(This is going to be a short post because I don't have that many notes about this day.)
On Thursday we went to Dogan, a large holding company. They had nice buildings on their "campus" and armed (MP5) security out front. Basically, Dogan owned a ton of other companies, with lots of them in the media business (TV, newspapers, etc.) In fact, the Turkish government recently hit Dogan with a $5 billion (yes billion!) dollar tax penalty which seems to coincide with some bad press Dogan published about the government. Censorship? It sure seems like it.
We went to a fancy lunch with the Dogan folks, who were great hosts. After that we went to Airties, a consumer networking startup and then met with a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Istanbul.
A couple of interesting observations from the day:
- Gas is expensive in Turkey, about $2.50/liter which is around $10/gallon!
- Dogan is helping build the Trump Towers Istanbul
- Dogan had an IT guy in our meeting strictly to run the videos and powerpoint presentation
- Airties is one of the coolest companies in Turkey (along with Turkcell)
- Airties get customer feedback directly into development by putting engineers in the call center a couple days per month
- Airties will never outsource their support because they view this as vital feedback
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