For all your
Adam Shlomi
needs.

SoFlo is an online SAT/ACT tutoring company I started on medical leave during my junior year at Georgetown. SoFlo started as a side hustle. I thought I'd learn to build a site and get clients and those skills would help me later. Instead, SoFlo grew fast with word of mouth.

We needed more tutors, so I began hiring remotely. I could find great tutors online but no qualified people in South Florida. By May 2019, a year before COVID, SoFlo was fully remote. The internet is our home field, and we had a system to teach online seamlessly, so when COVID happened, we caught the wave.

After four years of hard work, I sold SoFlo in a small all-cash exit. I bootstrapped the company and exited as sole owner.

Smile Analytics is my first failure. My college roommate Sam Beyda loved gambling and I wanted to get better at Excel, so we built an algorithm to bet on 2nd-half Over/Unders for NBA games.

Our logic: the 2nd-half line is usually just the 1st-half line with a few points tacked on for end-of-game fouls. Too little time for the bookmaker to custom-price every second half, so there's an opening to beat the book from 1st-half data.

I found a data scientist in China who volunteered to web-scrape every 2019 game split by half because he loved basketball as much as we did. We index-matched NBA data to O/U lines and got to work.

After endless variations and backtests, our algorithm was wrong 56% of the time. We would have been profitable betting against it. We lost interest.

I built Georgetown's Startup Career Fair to connect DC startups to Georgetown talent. The first event had 350 students and 50 startups. It has run annually for four years since.

Reading Smart People Should Build Things for Prof. Jeff Reid's class, I was frustrated by corporate recruiting — we wanted a casual job search, no suits, no leather-bound resume books.

I see this fair as the first thing I ever truly built. Four weeks before the fair only two companies had applied. I went to bed thinking I'd cancel. Couldn't sleep. I spent the night learning mail merge, designing emails, and pulling a company list from the Startup Hoyas Google Drive. I sent a merge to 40 startups before bed; when I woke up, 10 had already applied.

I believe the 21st century will be written in Asia. But we know so little about the country that may define the next 100 years. I'd just read Graham Allison on the Thucydides Trap, so going into junior year, I backpacked Asia and posted daily about what I learned. (Did you know in China they can count to ten on one hand?)

14 days, Thailand: family in Bangkok, scuba in Ko Tao, Full Moon Party, Khao Yai hiking.

7 days, Japan: tuna bowls, arcades, photographing fashion on Shinjuku streets, meditation at shrines.

30 days, Taiwan: Taiwan-US Sister Relations Alliance, dorm room at National Cheng Kung. Learned enough Chinese to survive mainland China.

5 days, Hong Kong: pro-democracy walking tour; saw the writing on the wall.

35 days, mainland China: Couchsurfed (site blocked by the Great Firewall; everyone took a risk hosting). 12-hour creaky trains, 200 KM/h bullet trains. Lost my passport, learned Chinese bureaucracy.

I was Editor-in-Chief of The Lariat at Cooper City High. Yearbook and newspaper split that year, and we needed money or there'd be no paper.

I found a new printer for $600 instead of $1800. Black and white newsprint instead of color, but we could afford to publish.

Then I went to College Experts in Davie, where I worked, and told my boss Janet Ronkin the back cover was doubling. She paid $600 instead of $300. (Janet was my first boss, responsible for much of my success. Rest in peace.) One check covered the whole edition.

I drove around town selling ads to other test prep places in my first car, a 1997 Cadillac SLS inherited from my grandma. Within a week we'd raised $2000 — enough for the whole first semester.