About

Alex Sok

I started my first business at 20 years old. Designing and creating logos and collateral for local businesses. In my spare time I was writing and producing music for local artist. At 21, I signed a management contract to produce records for a hip hop artist and an R&B singer. I would later start my own record label, First In Flight Entertainment. I did everything from writing lyrics, composing music, song production, artist booking & management, photography, designing marketing material, and managing the business with my partners Tina and Greg. 

After pushing hard for several years, I decided to go back to college and get a degree in business and marketing. During my first semester, my friends and I started an online college magazine. It was intended to be a passion project, but quickly turned into a creative staff, an office, partners, investors, and a full scale business. Learning about the publishing and media business was an incredible experience. During this time, I fell in love with design and the web. Having witnessed how the internet was disrupting the music business, I got a front role seat to see how it was disrupting media. 

We eventually transformed the business to provide creative services for brands. Our first client was Southern Tide. At the time it was an upstart with a small office and team. We helped conceptualize and take them into becoming a lifestyle brand. They were recently acquire by Oxford (Tommy Bahama and Lilly Pulitzer) for $85M.

My mom would say that I had my start as an entrepreneur in the 5th grade when I recruited my smartest classmates to start a solar powered aviation company. I read an article in Nat Geo predicting the economic boom of China, Brazil, and India. I thought that all these people with newly acquired wealth would want to travel the world, and we needed a more sustainable way to transport them. Unfortunately my parents moved us to another town a few months later and we never got it off the ground. :) 

I always dreamed of living in Silicon Valley and finally made the move in the summer of 2013. I relocated my startup, Elluva here with my partner Lucas. We weren't able to get funding for our startup, so we started designing instead for clients and startups. Lucas moved back to Toronto to start his own company (YC Summer '16) and I continued consulting for startups. I worked with BlogHer (acquired by She Knows), Red Tricycle (500 Startups and Social+Capital), PayByGroup (500 Startups), and SourceEasy (500 Startups). I also mentored Founder Institute startups. 

Early 2015, I co-founded Nearby Messaging. We launched during the holidays and quickly signed up half (120) of the businesses in our hometown of Lafayette, CA. We made our first engineering hires in January 2016 and released our beta. We raised $350k in seed money. In August 2016, I decided to step down from my role to pursue new opportunities.

Since then, I have been consulting again, spending more time with my family, and playing more music. I am excited to see what's next, to continue learning and hopefully contributing something meaningful to our tech ecosystem.