Selcuk Atli and the art of keeping the party together

Selcuk Atli expected rather more of the internet. As a boy, he imagined a place with worlds to explore and adventures to have, something he later called a “virtual Disneyland.” An ordinary web page was a disappointing opening attraction. The grown-up Atli has spent a considerable amount of time trying to improve the entertainment.

At twelve, he and his friend Sarp Erdag made Aftercala, an online games magazine. In 2004, he experimented with a mobile social network using Bluetooth. He eventually became the co-founder and CEO of Bunch, a company built around friends playing games together. In between came a long excursion through advertising technology. Careers have a way of taking the scenic route, particularly when investors are paying for the petrol.

There is another route through his life, with fewer pitch decks and more guitar cables. Atli writes songs and performs. Follow both paths and a question begins to emerge: what makes someone want to join in, and what makes them stay?

The expensive education of a recommendation engine

The education on paper ran through Koç University, Politecnico di Milano and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The education in business required customers. After studying in the United States, Atli returned to Turkey and tried building a recommendation-engine company. He later described a mistake that engineers can find especially seductive: beginning with the technology before understanding the customer’s problem.

In 2011 he moved to Silicon Valley and raised a $2 million seed round for SocialWire. The idea was to personalize online shopping through Facebook data. Retailers, however, had spent years refining their websites. Asking them to rearrange the shop for a newcomer’s recommendation system was a substantial request. Shoppers presented a second difficulty: too few wanted to sign in with Facebook to receive those suggestions.

SocialWire had useful matching technology and much of its money still available. The team changed the job the technology performed, moving into personalized product advertising on Facebook. The customer remained the retailer; the problem being solved changed. SocialWire became Manifest, which was eventually acquired by Rakuten.

Boostable approached another awkward corner of online commerce. Marketplaces had sellers who wanted sales, but the economics of buying advertising at marketplace level could be difficult. The company offered a way for sellers to buy advertising themselves. Atli took Boostable through Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 class. It was later acquired by Metric Collective.

He also became interested in moving knowledge between startup communities. Through Nomadic Mentors, which he co-founded, experienced entrepreneurs could meet founders in emerging technology hubs. His public advice to Turkish founders emphasized global ambitions and the advantages of learning across ecosystems. For someone who had needed to build connections after arriving in Silicon Valley, access to other people’s experience was a practical business concern.

Five floors, one foundation

By 2016, Atli had turned some of those lessons into a diagram. The Pivot Pyramid arranged a startup into five layers: customers at the bottom, then problem, solution, technology and growth. Its usefulness lies in the order. Each layer depends on decisions made beneath it.

Changing a marketing channel might leave the product intact. Changing the customer could require rebuilding almost everything. The distinction helps give a vague conversation about “pivoting” an address. A founder can ask which assumption is failing before moving the whole business to another postcode.

The framework also asks for measurable experiments. A proposed change needs a thesis, a modest test and a result that can inform the next decision. Enthusiasm alone cannot settle whether the change helped. That is a demanding rule for people whose occupation requires being enthusiastic about things that do not exist yet.

Atli’s current Pivot Pyramid project extends the framework into an AI advisor plugin. Its documented process asks founders questions, maps their business onto the layers and helps identify where a change might be needed. The original diagram has acquired a conversational interface. The underlying dependencies remain recognizable.

Keep the friends. Change the game.

Bunch began in 2017 with Atli, Jason Liang and Jordan Howlett. The memory behind it was straightforward: friends gathering for LAN parties, moving between games while remaining in the same company. Phones could run multiplayer games. Recreating the feeling of being together required attention to what happened around the game.

Bunch combined group video chat with mobile play. Its ambition extended across games, so a group’s conversation could survive the decision to switch activities. That matters because choosing the next game is itself part of hanging out. Somebody wants another round. Somebody wants something easier. Somebody is chiefly there to hear what everybody else is doing.

Among Bunch’s own games was Mars Dash, which Atli enjoyed for its opportunities to interfere with friends. The company also supported video conversation around outside titles. By September 2020, its reported monthly audience had passed a million. Its users had also broadened beyond the teenage boys who had formed much of the earlier audience.

The growing company needed to make room for those people in a literal computing sense. Atli described pausing future work while the team got its systems into better shape. A friendly interface carries a less photogenic companion: capacity planning. A party app still needs somebody to make sure the lights stay on.

“We’re highly ambitious and we want to get there quickly.”Selcuk Atli, September 2020

In September 2020, General Catalyst led Bunch’s $20 million Series A. Investors included Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Krafton, Ubisoft and other game businesses. London Venture Partners, which had led Bunch’s first round in 2018, described games as a gathering point for friends. The financing brought several companies with different game catalogues behind a shared social proposition.

Atli argued that people needed a social connection that could travel across games and platforms. Achieving that would require cooperation across the industry. A player’s friendships do not necessarily fit neatly inside one publisher’s catalogue. The business challenge was to make that inconvenient fact useful to publishers as well as players.

A room with a digital door

In February 2022, Atli outlined Bunch 2.0. The proposed experience added avatars and virtual places where people could gather, while retaining the ability to move into outside games. A house, a room and a door gave shared presence a spatial form. Friends could have somewhere to meet before deciding what to do.

That plan also addressed a distinction between existing friends and new acquaintances. A video call with strangers asks quite a lot of everyone involved. Moving an avatar through a shared space offers different ways to approach, linger or leave. The design question concerned ordinary social comfort as much as graphics.

There is a plausible line from the boy expecting an explorable internet to the founder describing digital rooms. It should not erase the detours. Advertising customers, marketplace sellers and game publishers had each required a different understanding of why people would participate. Bunch’s changing form shows the work involved in turning a familiar social feeling into software.

The founder has a soundcheck

Atli had already offered another explanation for his working life in a January 2015 essay. Startups, he argued, resembled rock bands. Both required finding talented collaborators, persuading them to share a vision, starting with limited resources and looking for backers. He had been performing as a singer-songwriter for nearly a decade, including shows in Istanbul, Milan and New York.

The essay included a less glamorous memory from his first startup: an office at a university converted from a teachers’ lounge. It is a useful corrective to the mythology of the garage. Before a company becomes a story about ambition, somebody must find a room where the team can work. Preferably one with an available socket.

Today, that musical life appears under the name ATLI. The debut album, Heart Sized Revolutions, contains twelve tracks spanning indie rock and synth pop. Titles include Space Odyssey, The Age of Taking Credit and If I Had the Time. The last is an understandable phrase to find in the catalogue of someone maintaining several occupations.

ATLI is presented as an animated band, with Cody Coda and Max Hammer alongside Atli. The live format makes the arrangement clear: Atli sings and plays guitar over backing tracks. At venues with a screen, the animated musicians appear in visuals synchronized to the set. The guitar player is physically present; part of the band arrives by projection.

As of October 26, 2026, ATLI’s calendar lists a Halloween appearance at UNRULY Collective in Brooklyn and a November 15 set at The Tiny Cupboard. The latter is scheduled for 6 PM. After the talk of virtual worlds, there is something pleasingly concrete about a place, a date and a request to arrive on time.

Atli’s career contains plenty of diagrams, funding rounds and software. It also contains the stubborn work of making something other people might enjoy together. A group of friends needs a game. A song needs listeners. On a Brooklyn evening, the invitation can be as simple as a guitar, a microphone and an open door.