S/Sozkes
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Stephan Sozkes — full-stack · ML · hardware

Founded two organizations.Shipped seven products.Asked permission for none of it.

Seventeen years old, operating between Fort Myers and Istanbul. He finds the gap, builds the product, then builds the team that runs it. Right now he wants to do that inside your startup — for free.

See the proofusstephan431@gmail.com
$0raised after 3 rejections
0+students on a platform he built
0%CNN accuracy, 100+ species
<$0BOM for working AR glasses
§1

The proof

Four builds, presented the way they were run: as products with users, budgets, and outcomes.

01Zero → funded → shipped

Canterbury Cougarbots

The administration said no. Three times.

Canterbury School had never fielded an FRC robotics team. Stephan pitched it, got rejected, re-scoped, got rejected again, and kept routing around the no until it became a yes. Then he raised $6,300, recruited 30+ students, and put a competition-ready robot on the field.

When the team needed a public face, he didn't open a site builder. He designed and built an agency-grade website himself — live right now, and the proof is one click away.

$6,300
funding secured
30+
students recruited
3
rejections survived

Org-building · fundraising · FRC build · custom web design & build

canterburycougarbots.org

02Nonprofit edtech · live in production

HerkeseLGS

Not a club. An organization with users, ops, and uptime.

Millions of Turkish students sit the LGS national exam; private tutoring decides outcomes for families who can afford it. HerkeseLGS makes that prep free. Stephan contacted 700+ potential tutors, recruited 50+, and enrolled 125+ students across Turkey.

He also built the entire platform: Next.js and Firebase with authentication, automated email notifications, and role-based dashboards for students, tutors, and admins. 200+ hours of engineering and operations, running today.

125+
students enrolled
50+
tutors recruited of 700+ contacted
200+
hours engineered

Next.js · Firebase Auth · Firestore · automated email · role-based dashboards

03Proptech · in build

KonutAnaliz

Turkey's housing market trades on rumor. He's giving it comps.

There is no Zillow for Turkey — no automated valuations, no rent estimates, no investment scoring. KonutAnaliz is that layer: AVM-style property valuation, rent yield estimation, investment scores, and neighborhood-level comparisons for one of the most actively traded housing markets in Europe.

If you're building in proptech, this is the project to ask him about. He's not learning your domain — he's already in it.

AVM
automated valuation models
Rent + yield
estimation engine
0 → 1
no incumbent in market

Next.js · data pipelines · valuation modeling · investment scoring

04Hardware · accessibility

AR Captioners

The expensive way is glasses that compute. The right way is glasses that display.

Live-captioning glasses for deaf and hard-of-hearing users. Everyone else embeds processing hardware in the frames and ships a $3,000 device. Stephan reframed the problem: the phone in your pocket is already a supercomputer. Offload all speech processing to it, and the glasses only have to display text.

That one architectural decision cut cost by an order of magnitude — under $20 per unit, 11+ hours of battery. Honorable Mention, Thomas Edison Regional Inventors Fair 2026.

<$20
target unit cost
11+ hrs
battery life
10×
cost cut by reframing

Embedded C/C++ · BLE · smartphone speech pipeline · optics

§2

Also shipped

§3

How he works

Patterns pulled from the projects above, not from a personality quiz.

01

Reframe before you optimize.

AR Captioners didn't get cheap through better sourcing — it got cheap because he moved the computation off the glasses entirely. He attacks the framing of a problem before its parameters.

02

Rejection is a routing problem.

Three administrative rejections didn't kill the robotics team; they redirected the path to it. He treats 'no' as information about the route, not the destination.

03

Ship the org, not just the code.

HerkeseLGS isn't a repo — it's 50+ tutors, 125+ students, automated ops, and a platform holding it together. He builds the system around the software.

04

Price is a feature.

$20 glasses. A $75 timing system. He engineers to a bill of materials the way founders engineer to a burn rate — because the cost is the product.

§4

The stack

Tools, with receipts. Every line below maps to something shipped above.

Product / Full-stack

  • Next.js
  • Firebase Auth + Firestore
  • Role-based dashboards
  • Automated email infra
  • JavaScript / advanced CSS

HerkeseLGS, KonutAnaliz, cougarbots.org — all live or in build.

Machine Learning

  • Python
  • TensorFlow / TF Lite
  • CNN architecture + training
  • Dataset curation
  • Flutter mobile deployment

97% accuracy across 100+ classes, shipped to a phone.

Systems / Hardware

  • C / C++ (Arduino, embedded)
  • Java
  • Swift (iOS)
  • Fusion 360 CAD
  • 4-bit calculator from raw logic

AR glasses, timing systems, an autonomous go-kart.

Elsewhere

  • Pine Script (quant backtesting)
  • Linux
  • Workflow & inventory analysis (Renault internship, 2025)

Comfortable anywhere between a terminal and a balance sheet.

§5

The ledger

For the diligence-minded. No adjectives, just the record.

Academics

GPA
4.13 unweighted · 4.89/5.0 weighted
SAT
1410 · Math 780 (99th percentile)
AP
Calculus BC 5 · CS Principles 5 · Microeconomics 5 · CS A 4
Now taking
AP Physics C (Mech + E&M) · AP Chemistry · AP Statistics · AP Environmental Sci
Dual enrollment
Multivariable Calculus — A
FGCU AMC 10
First place, 2024

Selection & training

BİLSEM
Turkish Ministry of Education gifted STEM program — top ~5–7% nationally, via 2-stage exam + WISC-R
ARGEM
National science camp, Hacettepe University — fully funded, BİLSEM-only (2019)
Kadir Has University
Advanced STEM with Prof. A. Nihat Berker (MIT Emeritus) — Outstanding Success across 6 tracks incl. AI, Finance Engineering, Robotics
Turkcell AI Marathon
National program — completed
Columbia University
Java programming (2023)

Competition & service

Entrepreneurship
Top 50 teams nationwide (Turkey) — invited to Istanbul Chamber of Industry
Inventors Fair
Honorable Mention, Thomas Edison Regional 2026 (AR Captioners)
HOSA Forensics
2nd place Sunset Regionals → States qualifier
DECA
Districts qualifier · top 8 on district exam
Service
National Community Service Award, Silver — 429.5 volunteer hours
Leadership
School Co-Vice President, Canterbury School · VP of multiple organizations
§6

On the record

People who watched the work happen. Quotes are being collected now — each slot below marks who’s being asked, and about what.

Placeholder
TODO — quote from the Cougarbots faculty advisor or a Canterbury administrator. Ideal shape: what it looked like watching him come back after each rejection, and what the program is now.
Faculty advisorCanterbury Cougarbots · FRC
Placeholder
TODO — quote from a HerkeseLGS tutor or a parent of an enrolled student. Ideal shape: what it's like working inside an organization a 17-year-old built and operates — the platform, the follow-through, the ops.
Volunteer tutorHerkeseLGS · nonprofit edtech
Placeholder
TODO — quote from a technical mentor: the Kadir Has program with Prof. Berker, a BİLSEM instructor, or the Inventors Fair judging. Ideal shape: a specific moment that showed technical depth beyond his age.
Technical mentorAdvanced STEM programs

§7 — One action

Your roadmap has thingsnobody has time to build.Send one.

Founder workload, intern price tag: free. Full-stack, ML, or hardware. Florida or Istanbul hours — your pick. No hand-holding required; he's run his own ops since sophomore year.

usstephan431@gmail.com

Replies fast. Ships faster.