Conversations with Turkey's Career Pioneers - Murat Sönmez

CONVERSATIONS WITH TURKEY'S CAREER PIONEERS - MURAT SÖNMEZ

With the start of the new term so have our Career Pioneers Talks. The first guest of the second term was World Economic Forum Managing Board Member Mr. Murat Sönmez. Mr. Sönmez, who started his talk by introducing himself, mentioned that after completing his primary and secondary education at TED Ankara College, he was admitted into the Industrial Engineering Department at Boğaziçi University ranking first. During his graduate education at Virginia Tech, he was able to establish a wide network by selling Turkish carpets, and with the scholarship he received through this network he was able to finish his degree.

Together with his Indian partner whom he met completely by chance while chatting at a coffee shop, Mr. Sönmez founded a company called Consilium in Silicon Valley. He indicated that they were able balance renting an expensive office by making use of Stanford students’ brain power for only 10 dollars an hour. Sönmez, who later helped establish TIBCO Software, worked as a project manager in setting up the infrastructure of companies such as Amazon, eBay and FedEx, and expanded the company to such a degree that they went public in the NASDAQ stock market in 1999. After an offer from the World Economic Forum Managing Board, he moved to Geneva in 2014.

Sönmez, who continued his talk by answering students’ questions, talked about how they managed to stay ahead of others in new technologies by finding out how they could destroy their own products before others did and by creating competition and a discordant work environment through the 5 different working teams they established. He said that there are great opportunities in Turkey, and that students could create their own opportunities by working in the summer, making mistakes and not being afraid of failure. Mr. Sönmez stated that other people’s perspectives are not important and that what is important is the fact that they could change others’ viewpoints. Mentioning that technology is at their finger tips, he ended his talk by suggesting that students read Steve Job’s 400-page autobiography. Following his talk, Murat Sönmez was a guest on Radio TEDU.