Alex Sikand Launches Tabula Rasa AI-Powered Resume Builder

There must be something in the water and/or Gateway School. Ok, maybe genetics. Alex Sikand, a Santa Cruz native and graduate of Gateway School, just launched Tabula Rasa. Alex is the older brother of Michael Sikand, who’s company Our Future Media was recently acquired by Morning Brew.

After dropping out of a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence degree at Boston University, Alex has been trying to create software offerings that utilize AI to solve critical problems, rather than using it primarily, like many of the largest tech company’s do, for serving advertisements.

“I basically took all of the artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and data science courses as an undergraduate. It was really difficult and I think most of the class failed a lot of the exams and the course was heavily curved in most cases. What frustrated me was I wasn’t building anything. I already understood the mathematics behind it (which is surprisingly basic for anyone willing to try to learn) and I was dreaming of all these incredible products and services and I wasn’t getting any closer to understanding how to create them.”

Alex launched Silk Labs, an AI research company with a focus on computer vision (AI that operates on image and video data). Together with two of his friends, motivated by yet another mass shooting in Colorado, they built a real-time AI model that can detect multiple types of firearms from security camera video feeds. While he says the business failed to generate enough revenue to sustain it, it taught him a lot of lessons, and you can tell he has big dreams.

His latest product (this time easily available to the public) is an AI-assisted resume generator. Using GPT-based models from OpenAI, users can enter only a few pieces of information and generate a PDF resume with sections like ‘Professional Summary’ and ‘Work Experience Description’ automatically filled in for you.

As a subtle easter egg, although you can choose your own custom colors for your resume, the presets include ‘Ancient Bone’, ‘Eggshell’, ‘Pale Nimbus’, and ‘Off-White’ which calls to mind the business card scene from the film American Psycho.

He said he launched the idea because he wanted to start building products again, but this time smaller, what he considers ‘micro-SaaS’. Despite this, he has plans to expand the offering to include cover letters, more AI-based features, and eventually expand to generating PDF quizzes and tests that can be generated with GPT (saving teachers work) but administered in a secure classroom setting (preventing cheating).