Eren’s parents were political activists and teachers, members of the Kurdish minority that has been persecuted in Turkey for generations.
They moved back to Durulova (pop. 330) to help teach the local population bc nobody else would.
His dad was regularly detained for months w/o charges due to his political activism. His mom raised 3 kids in a 800sqft house + taught grades 1-5 at the local school.
There was just 1 room for all grade levels. No heating or power.
Puts Snowpocalypse in Austin in perspective 😅
Eren’s grandparents died early so his parents took care of his dad’s 8 younger siblings. The entire family lived in tents and worked in apricot farms during summers to make ends meet.
The youngest child, Eren's job was to herd cows + fetch water from the wells via mule.
Eren, a self-taught math prodigy, eventually won a silver medal at the world's biggest math competition, the Int'l Math Olympiads.
US universities courted him, but his family couldn’t afford it.
Eren attended Turkey's top eng. school: Middle East Technical University (METU).
At METU he found entrepreneurship. By day, he hacked away with friends on startup ideas. By night, he worked on odesk (now @upwork), starting at $10/hr!
I have no idea how he had time for school.
Alongside his best friend from his hometown, @caglaroktay, he created "Knowband" - a live video education platform.
They raised some money from the Turkish government, wrote 100,000 lines of code, and eventually ditched the project.
We'll get back to Knowband later 😏
Eventually a Silicon Valley startup named SpeedDate hired him. After many battles with immigration, Eren relocated to Palo Alto where he became Head of Engineering.
He and Oktay continued to work two jobs: SpeedDate by day and their own startup by night.
Due to their visas, this Turkish duo was ineligible for incubators like @ycombinator or @techstars.
Luckily, @adeoressi’s @founding accepted part-time founders who still had day jobs and Eren joined up.
This is why Eren is passionate about immigration reform: he’s lived it.
At Adeo's urging, Eren resurrected Knowband and renamed it Udemy, the “academy of you”
@adeoressi gave him one more piece of advice: “get a business co-founder who can sell and talk to investors.” That’s how I came into the picture.
Udemy was a wild ride. Eren fired me: “We were both rookies and I didn’t know how to manage you”.
Later, the board fired him. Instead of getting pissed, he maintained his relationships and treated everyone with respect.
In fact, he took the failures as lessons for the future.
“I was a B- CEO. I had the right ideas about product, but I didn’t pay enough attention to building an organization, and a long-standing culture.”
Eren remained Chairman of the board at Udemy and started Carbon, tackling the massive healthcare industry.
Carbon was surprisingly hard to fundraise for. You’d think a serial founder would have it easy, but investors categorically rejected anything involving brick & mortar.
Luckily, Eren’s previous investors said yes. @iPaulLee and @russfradin believed when few others did.
Carbon runs tech-enabled Urgent Care clinics.
Eren spent years finding the right model, eventually succeeding due to his ability to bring together disparate disciplines into one organization (doctors, engineers, designers, finance, sales and customer support).
When COVID happened, Carbon was in the perfect position to help. They quickly became a national leader in COVID response:
Testing 1M+ people
First open-source clinical dataset
First at-home testing kit
First mobile testing center
First COVID-positive rehab program
As California struggled to get vaccines out, Eren’s Carbon has come to the rescue: within 31 hours of being asked, they converted Dodger Stadium into a vaccination “supersite."
They are leading the charge in getting shots in arms.
Recently, CA has thrown a curveball at Carbon's progress.
Despite helping book over 400k vaccinations and administering 250k in LA and San Mateo County, the CA government is insistent on pushing a too-little-too-late system.
Fundraising for first-time founders. This is a first principles thread on fundraising that should help any new founder understand how to raise money and what steps to take.
I've personally raised about $70M from 1500 investors & this synthesize a lot of my advice.
**Read On**
Step #1: Understand Venture Capital
So many founders message me asking for advice on raising capital, yet they haven’t bothered to actually understand how VC’s work. If you don’t understand why investors invest and what they look for, how will you convince them?
VC is a hits-driven business that relies on the top 1% of companies to succeed. Show them that if you do succeed, you’ll be huge by sharing:
1. You have product/market fit, or a path to getting there. 2. If you’re right about #1, you could eventually be a $1B+ company.