Thread by @gaganbiyani

Profile: @erenbali, CEO of the fastest growing healthtech co in America.

Eren grew up in post-1980-coup state terror, dad expelled for political dissidence, his mom the only teacher in the village

Since, he's founded 2 unicorns @udemy + @carbonhealth

This is a wild story 👇🏾

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.

https://twitter.com/gaganbiyani/status/1230281635423227904

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.

bit.ly/3jAbCZ4

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.

Read Eren's thoughts here:

https://twitter.com/erenbali/status/1362092657380483074

Incredible public service led to insane business growth. Carbon grew 12x in 2020 and expects similar growth in 2021.

The company is on track to have 1500 locations by 2025 and is the fastest growing healthcare technology company (10-100x faster than the next fastest)

How did they do it?

Eren credits the organization’s ability to work across disciplines in a highly agile way. His company values document is a masterclass in leadership:

1. Assume Karma Exists: Continually doing the right things will lead to disproportionate rewards.

2. Respect The Craft: Value the collective wisdom that has been accumulated by people who have been doing the job for a long time.

3. Put Yourself in a Position of Insight; No amount of data, and research can replace the intuition of people develop experiencing problems.

4. Hire People Who Genuinely Care: There's no replacement for having people who care deeply about solving the problem we're hiring them to solve.

Today, Eren lives in Hillsborough with his wife and three children. I’ve personally met hundreds of CEOs and think he is one of the best out there.

His Twitter is also 🔥: @erenbali

If you want more profiles like this, follow me and tell me in the comments!