About

The Turkish Founders’ Club is a network of Turkish entrepreneurs and investors. It is a pitching and learning platform for Turkish entrepreneurs and students to demo their products, polish their business plans, meet other entrepreneurs, pitch to investors and get funded.

Bi-monthly gatherings of entrepreneurs and VCs will first start in New York City. Our goal is to help startups with Turkish founders and to build an ecosystem for Turkish enterpreneurs.

Turkish Founders’ Club is supported by the Entrepreneurs Roundtable, Turkish American Business Forum and the Turkish Women’s International Network.

Team:

Melek Pulatkonak is the co-organizer of the Turkish Founders’ Club and the President & COO of Hakia, a semantic search technology company. Since 2004, Melek has been dedicated to semantic search and can’t wait to see how its successful implementation will change our lives. Most recently, she was the Associate Partner of Star Venture Group (SVG), a VC firm with investments in the U.S. and Turkey. Prior to her work at SVG, she was the Advisor to the Chairman of the Istanbul Stock Exchange. Prior to that, she was a Research Associate at the New York Stock Exchange where some of her academic work was published. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a B.Sc. degree from London School of Economics and Political Science. In her play time, Melek co-organizes TEDxGotham, co-leads the International Committee at the Columbia Business School Alumni Club and Entrepreneurship track at Girls in Tech NYC and is building the Turkish Women’s International Network. Melek also serves on the Board of the Turkish American Business Forum and on the Advisory Board of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable.

Murat Aktihanoglu (@muratny) is the co-organizer of the Turkish Founders’ Club and a serial technology entrepreneur.

Most recently he founded, obtained funding for and sold Centrl, a location-based social network in New York City.He is also the founder of Entrepreneurs Roundtable, an organization which holds monthly meetings connecting investors with promising startups through introductions and short pitches in New York City and other upcoming cities, like Boston, DC and Istanbul: http://eroundtable.netHe is a Venture Partner at 212 Ventures: http://212ventures.comHe is a board member at Turkish American Business Forum: http://forum.orgHe is an advisor at StandardStart: http://www.standardstart.com/He is an advisor at Girls In Tech: http://girlsintechnyc.comHe is an advisor at Turkish Women’s International Network: http://www.turkishwin.com/He is also the co-author of the book “Building Location-Aware Applications”, published by Manning Publications: http://manning.com/ferraroMurat holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and a BS in Electrics and Electronics from Bilkent University. He has served as a consultant to many established companies (AT&T, Sony, Logitech, Panasonic) as well as startups (Improv, Sonicbox, Atair, Plaxo, Manyone, Coollris) at the founding level to establish their engineering infrastructures and software development methodologies, and he has managed engineering teams at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View and Sony Corporation in Tokyo, Japan: http://holoscape.comHe is a frequent speaker at technology and entrepreneurship conferences and panels, such as Mobile Marketing Association Forum, Monaco Media Forum, Ultra Light Startups, Siggraph, New York Entrepreneur Week, etc.