Sabancı University Pre-Incubation Center – SUCool and Innomate held a conference titled “Winners by Losing Club” on Friday, January 30, 2015 at the Karaköy Minerva Palas. Young entrepreneurs Kerem Alper, Cenk Sezgin and Sercan Çelebi shared their stories of failure on the path to success.
Based on the idea that people learn most from their mistakes, the conference featured young entrepreneurs who shared their stories of failure as well as what they have gained when they failed.
Kerem Alper
A graduate of İstanbul Erkek Lisesi, Alper did a double major in Mathematics and Economics at Wesleyan University. He worked on renewable energy technologies and investment finance in New York, first at Lehman Brothers followed by Cadent Energy Partners.
After a double master’s degree from Stanford University in Business (MBA) and Sustainable Design (MS), Alper worked as a teaching assistant at the Stanford Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). Following an agriculture software venture supported by the Lightspeed Venture Partners Fellowship, he worked on product development at Nest Labs (www.nest.com). He returned to Istanbul in 2014 to start ATÖLYE İstanbul.
Cenk Sezgin
Cenk Sezgin is a graduate of the Galatasaray University Industrial Engineering Department and has a master’s degree in Management Strategy from the London Business School. He has been a manager of business development and innovation in global companies like SAP and Teradata since 2006, and has worked within teams responsible for expanding innovation in organizations of 65,000 people or more. Cenk Sezgin also organized entrepreneurship programs with companies and universities in Turkey to promote ventures in Big Data.
Teaching and education runs in Cenk Sezgin’s family, and in addition to his corporate efforts, Sezgin creates social projects to improve inequality in education in Turkey. His latest initiative was SoruSana, a crowdsourced, mobile question and answer platform aimed at students preparing for university exams. SoruSana is now available across the 81 provinces of Turkey.
Sercan Çelebi
After graduating from the German High School, Çelebi studies Economics and International Relations at Yale University. He worked in the New Jersey and Istanbul offices of McKinsey & Co. as a management consultant for various regions (Africa, Europe and Middle East) and industries (media, medical, industrial strategy among others) before joining MetCap Energy Investments as a director responsible for large-scale investment projects. He founded and later closed Zorkun Agriculture, which had industrial tomato and pepper farms in the Izmir region.