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Akin Babayigit

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2023-06-26
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2023-06-26
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  1. “Iron source for a pretty healthy amount. And we were able to execute across both paths together, right? So I'm not anti this message, but the message is given with such certainty that if you're an entrepreneur, you hear this message, you say, okay, I must focus on only one thing. But no one tells you what to do. What if that one thing is the wrong thing? The core fundamental problem here is when you say you must focus on this thing, I think the spirit there is that you must not spend your time at conferences or this. I do buy that. I think you must focus on execution. But this is said with such certainty that I actually have people I have spoken with that listen to X, Y, Z podcasts and some VCs are dangerously prominent in social media and they say, oh, focus on one thing, one thing only. These guys come to me and they say, well, I focus on building.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yes. Look, I'll give you a personal example. I mean, when we started triple dots early on, internally we developed a technology inside triple dots. And this may actually not even be a very well-known story for you either. This technology was developed inside Triple Dot, and this was not our core area of focus. We're a mobile games company. We're supposed to be building mobile games all the time. And we developed this technology to enable us to better build games. But then we saw that this piece of technology had such a product market fit in the market that we didn't even know about. We decided to spin this off into a new entity called Luna Labs. And we basically partner with another entrepreneur and some of my team from Facebook. But we were very involved. So if in those days someone who was preaching the gospel of startup porn met us, they'd say, you guys are absolutely doing the wrong thing. But Luna was sold within two years.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Because I told you, I love you and I do genuinely find what you're building and is not again blowing smoke up your ass. But I think what you're building here is going to be incredible over the next five decades. So this kind of time horizon I'm looking at you and I'm saying, okay, when Harry's 76 years old and he looks back what he has built, I think this will be the five decades of Harry because of the way that you operate the relentless execution. And the most important thing is you have a why. So once you have the why, and that's a very personal why. That's not a why that can be satisfied. If your why was money, there will come a point where you have diminishing returns. Your why is very personal. Frankly, I'm not here because you invest in our company because thank you, but that's not why I'm here.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “When we started the company, and even when I was at Facebook, right, I would become an advisor to company X. The reason I would do that is, hey, what if they do something really well in the future? I could have some upside and so on. And I spent a lot of time with people, frankly, that I shouldn't have spent. And when you have more liquidity, when you have more money, you don't have to do that. You just can say no to people that you just don't want to hang out with because frankly, you don't need the XYZ amount from that interaction. So it does get easier in that sense because you have more freedom. I guess what I'm describing is you have more freedom over your own time. You don't have to say yes to people that you don't want to.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think it does get easier, right? The nature of the problems change. It's like when people ask me about kids, you know, when you have a small kid, you worry about something relatively minuscule every single day. Maybe every single hour. And as they grow older, the magnitude of the problems increase, but their frequency decreases. So now with my 12-year-old daughter, I worry about she hanging out with the right friends. And if she's not, how can I change that? And I think it's very similar to work when we first started the company. it was different, but it was a different type of difference. It was now we're in a place, our daily worries, our problems have changed. And to be honest, personally, having more money than I did before, it definitely helps. It allows me to focus on things that I want. The biggest problem it solves for me is I don't have to spend time to optimize for an unknowable upside in the future.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Frankly, when I was working on Facebook, I traveled quite a lot early on when we were building triple dots. I would spend a lot of time either on the road or whatever working. In the last two years, actually with COVID, what we learned is that we are more masters of our own schedule and destiny than we think. I started basically making a point of trying to be home every day by around 7 o'clock, spending that time with the kids. And it's not much, it's two hours a day, but you know, it's great for them. It's great for me. And I put them to bed every night basically between seven and nine is family.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, your life doesn't have to suck. You can manage your own time. You can manage your own schedule. And life doesn't have to suck.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, you spend enough time to learn the inside of the machinery and develop an expertise in just kind of punting away responsibility, right? But my life was absolutely miserable because nothing I did actually mattered. And I was always very frustrated. I couldn't have any impact whatsoever. And I was always, am I going to be found out? Like, are they going to realize that I'm doing basically no work? And that was not easy, right? Compare that to triple. I was working very, very hard, but I was loving it and my life didn't suck. We talked about work-life balance. I do agree that work-life balance is not true in the standard sense of work, you finish your work, you go home, and then you chill. That's not work-life balance, right? If you're lucky enough to be doing something that you like, that you're excited about you're good at, you go home, you sleep, and you're thinking about your work. And that's why I feel fortunate this is kind of what I found with Triple.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That's just wrong. Because, yes, I mean, there are cases that will be the case, but it depends on what you mean by your life will suck. My life didn't suck when I was building Triple Dot. And not because I wasn't working like a dog, but you know when my life sucked, when I was working two hours a day was the tail end of my career at Facebook. By all measures, it was supposed to be super comfortable and whatever I was cruising, right? I was barely doing any work at all.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Engineer and you have to justify what you're going to build. You just have to play the game. So then I advise them on how to play the game and how to communicate what they're going to build.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “A great point, it depends a little bit on their backgrounds, right? Let's take gaming, for instance, and DreamGame is a perfect example of this, right? These are guys who've built two hits before when they were at peak games. And when they came out with the kind of idea of starting a new studio, my advice to them was, you guys may not know how good you are so you don't even need to tell people what you're going to build because it's going to change over time. They had, I think, in their pitch tech, they had like seven slides. And three of the slides talk about who the team was and what they've built before. Because truly no one should care if you simplify it to its core, what you say you're going to build is going to change. I don't care who says what it will be different. So to me, if you have the strength to lean on your previous experience, I would say lean on that. But if you're a first time founder, if you're a brilliant guy out of university, if you're Facebook”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “First of all, I think, and this is a bit anti-climactic, the answer is really not one thing. We pay attention to details. We make sure that what matters we spend a lot of time on and what doesn't matter, we don't spend that. And that judgment is something you develop it over a period of time.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Sometimes done is just more important. And the perfect example in gaming for this is there's two brothers called Igor and Dimitri. They're probably the best Kept Secret in mobile gaming. It is an absolutely incredible story. There are two brothers. They're from Vologda, Russia, right? Middle of nowhere. They started building games initially they started building pay-to-play games, not even free-to-play, which was the revolution in gaming. I met them in 2013 in Moscow when I was working at Facebook. When I told everyone about mobile games, free to play, everyone jumped on it and I remember talking to Igor and Igor was quite careful and he kind of just wanted to see if this Facebook thing was real. And so they just took their time. But when they executed, they executed so well. They weren't necessarily prioritizing speed.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Broadly speaking, yes, I can say that, you know, like speed is very important, but the porn around speed is something that I'm uncomfortable with because speed of execution allows you to do more iterations than others. But there are points that this is a road and the road has curves. And you know what? When you're approaching those curves, sometimes you have to just slow down and actually think and take your time. So I've seen many companies in Turkey, also in Israel, where I also do quite a bit of investing, they have this mantra and they put it on the walls and say, you know, speed overall, speed above everything else. And sometimes just sometimes they are too fast when they approach one of those curves and they go off the cliff. At Facebook, we had these posters, right? They said done is better than perfect. I agree with that in general in spirit. But when you go over to finance, they said done is better than perfect, except in finance.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, I mean, we really weren't solving a real problem. The fact of the matter is true innovation happens through iteration. You start working on something and you iterate, you do this thing 1% different, this thing 1% different, and then the aggregate impact ends up being something completely innovative. So I don't like this advice in the sense that I don't think it's necessarily just false, but I think it's a bit misleading because it's okay. We started out building a solitaire app. one of the companies that i was very fortunate to partner with is dream games and they're building a match three game and you know what world has plenty of match three games but theirs is performing much better now so you know there's this thing that to be solving a real problem of building something that doesn't exist and if you're lucky enough to find something like that by all means i'm not disparaging that but not everyone has to do that”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Absolutely. It's okay to do it for the money. I'm not doing it for the money, but money is a great plus. I mean, money doesn't buy you happiness, but it can eliminate some forms of unhappiness. And a lot of people fetishize this grandiose meanings in life and, you know, what it means to have a mission statement and you put it on the wall. And there's just so much lack of genuineness around this. A lot of people are doing it for the money. Other people, like me, were doing it because”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Absolutely, that checks out so much because earlier at the beginning of the show, one of the things we talked about is how much I respect you, right? And I think you're unstoppable because you have a why, right? The thing with your mother, and that's your why. As long as you have a why, you can bear anyhow. So you just have to find your own why. That why does not have to be the domain that you're operating in.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You have to be passionate about winning. If you're passionate about winning, when the hard times do come and they will come, then you need this internal engine to propel you through. But that passion doesn't have to be directed to the domain. I think it's a very Western-centric view of the world to think that you have to be passionate about the domain that you're in. And I think that ends up actually in quite dangerous territory because a lot of people who are passionate for winning, who are just hard workers and learners, they end up not pursuing good lucrative jobs because of this kind of advice.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So, I have many friends that are successful entrepreneurs, and some of them, actually one of them lives in Canada, and he is in the insurance space. And I can guarantee you he's not passionate about the insurance space. I've never met a single person who is passionate about the domain of insurance. So that's just not true. I'm the living example of this. I think, you know, triple ad is a company that's doing quite well, but I'm not a gamer by definition. Now, depends on what you mean by gamer, but any kind of definition you have, I am not a hardcore gamer. I do like games. I like the business of games. I like the philosophy of games, but I'm not a gamer. I am passionate about winning. I think that's the biggest difference because I invest in a lot of companies as myself as well. And I think the thing that people like working with me is I don't have this incentive to tell people, give people this startup porn advice. And there's a lot of them out there.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “With his family. That is someone that I want to learn from. I want to partner with. And that really drove the decision beyond anything else. And on the side, I was developing some of these games myself. I felt that I could and we could out-execute some of the other companies. As we started to talk more and more with Lior, I felt that we were thinking very much on similar terms. So that's kind of how it all started.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Sure. So there's actually interim step, there's a guy that I really love called Humam. He was the chief strategy officer Activision, Bod King. And I joined him at King. And I actually initially reached out to Lior because we wanted to do a project within King that I thought maybe we could get him interested. And the thing that I remember specifically about Lior was how good of a person he is. Before meeting Lior, one of the horn that I heard in the starter world was that, you know, successful founders are always assholes, right? This was the thing that I kept on hearing. And I met Lior and he was none of those things. And also AL, our third co-founder, right? They're the type of people if something bad happens to you, you want them taken over your family affairs and you want them to make sure that your family is well taken care of. And he's a guy who successfully sold a business to a publicly listed company and still goes home every night at 6 p.m. to have different.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Delivering. And fast forward, I think there was a period of time when I think 35% of Facebook's mobile revenue was coming from like three developers in Russia at the time, which is absolutely incredible, right? This is how hungry they were for this kind of offering. They were game developers and game developers are always very hungry to adopt new things that might be game changers.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So I do remember when we launched appads originally, and this will sound comical, but it was not a foregone conclusion that those ads would work because they are a new ad format, they're native ads. And when we launched those, I got so excited that I went and told all the partners that were working with Facebook at the time about this amazing thing and so on. And I remember all my partners being extremely frustrated that these ads weren't because it took them six to nine months to figure out. I remember there was a famous bug on Facebook Android. These ads weren't delivering. And there was something wrong. That moment I remember thinking this may not work. You know, the performance of the ads were not there and all my partners were pretty frustrated with the performance and so on. And I thought maybe it's not going to work. But there was somebody that discovered a bug in Melo Park. I can't remember exactly who it was, whatever, but it was a step function change over a week. These ads started.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Exactly. That's such a good point because it will all be okay. We will all be okay at the end of the day. There are times when you have to act and you have to act with gusto of fight.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Exactly. It opened, I think, $38, went down to $19. My wife said, Hey, are you sure that you did the right thing by joining? And I was like, I actually don't know. But I think so. And I remember Mark being extremely calm and actually...”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Facebook was an incredible place. The biggest thing I learned at Facebook actually is things are never as bad as they seem and never as good as they seem. I heard in all hands with Mark. And when I joined Facebook, it was 2012, soon after Facebook launched their mobile offering, right? Because they were getting really heavily criticized about they don't have a presence on mobile, they missed the boat on mobile.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Zynga. Back then, I was told the culture at Zynga was not very good, so I ended up not taking that job. But I got bitten by the gaming bug. I flirted with the idea of going to Turkey at the time. For a couple months, I actually joined this company called Peak Games out of Istan as an advisor and they were making Facebook games at the time. And through that, I met Julienne, our common friend, and joined Facebook. Decided not to move to Turkey at the end and instead came to London.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So, after HBS, I went to work at Skype for a couple years. I learned how to ruthlessly prioritize. Skype was an engineering-led organization. Being engineering-led, you know, there's no room for fluff. And I developed a very strong distaste for fluff while I was at Skype. When you're talking with an Estonian engineer, you learn very quickly to get to the heart of the matter very, very fast. In between, when I was at Skype, I was presented with this world of mobile gaming. I learn about this game called Zynga's Farmville. But the thing that was absolutely amazing at the time, I read a statistic somewhere that there was more tractors being sold in a day on farmwill than anywhere else in the world combined. It was very different in terms of a game design philosophy. That element of understanding the psychology behind that actually made me interview at”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “My wife in university in Wisconsin went to graduate school. I thought I wanted to become a professor. And most people that do consulting don't know what they want to do with their life. That was me. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life at that point. Decided to just stop graduate school, left Yale, went to McKinsey, spent two years at McKinsey, absolutely hated it. It was a very rigid environment. I wasn't the type of person that would necessarily follow the rules. I wouldn't do the way they wanted me to do the analysis. But the analysis I did was correct.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Sure. So I grew up in Turkey until I was 16 and I was this mega nerd. I was in the math Olympiad team and I was one of those people that I was social, but I wasn't externally facing, externally friendly. My mother came in one day and my mother is not for the faint of harden. She said, I decided to put you on an exam for the rotary club to go to the US. And I protested and I said, I don't want to. I'm happy here in Turkey. And she came and she said, fine, you can be a garbage man then. And that was the end of the discussion. So next thing I knew, I was in an exam room with the rotary club. I went to the US into Wisconsin. And you took a masked nerd from Turkey, put them in Tomo, Wisconsin. That was an incredible experience. I was the outsider. And that was a very defining moment for me. If I made it in Toma, you know, I could make it anywhere.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “It's such a privilege. It's an honor. I do have to say, first of all, on a personal level, I really love you. On a professional level, I think most people don't know. We have an amazing professional relationship. You're an investor in our business as well. We'll talk about startup advice and all of that, but most people don't know. You're actually a media entrepreneur, not just any VC. So for me, it's such an amazing privilege to be here. You're one of the very few people I tell my kids about at dinner table. I say Uncle Harry did this. I want you to do this like Uncle Harry when they were, and it's not me blowing smoke up your ass. This is really legitimate. And I'm really, really happy to be here.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Best founders talk about quote unquote value at VC firms and giggle because I don't think a VC can truly add operational value to a truly exceptional founder. The biggest value add, I think, that a VC can have on a company is really just to be there for the bad time. And just be a friend in the good times.”

    2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source