On October 18, 2016, our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu delivered a startup law training session as part of the Onward program — at a time when the Turkish startup ecosystem was still in its early-formation years and structured startup-law content was rare.
The central thesis of the training was clear: the founders who would shape the next decade of the Turkish ecosystem needed access to legal content that was practitioner-led and grounded in real deal experience — not academic generalities — and programs like Onward played a meaningful role in distributing that knowledge before it became standard.
The 2016 baseline
The session walked the cohort through the legal scaffolding of a Turkish startup: entity choice, founder agreements, IP assignment, share structure, vesting, early share issuances to angels, and the practical mechanics of moving from a TL-denominated bootstrapped operation to a USD-denominated investable structure. Many of these decisions were less standardized in 2016 than they are today — and the cohort got the benefit of an early, unhedged view.
Why the early years mattered
Closing the training, Mümtaz reflected that the ecosystem of the 2020s was built on the structural decisions made by the cohorts of 2014–2018 — many of those founders are today’s exit cases or repeat operators, and the legal vocabulary they internalized early continues to shape how Turkey’s startup law looks as a practice.
