Ege Kaan Duman and the art of letting other people build

The useful question arrives after the demonstration. A game has been changed, a new idea tried, a little world adjusted to suit its visitor. Then somebody wants to know when another person can join. Ege Kaan Duman has described exactly that moment while showing an Orca strategy game. For a founder making tools for creation, it is a pleasing complication. A working feature has become an invitation.

Much of Duman’s public career can be read through that invitation. At Oxford, he and friends built software to help researchers work through an unruly collection of tools. In San Francisco, his company’s attention moved toward games. Today, Orca Client focuses on Minecraft experiences people can discover and enter together. The change in subject is considerable. The recurring concern is recognisable: all the practical work that gets in the way of doing something with somebody else.

His biography contains the ingredients of a conventional founder introduction: universities, a scholarship, an accelerator, a company. It also contains a cook, a musician, a poet, flowers that need watering, and a preference for generously proportioned cats. Those details make the introduction less efficient. They make the person considerably easier to imagine.

A first class, and a first scholarship

Duman entered Duke Kunshan University as part of its inaugural undergraduate cohort, graduating in 2022. An inaugural class has a particular relationship with an institution. Its members encounter a university before there is a long procession of previous graduates to consult. Their own choices become part of the record that later students will inherit.

In November 2021, while he was still an undergraduate, Duman was announced as Duke Kunshan’s first Rhodes Scholar. He was the first from Turkey elected through the scholarship’s Global constituency. The distinction deserves its full wording. There is enough in the actual achievement without sanding off the qualifications that make it accurate.

Oxford followed. The geography of his education had already crossed national boundaries; the scholarship added another setting and another group of people. Speaking about his university experience, he said, “I can now approach an issue from considerably different points of view.” It is a modestly phrased observation about something that can alter a working life: learning that your own view is one among several.

That observation is useful context for the founder who would later build collaboration software. A shared project needs more than several people and a common document. It needs ways to preserve what each person knows, to let others understand it, and to make the next contribution possible. Duman’s later products would put some of those practical questions into software.

Oxford friends versus the tool drawer

Simplifine began with Duman, Ali Kavoosi, and Raveen Kariyawasam, friends from Oxford. Their early proposition addressed research work: finding literature, keeping notes, managing citations, handling analysis, and coordinating the people involved. Anyone who has opened a file and then spent ten minutes locating the information required to use it can appreciate the complaint.

In his December 2024 account of the company’s beginnings, Duman described fragmented processes and the effort of collaboration across continents. The team’s answer was to bring activities into a shared workspace and let people ask for work in ordinary language. The ambition was practical. A person with a research question should spend less time assembling the apparatus required to pursue it.

There is a familiar indignity in having a useful idea and then needing to become an amateur administrator before you can try it. The folder has a folder. The relevant note is in another tab. A colleague has the latest version, which is named as though several earlier versions were also the latest. Simplifine’s early work lived in that territory.

The company’s origin is especially interesting because the founders were describing problems they had encountered themselves. Their test for a feature was whether it would have helped during their own research. That approach gives a team somewhere concrete to begin. It also creates an obligation to keep listening when other people arrive with different habits.

The call after ten o’clock

One of Duman’s updates makes that obligation unusually visible. He was in Washington, D.C., for a Rhodes alumni weekend. It was after ten at night, and he was on a call with Kavoosi. His account of what they had built that day included a teams feature ready for internal testing and changes to research search.

The requests were specific: people wanted to write with their groups, share libraries, and work with annotated documents. Search needed better filters and indexing. The update ended with the familiar business of fixing bugs. A grand explanation of artificial intelligence would have been easier to polish. This was a list of jobs.

Such updates reveal a company at the scale where a feature still has a human request attached to it. Someone asks for a way to work with colleagues. The founders decide how to build it. Then they have to try it together and discover which assumptions survive contact with actual use.

The scene also places two parts of Duman’s life in the same evening. A scholarship community brought him to Washington; a product conversation continued after the day’s activities. The connections from one chapter had followed him into another. Meanwhile, the software still needed attention. A change of city does remarkably little for a bug’s sense of occasion.

“We pivoted, we iterated, and we built.”

Ege Kaan Duman, reflecting on life after YC

The work after the batch photograph

Simplifine belonged to Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch. In a reflection afterward, Duman described the continuing effort of making decisions, improving the product, and talking to users. The program had supplied an intense period of work. Finishing it left plenty more work to do.

There is a temptation to arrange a founder’s career around admissions and announcements. They come with dates. They can be photographed. They are easier to explain at dinner than an afternoon spent discovering why somebody stopped using a feature. Yet the latter may tell a team something it urgently needs to know.

Duman’s own account gives those ordinary activities room. He described changes of direction and iterations rather than a plan carried out without interruption. Some days brought wins; others brought lessons. The language is familiar, but the circumstance underneath it matters. A company has to decide what to carry forward and what to revise while still serving the people who have already arrived.

The later move into gaming makes that reflection more than a ceremonial post about finishing an accelerator. The product’s subject changed. There is no need to turn the change into a neat destiny. Research software and a Minecraft platform ask different things of their users. The interesting part is watching the founders continue to work on the conditions that let people participate.

A library with room for dragons

Away from company updates, Duman’s personal website offers another arrangement of his interests: reading, writing, listening, and watching. The reading page moves between political thought, poetry, novels, and speculative fiction. Goethe appears alongside Liu Cixin; Ursula K. Le Guin’s imagined worlds share the list with Roald Dahl’s.

A book list cannot explain a business decision. It can, however, show how much a professional biography leaves outside its margins. Duman makes space for Turkish literature as well as books from other traditions. The page includes writers such as Sait Faik Abasıyanık and Nâzım Hikmet, alongside authors whose invented worlds have travelled widely.

It would be convenient to recruit every dragon and spaceship into the story of a gaming founder. There is no reason to do that. A person can read a novel because a novel is a good way to spend an evening. The list is interesting without requiring each title to audition for a place in the business plan.

His writing has a public life of its own. In February 2026, Roots & Words published a poem credited to Ege Duman. The author biography describes a Turkish writer and anthropologist in San Francisco who has lived in Turkey, China, and the United Kingdom. It also mentions making music and cooking too much food. The startup is one activity among several.

Poetry requires a different pace of attention from a product announcement. It allows a sentence to take its time, and a reader to return to it without being asked to click a button. Keeping both forms in view produces a fuller portrait of Duman: somebody building software who also chooses to work with language for its own sake.

A world worth inviting someone into

Orca’s current focus brings the story back to participation. Its Minecraft launcher is designed around discovering games and joining them, with hosting and mod delivery handled for creators. The practical attraction is straightforward: reaching the experience should demand less preliminary work from the player.

For a creator, an idea becomes more interesting when somebody else can enter it. That person may use it unexpectedly, change something, or ask for another feature. The invitation expands the project beyond its maker’s original intention. Games make the exchange particularly visible because another player is immediately another presence in the world.

This is a useful way to understand Duman’s route without pretending every turn was planned. The Oxford project concerned people working through research tasks. The gaming project concerns people making and sharing playable experiences. His writing and reading remain alongside them, with music, food, flowers, and animals occupying their own perfectly reasonable space.

A founder profile can end with an ambition large enough to make the person disappear. Duman’s story offers a smaller ending with more people in it. Something gets built. Somebody tries it. Then they want company. The next question is when they can play together.