Henry Song is a senior studying Computer Science at Berkeley. He is also co-founder of Skylow, a "live" social media that uses your knowledge and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help you automate social interaction. On Skylow, every user has their own AI chatbot that acts as a proxy to discuss their interests and connect them with similar users.
Part of Skylow’s promise comes from defining a specific target audience to kickstart its growth—college students. For Song, this choice is rooted in practicality. “We’re starting from college students because we know this group the most,” He said.”And we do see that many college students are desperate to make friends and become influencers.”
Song’s startup has undergone many iterations, as it pivoted from Large Language Models (LLM) to help high school students with college applications to when an investor who is an experienced and well-respected senior executive in a space counseled them to take that big step to become a social media app for good.
The main challenge that Skylow is solving is the main problem of finding friends that its users are looking for, and this includes how to accommodate hyper-specific requests. “What would the AI do if someone asks for Elon Musk?” Song jokes. “We hope that Skylow will find them the next closest thing.”
UC Berkeley itself is a large campus, but when potential roommates, romantic partners or co-founders of a company are looking to find each other, requirements can get steeper as Song has observed that roommates in particular need substantial alignment on lifestyles to avoid conflict. “On other platforms, you might get ten people, most of which will ghost you or tell you they’re not interested in rooming,” Song said. “On Skylow, though, you’re getting an immediate response from their AI agent to get the conversation started, and both of you can review that conversation to see the similarities between you two and determine if you’re aligned.”
Like many of our UC Berkeley students, Song came to Berkeley as an experienced entrepreneur. In high school, he formed a team with like-minded student entrepreneurs and built software that was eventually sold to a Fortune 500 company. These experiences taught him early entrepreneurial skills, and he still contends that spending time outside of class on entrepreneurial pursuits as early as possible is the best way to stay up to date with the field. For example, while he gained technical knowledge in high school that he expanded in classes like CS169 in Berkeley, where he used the programming language Ruby on Rails, he found that for Skylow, programmers usually used Next.js, like ChatGPT’s OpenAI, which allows for much faster and easier building of AI programs compared to the languages he primarily studied in university.
Talking to investors is a skill that Song has improved at as the company has gained its footing. While before he would prepare a lot for these meetings, he now knows that being himself is the most important thing. “If you don’t look honest, you’re out of the game,” Song said. “If you want any investment, you have to be teaching them during the whole conversation.” Displaying the true passion behind a passion project that has grown into a fully-fledged business as well as your expertise and confidence is something that is way more valued than then trying to act like set model of what an entrepreneur is in the cultural consciousness.
He cites the organization Association for Chinese Entrepreneurs (ACE) at Berkeley as an important support system as he was able to find mentors who have gone through a lot of the challenges that he had, and found being in a competitive environment around other startup founders.
His best advice for future entrepreneurs is that talking to mentors is not enough though – you have to be actively working on your original projects rather than trying to replicate someone else’s success. Following and pivoting based on investor trends and having knowledge of new technologies is important, but so is doing something that fits your skill set and something that your gut instincts tell you there is a major opportunity to serve an underserved need. His third piece of advice was to find a supportive team that shares your passion for the startup and be willing to delegate important tasks to them.