Mehmet Yavuz Açıkalın
I go by Yavuz.
I am passionate about understanding, predicting, and influencing user behavior in digital products.
I combine my academic expertise in behavioral science, experience working in games, and full-stack data science toolkit to improve acquisition, retention, and monetization outcomes for games.
- I grew up in Turkey, then moved to the US for college.
- I studied Neuroscience and Economics at Duke, on a full ride from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
- I got my PhD from Stanford, where I learned a lot about behavioral science. I published research at the intersection of consumer behavior and neuroscience.
- I also contributed to an academic textbook.
- I helped teach Data & Decisions, Product Launch, and Marketing Management to MBA students at Stanford GSB.
- I got pretty good at coding and statistics by building experimental paradigms and analyzing large and diverse datasets for my research, alongside rigorous coursework.
- I now live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Recently, I worked at N3TWORK.
- I led the Data and Insights function as part of the executive team.
- I worked closely with product leads, product managers, data analysts, data scientists, and data engineers to improve our games, such as Legendary ($300m+ revenue) and Tetris (36m+ installs).
- I worked closely with business development managers, marketing managers, data analysts, data scientists, and data engineers on our publishing platform NSP (~$25m ARR) to identify, test, publish, and scale great games.
- I oversaw and contributed to our analytics (data collection and reporting), insights (data visualization, causal inference, and product/growth decision making), and data products (personalization, forecasting, and automation).
- Now, I work at Forte, where we are building an equitable ecosystem and bleeding edge technology to support game developers in building and scaling massive game economies on interoperable, customizable, and legally compliant blockchains.
- I’m leading a core initiative to build Forte's data analytics infrastructure as the product owner, driving the vision, feature roadmaps, sprint planning, and engineering resourcing & management, along with a team of 7 senior engineers.
- I’m also building a Data Science and Analytics function to derive insights and value from data through actionable analysis and data products, currently leading our initial team of 3 experienced data scientists.