ever looked into elderly people like nursing homes? Because they're very like socially isolated, they don't talk to people, you know. Here you get put in a nursing home and you don't even see your family a lot of the time. Why don't you look into that? And I was like, that's interesting. So I put out a Reddit post saying, hey, we're building for caregivers, etc. And that was a little hard because technologically it's very hard for them to use these devices. But what happened is we got a comment from this girl who has acute poria, 20 years old, bedbound for a better part of the year. She doesn't see anyone besides her mom for you know five weeks at a time. And she comments on this post saying that this platform would be life-changing for wow. So I hop on a call with her. You know, it's supposed to be 30 minutes. It turns into three hours, and she's just outlining all of these anecdotes from her life, how extremely isolated, you can't even go out. You know, Discord is harder for her to use. She only uses like Instagram to see what her friends are up to. And she tells us about this thing called the abilities expo, right? And say expo for people who are in wheelchairs, bedbound, housebound, MVTs. And what was super interesting is that like two weeks later, there was one happening in Houston. So I was like, there's so much alignment with this one person. Why not go down there, you know, spontaneously and actually validate this product market fit? So we go there, me and my co-founder, uh, we have no idea what we're doing, and we just go wheelchair user to wheelchair user, vendor to vendor, and every single one of them told us that this would be a life-changing thing for them. Because think about it like this: you have an expo that, according to them, gives people a reason to live because they see the opportunities and resources and technology that are made available for them that they didn't even know of, right? And paradoxically, the people that this event is for, most of them can't even end up going. A lot of them said they were about to skip on it, you know, they had to pull some strings to go there. It's crazy that this is only held in real life. Yeah, so we went there, we talked to the managing directors, the the lady that runs this across the entire US, and she offered, she's like, what an amazing thing. We'll be a guinea pig for you guys. Wow. We'll work directly for you guys. And we're seeing that this is a market that is screaming at us. Because the end bull for sync is yes, you know, a library of persistent virtual experiences for any community, whether that's your founder community, you know, uh an anonymous alcoholic meeting or support group, whatever it may be. But I think comparative to this whole graveyard of all these metaverse companies and all this stuff, they were very unintentional about who they were building for, right? Like, I feel like a lot of people maybe watched Ready Player One and they were like, We're gonna build the future or whatever, and they had no actual real plan for the specific use case. Like, I've seen some crazy stuff like a virtual mall or whatever. Like, why play around at a virtual mall? And then you also have these companies like Gathertown or you know, spatial chat that focus on workspaces. Doesn't really make sense when you have return to office mandates, right? Like a lot of these companies came at a time when you had a lot of online fatigue. Yeah, right? People were just coming out of forentine, it didn't really make sense. But five years later, now you have you know third spaces on like an all-time high and Google Trends, you have Gen Z and Gen Alpha, which grew up on part online, yeah, and part online, you know, on spaces like Roblox, Fortnite, Call of Duty, attributing real social experiences to these completely digital environments, are now entering an adulthood with the lack of third spaces, a loneliness epidemic. And that's kind of the second question, which is doesn't that just get worse for that generation?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah, and I think there's you know, there were so many things. I just wanted to sort of um jump in there because there's there's so many interesting things that came to mind. And I mean, when you said about the metaverse, you know, and I'll show you my age here in that, you know, um when I was at university sort of 15 years ago or 20 years ago, let's say, um, somewhere around there, um, there were things like Second Life, right? You know, and then of course, uh as you said, it kind of evolved into uh kind of online games, and then you there were there were entire friendships that you'd have where, you know, whether it was somebody you hadn't met or even just a friend that you knew in real life, but you tended to talk to them when you were gaming. Yeah, um, and so you could kind of see these component parts coming together. But then the metaverse was almost um a filled, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

It filled horrible.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Yeah, there was a letdown because I think there was the um the criticism was obviously the it's style over substance. Um it's an interesting technological idea, but it lacks the. I think it was the framings too.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Yeah. I think that you know, with Meta specifically, I think a lot of their branding came off as like trying to replace reality. You know, I think a big thing people are surprised to hear is that like, dude, if you can go to these real life events, like go to them, right? But for every Corgi cafe, for every real life founder event, whatever it is, for every support group in real life, there's a millions of people out there, thousands of cities where they don't have access to stuff like that. So my question is not replacing reality, it's more so how do you bridge this gap between the horrible nature of virtual events right now and making it more like the face-to-face interaction like we're having right now? How do you have more spontaneity, more connection virtually?

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Of course, we're doing the the We Are Developers World Congress North America, and we're kind of bringing our in-person event, you know, to the stakes. Um, now the thing that we we found, you know, was that during COVID, we had one year where we weren't able to run our big flagship event in in Berlin. And there's all these stereotypes that exist around developers. You know, there we're we're introverts that we we don't like to speak to people, we would all like to work remotely. Right. So, how do you explain the Corgi Cafe, right? Uh, it doesn't, it's it's a stereotype that's just not true. Yeah, and and it's we found it when we got talking before here, it's the energy, the excitement of hearing about somebody's idea and uh and what you can learn from them. Um, and I do think that one word you used, you know, it links again to the metaverse, is you said that when you received that Reddit comment, it gave the whole thing substance.

unknown 10:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

What do you mean by that? Yeah, so you know, my background is in staffing, right? Staff are 100 founders, 10,000 students in my pool. I've also thrown 500 plus attendee events for a very long time. Like I've done contract, I've helped a lot of these Jen Z founders like Sperm Racing, Ditto AI, uh, even through a YC, helped YC throw an event at UT Austin. And that was kind of my background, right? So naturally for me, it was like, okay, I'm gonna look at that space for our first clients. And yeah, we made money. We had some communities with over 10,000 founders pay us for these online, you know, networking events, virtual hackathons, stuff like that. But when we got that comment, you know, from this girl who has no idea who I am, no idea the work I've done and everything, you know, it was kind of validating the product. Because when I bag, you know, when I when I close some of these clients, right, like they have maybe heard of me, or maybe I've staffed for them in the past, or maybe we worked together, maybe they worked for me. It's kind of easy. It was easy. I didn't really know if they were buying into what we were building or if they were buying it to me. But when we had this complete random person from across the US, like across the country, reach out to me randomly, unprompted, saying that this would be life-changing based solely on a description of a product, that was very, very exciting. And I and I think that because of that, you know, going to the Abilities Expo, talking to not just people who are like, you know, 20 years old, these guys are 40, 50, 60, and every single one of them is telling us that this would be life-changing for them. Again, I you know, I say that word again and again because it's such an impactful thing. It really gave what I was building substance, right? Because, like, sure, you know, you're trying to build a billion-dollar business, you're doing all these things, but you know, I didn't really realize how much of that emotional motivation matters to right. Like, I'm I'm going there and I'm seeing all these things and I'm seeing the or and I'm hearing the antidote at the and I'm hearing the anecdotes from these people. They're talking about it takes them three hours to get ready, right? You have to get loaded into a car, loaded out of it. You can't even go outside without being facilitated by someone else. And for a lot of them, very early in their life, they begin to feel like a burden, right? Because they have to get help every time they go out. It has a real effect on their, you know, cognitive ability, even because of the social the isolation, right? Like it's a very, very isolated thing. And it's almost like barbaric. It's like, how are we in 2026 and we have it, you know, and we're still coming across these issues right now.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

Absolutely. I mean, we talked before about some of the words that we hear thrown around so much in the tech industry, and that um sometimes they can lose meaning or they can be maybe marketing terms, you know, things like um democratizing or um accessibility. And we mean that from all you know different angles in the the the tool or the product or the app or whatever it is you're making um may help somebody access something in the case of yours. But also there's something to be said for you know, you need to actually be empathizing with users um with all different kinds of um needs, challenges, disabilities that mean that they're gonna access your your your tool, your app, your service in a different way to the majority of users. Um and I feel like for you, you've kind of managed to get a bit of everything in terms of accessibility really means something to you because you're helping people access events. Yeah. But also I feel that there's something around not just the validation of the idea from the people that would be likely to use it, but actually the fact that um you're going to learn how to make your tool as accessible. Because, as you said, if if if people can't go to events um w without support, you don't want to kind of repeat that in how your application you know requires any any kind of um any support or anything to use, right? It has to be as kind of intuitive to use as possible. Um so how would you kind of look at the um is there a sort of a greater motivation for you then if you're making something that you know, you know, you said about life-changing. Um I mean, of course, as a founder, a lot of what we're looking for or what people are looking for when they're building things is to change their own lives. And that may be, of course, in the form of profit and um investment, etc. Um, but was this always something that was on your mind, like a social good or a kind of a greater good than than I put this in quotes, than just another software or just another app?

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Yeah, like very early in my life, I was always interested in like social entrepreneurship, right? Like I was running like a nonprofit uh where we taught these elder folk to like use AI tools that already existed and stuff like that. But I think when I started making money, like good money for the staffing business, I kind of you know hyper-indexed on just providing for the clients, like you know, making sure we get the interns staffed and everything like that. And even for the beginning of this company, too, like it wasn't really something that was on my mind. I mean, at the core of the business is you know, how do you build a billion-dollar business, right? Like at the end of the day, like that's that's what I do, that's my job. But I think something that's so exciting about building for this market at the very beginning, is that it has an actual impact outside of just the revenue we're generating. Yeah, and I mean that's not to say that like I don't want to like value signal or anything, it's just like it's just uh a little bit more fulfilling, right? It's like that's all it has to be. I I I'm not trying to say, like, hey, we're trying to like change the world or anything like that. I think it's that you know, we have a vision for a billion-dollar company, and it's nice to have number one, a market that's like screaming for us, right? Yeah, but number two, like people that are actually suffering when it comes to this, and something that we can help them, right? Like, I think um that like made it very, very exciting for me. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

And I mean it's also a market that, by the definition of the fact that accessibility is still an ongoing problem, is underserved, you know. And and so um, when you said, you know, uh, we're not looking to kind of change the world, but I will remind you that that comment said life-changing, you know, and that's that's something that I think you know you shouldn't overlook. That's true. That's that is true. Even if you change the world for one person, that's quite powerful. And I think that is true. We we quite often, you know, have this thing in software, don't we, where we have big dreams and um we we like to think we can make a difference. And sometimes it's hard to find the idea that actually we think will keep us motivated through the grind. However, I feel like that's enough motivation to kind of you know um get you up in the morning and kind of uh take you forward, no matter how hard it gets. Um, hey Ali, I've loved hearing about your project. I really am, and feel free, give it a plug to the camera because we'd love to uh you know uh share it with our with our audience. And it may even be something that you know we spoke before, that's something that as we are expanding, we are there's only so many of us, and we are developers, we want to try and be everywhere on the planet all at once, and it might just be with your tool that we can do that. So go for it.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Thank you. Yeah, if you want to follow with the journey, uh you can follow me on Instagram, a li.mk a y. Or if you want to sign up for the wait list and join some of these events, you can sign up on syrnk.today.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Love it. Ali, thank you so much for your time. It's great to bump into you today and to hear all about it. Thanks again. I appreciate it.