Fireside Chat With Emre Guzer 3
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.
Do you see this as a trend that businesses become more co-operative in working together to get a better product rather than being more competitive?
It is a great strategy if you have a clear go to market timeline or roadmap, because it is cheap, you start doing business in 2-3 months and start building from the scratch, you learn and deepen your relationship with people you are co-operating with, if you have enough money or a big investor behind you, then you can go further to invest in them, taking their businesses to other countries as well, this is what we are doing currently, for instance we start doing something in Argentina, we give a try, learn how it works, put into our API (Application Program Interface) and try in Turkey as well, if it goes well, we start negotiating with those guys to invest into them, so we can expand it to be a PayU brand in other countries too.
We have seen a lot of businesses today; do you have any words that you think would be of benefit to them?
I like some of them, they need a strategic partner first of all instead of money, money can be found from anywhere but if you have a strategic partner holding money, then you can expand your business, then you can get that scale that can be monetized by you, to move forward. They need to focus on their businesses, they need to be aware that people are changing a lot especially the new generation. It is not about the technology itself, the main drive is the consumer, technology is just a tool that is being shaped by the consumer himself. They need to start finishing and stop starting.
Roger Cowdery added that there is a need for startups to focus more, when trying to sell to everybody, you end up selling to nobody, along with a strategic partner, a good mentor at this stage is also critical to the startups. Emre mentioned that there are a lot of good mentors in Turkey and the startups should listen to somebody, networking is also very important but should start with corporate companies first, getting their network, working and learning, spending their money, these would teach things that would be useful when running your own business.
https://youtu.be/ifNRsP60fA0