About Can Sar

Can Sar is the Co-Founder and CTO of Apture, a service enabling richer online communication for publishers and bloggers that is used by both the Washington Post and New York Times. He is currently on a leave of absence from the Stanford Computer Science PhD program and holds a BS and MS Degree in Computer Science from Stanford, both with a focus on Systems. He has published several academic papers in Operating Systems and Security, is a Stanford Graduate Fellow, Stanford President’s Scholar, and the author of several pending patents.

He is interested in leveraging technology to create innovative solutions to real world problems, and extremely excited about turning the web into a truly rich communication medium with Apture. His other interests include Innovative Non-Profits, Social Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development, as well as Foreign Policy.

Can is a native of Vienna, Austria and spent all his childhood summers near Istanbul, Turkey. He has travelled widely all his life, often on a very tight budget. He sees Apture (among other things) as a way of making the rest of the world more real to everyone and forging tighter connections between people in different places.

Blog

This blog is a place where I discuss ongoing work at Apture as well as thoughts about wider issues affecting the world and innovative and potentially unorthodox solutions to them. This is a personal blog and the things said here do not represent the position of my employer, Apture. I try to keep an open mind about most issues, especially those that I am still learning about and will likely change my mind on many of them in the future.

Name

People always ask me how to pronounce my name and I wanted to clarify. Please don’t be embarrassed if you mispronounce it – I really don’t mind. I was born Erwin Can Sar but generally go by Can Sar. Can is a Turkish name and is pronounced very closely to the English John though the o sounds more like an a. The Turkish C is pronounced like the English J so that’s where the pronunciation comes from.