Salik Syed is an artist, computer scientist and entrepreneur. In 2012 he founded Parastructure, which was the first company to build cloud based data visualization and business intelligence software for schema-less NoSQL databases. It was acquired by Dropbox.
His second company VALIS built scalable visualization tools for population scale genomic and epigenetic datasets, and enabled scientists to more quickly discern causality from correlation when analyzing genetic mutations.
Salik is passionate about the arts and maintains an active painting practice specializing in surrealism and abstract expressionism. He holds a BS/MS in computer science from Stanford University and has studied at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.