I am an engineer and an operator, and I live in Istanbul. For five years I have built ventures across AI, gaming, semiconductors, and network-driven platforms. Most of what I believe fits inside a single idea: operating leverage.

How product architecture and distribution systems compound execution over time. How teams, incentives, and infrastructure decide an outcome long before any campaign reaches a market.

The first organization I ran was the esports club at Bilgi. As its president I looked after four hundred members, twenty-five events, and two competitive rosters.

We formed Türkiye’s first women’s professional Valorant league, then built a team of our own from its players. That team went on to the regional elimination of Game Changers, the biggest Valorant tournament for women, and placed sixteenth.

We also ran the regional initial testing of Delta Force Mobile, sponsored by Garena.

It is where I learned the first thing I still believe about teams: they need structure more than they need motivation.

I still work in that world. Today I advise PCIFIC Esports on growth strategy and operational structure.

Portalize was a no-code spatial editor, built at Paff Studios, the venture studio where I have been operations lead since 2021. We were accepted into İş Bankası’s Workup program, and we raised angel capital.

We ran live hybrid events in it, where a room in the world and a scene in Portalize shared one programme. The OffChain Web3 meetup, hosted by Sinofy in Istanbul, was streamed onto a stage on a Portalize rooftop. The Kaş Jazz Festival came in through YouTube.

I operated it for about two years. Then I shut it down, deliberately, on my own terms.

Mamurt Kaleh is a Hellenistic sanctuary in western Türkiye, associated with the cult of the Mother Goddess. With Ahmet Denker and Deniz Karacal, I worked on bringing it back as an intelligent virtual reality experience: an explorable reconstruction, constrained by the evidence, with a guide you can talk to.

I led the visual design and created nearly all of the environment and visual content, from the architecture and terrain to the guide’s appearance, the materials, and the light.

SporAnaliz, also a Paff Studios venture, predicted football matches with roughly seventy percent accuracy across the top leagues. We acquired twenty-five thousand users in two months, and Webtekno featured us during EURO 2024.

The same year I built DriversHub, a gamified community for car groups. It was incubated at WePlay Hub and accepted to Startgate TEKMER: ten communities, three to four hundred users.

Two products, one lesson. Distribution defines outcomes.

Now I am building Pistalogic, a conversational design assistant for analog IC engineering. A designer describes a circuit, refines it in natural language, and evaluates the result with engineering tools: from design intent to a verified schematic.

It is trust-sensitive work, so Pistalogic is built on open PDKs and open-source EDA, and it never claims a check it did not run.

Its ground is analog IC layout, verification, open-source EDA, and analog and mixed-signal design workflows.

Systems before headcount.

In 2026 Pistalogic was named to the final five for DeepTech Startup of the Year at the NEXUS Awards, held with Baku ID and TEVCA. I was selected to pitch it on stage at Baku ID ’26.

• B.Sc. Electronics & Electrical EngineeringIstanbul Bilgi University, 2020–2026
• High School DiplomaÜsküdar American Academy, 2015–2020

Programs

• McKinsey Forward ProgramMcKinsey & Company
• Newton Venture ProgramEarly-stage investing, portfolio construction, founder evaluation
• Fund Management (AIF / VC / CVC)Bilgi University · Startup Wise Guys
• Financial Analysis Fundamentals, FMVA trackCorporate Finance Institute
• TÜBİTAK BiGG MastersCurrently, through Sabancı University SUCool

None of these are rules. They are what the last few years have taught me, most of them by getting it wrong first, and I expect to keep revising them.

1. A team needs structure more than it needs motivation. The club taught me that.
2. Knowing when to stop is part of building. Portalize taught me that.
3. A good product still has to find its way to people. SporAnaliz taught me that.
4. Work that people trust has to be honest about what it has not checked. Pistalogic is teaching me that now.
5. Small systems, kept up, carry further than big pushes.

I am still early, and still learning from people who have done this far longer than I have.

I like talking with people who are building something early, before the product or around its first version. Where I can help, it is usually with product, operations, or how a team reaches its first users. I also take operating roles inside ventures, which is where I learn the most.

If you are building something and think I could be useful, or you would just like to compare notes, write to me.

atlasakbulut@hotmail.com
LinkedIn
Curriculum vitae (PDF)

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