If you are not interested in reading all this, here is our template term sheet for equity rounds in Turkey. Every venture capitalist I know in CEE or Turkey invests through SAFE notes in companies that are domiciled abroad, giving close to no governance rights to the investor. But when…

We have been thinking of setting up special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to invest in growth rounds of Fund I portfolio companies as massive winners like Carbon Health, BillionToOne, and Insider mature just to name a few. If you want to learn more about SPVs, you can start here. Plum is…

The most profound movement in the next decade will be the transition from logic-based software to learnıng-based software. Conventional rule-based software development systems are slowly being replaced by AI systems that need a tremendous amount of sophisticated datasets to operate efficiently. Although there has been progress in unsupervised learning methods…

International payments and money transfers are still painful as they utilize too many intermediaries, resulting in slow, expensive, and opaque processes​. Modern technology players in the remittance space (Wise or Payoneer) challenged banks and other legacy providers (i.e. Western Union), but even these novel players struggle with instant settlement and…

Glocal is a podcast on locally incubated global startup success stories. OpsGenie (featured in Ep.2) is an IT incident management software that was bought by Atlassian for $295M at around 20x revenue multiple (my guesstimate). Below are some of the potential reasons from my conversation with Berkay on Glocal. 1) Focus on collaboration and orchestration OpsGenie…

Still at embryonic stage, Pakistani startup scene is evolving fast as entrepreneurs tackle the country’s vital problems and hustle to make a lasting impact. The digital revolution enabled Pakistani entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions to country’s massive challenges like fake pharmaceutical products, access to clean water and stable electricity —…

VCs love companies that burn cash in order to grow fast and bring more positive progress as cash gets converted into supposedly bigger assets. — Contrarian to the general belief, I believe it is critical for seed stage companies to achieve early sustainability in order to have enough runway to pivot as much as needed and experiment with different business models, industries and value propositions.

Ukrainians already put a stamp on Silicon Valley with outstanding companies like Whatsapp (Jan Koum), Paypal and Affirm (Max Levchin). Still at the dawn of its tech revolution, Ukraine is headed to become a startup powerhouse with many more global success stories to come. Strong tech education provides a powerful foundation. Country’s robust education system creates close…

Investors analyze a variety of factors about the team, product, traction and market before investing. But in early stage investing, there’s really one quality that trumps all: self-awareness. Well-informed on every aspect of the business, self-aware founders portray confidence and reliability, that make investors feel impressed and helpless. I love feeling ignorant and it is addictive! Great team…