Fireside Chat With Emre Guzer 2
This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Yunus Emre Guzer is the co-founder and CEO of PayU, he has a vast experience in entrepreneurship, fintech, and management information systems, he was present at Startup Turkey and was part of a fireside chat with Roger cowdrey, who is a motivational speaker and author of “Creating an entrepreneurial mindset”. Emre shared his vast expanse of knowledge and experience with the audience. Questions asked and answers given are below:
Having studied in the Havard Business School, Emre possesses over 18 years in the technology space, of which he has 15 years in Fintech, he co-founded PayU in 2011, which is the first and the biggest payment service provider in Turkey. Emre also has experience working with a number of enterprises including TOBB, Garanti Payment Systems, and Teknoloji Holding.
You talk about mixing with other products in a co-operative way, is that the way you are trying to develop the business?
Yes, it is in our DNA, we are art of Naspers and we have a lot of sister companies, one of them is Tencent, one of the biggest investments done by Naspers 16 years ago, Tencent is currently worth more than $200 billion and is one of the biggest companies in the world, Naspers owns 35% from an investment of $30 million 16 years ago, it is one of the biggest and best investments in the world, and once you have such a revenue generator, you can start investing in companies from all over the world, you invest in Olx, you invest in Letgo, Letgo is one of the latest Unicorns we have made, it is currently worth $1 billion and it is competing with commercial classifieds such as Olx. The new way of doing business includes sharing of information on messenger apps, this is happening and we need to adapt, we are trying to give some services like we do with WeChat in China. There are 900 million people, 700 million are uniquely active, people are using and sending billions worth of transactions on a weekly basis, so that’s the idea, we created platforms for everyone.
So, you don’t see your future model as a peer competitive as the next guy doing the same thing?
Being competitive is ridiculous if you just talk about price, if you have new kinds of services, that you can enable to reach the market, then you are competitive, being the biggest does not necessarily make= sense to me, being the best is what we are chasing, that is why we offer those kind of dices by co-operating with other financial services like Mastercard, Visa, because they have great networks, we cannot build that network from the scratch, but we can co-operate with these companies, half of the population is still unbanked, the market is so grown. It is too early to compete with someone, it’s happening in Turkey as well and we are not competing with anyone.