Founder & CEO at Oasiz
Abel Dagne
Abel is a highly technical and creative builder. He has shipped to billions of users at Google, won top of class at Stanford, built apps with over half a million downloads and have reached #1 on the App Store social charts.
Questions & Answers
Why are you excited about your company/product?
Every social platform is defined by its medium, and that medium sets a ceiling. Text platforms like forums, limited. Images, more expansive but still constrained. Video, even more so, but still bounded. Software has no ceiling. It's the only medium where what you can create is truly limitless. And for the first time, AI is collapsing the barrier to creation so that software is truly becoming like content. But software has never had its social platform moment. No one discovers software the way they discover a TikTok. What gets me excited is building that: social discovery and distribution for a limitless medium, starting with games. When you combine a medium with no ceiling with the mechanics that made social platforms explode, really wild things start to happen. Every other medium has had its platform moment. Software hasn't. Until now.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
We're the next generation of AI-native developers. At 21, I grew up shaped by short-form, user-generated content, and building a social platform for software feels natural to us. I've been building apps since middle school and shipped one that hit #1 on the App Store social charts with 500K+ installs. Our team comes from Google, Nintendo, Tesla, Superhuman, and Amazon. Over the past year, we've generated tens of thousands of games across thousands of prompts, agent harnesses, and model configurations. That work taught us something critical: if you want software distributed like content, you can't just open the floodgates. You need taste. You need to know how to guide models toward experiences that feel crafted, not generated. We've put in the hours to develop that taste and map the path from curated quality now to open UGC at scale, without the platform ever feeling like slop. Craft and player delight are everything, and we know how to protect that at every stage.
What inspired you to start your business?
One source of my inspiration for Oasiz is from an experience I had in high school, when I built and launched an IRL battle royale game just for fun with my friends. We loved playing battle royale games like fortnite, but we also loved being outside together, and we kept wishing there were ways to bring that same energy into the real world. So I hacked together a cross-platform mobile game that turned a neighborhood or park into an arena using live maps and your phone’s camera. Players had to physically outrun a shrinking zone, and you could eliminate friends by snapping a photo of them in real life. I shipped it on both iOS and the Play Store, but the process was brutally hard. Multiplayer infrastructure, cross-platform support, and long development cycles took so much effort that it distracted from the most important part, making the experience more fun. That project stayed with me because it showed how much creativity and delight is locked behind technical barriers.
