Mustafa (Vic) Uzumeri

I'm a civil engineer by training, an operations management professor by profession, and a builder by temperament. My career started in the 1970s modeling travel demand for Toronto and selling wind tunnels in Ontario. A PhD at RPI led to twenty-one years on the faculty at Auburn University, where I taught operations management, studied ISO 9001 standardization, and built mathematical models of how people learn — and forget.

Along the way I founded and bootstrapped iPOV for twenty years — an eLearning and software company that delivered ~500 projects for clients including Siemens, Michelin, and Amgen. We pioneered Flash-based interactive video, built a YouTube-class video gallery years before YouTube existed, and developed a production workflow that cut conventional eLearning costs by 75%. The 2008 financial crash and the death of Flash eventually closed that chapter — but two decades of running a bootstrapped startup taught me more about thin markets than any textbook could.

Thin markets have been a thread through most of my professional life — from niche academic publishing and specialized eLearning clients to supply chain data standards (ISO 8000-119, ASTM F49) and the Canadian grain trade. The pattern kept repeating: small, specialized markets are structurally underserved because the platforms built for large markets don't work when participants are few, remote, and diverse.

Those decades of firsthand experience became thin market theory, and the theory became DeeperPoint — a self-funded, open-source framework for building AI-enhanced marketplace ecosystems in markets that conventional platforms can't reach.