On October 15, 2020, our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu joined an Instagram Live broadcast hosted by the Ankara Düşünce Topluluğu — Ankara Thought Community — a student-driven discussion forum that brings professionals into conversation with university students on emerging legal, technological and economic questions.
The central thesis of the conversation was clear: 2020 collapsed the distance between practitioners and the next generation of operators — pandemic-era live formats on platforms students were already using daily became a more honest channel than the traditional conference circuit, and the practitioners who showed up there built relationships that compounded into the next venture cycle.
What the broadcast covered
The session moved through the practical questions Mümtaz was hearing from founders, students and young lawyers at that moment: what a SAFE actually is and when it makes sense, how vesting protects founders rather than restricting them, how cap tables get out of shape when structural decisions are postponed, and how to think about Turkish-versus-U.S. structures in the new fundraising environment.
Why student-led formats matter
Mümtaz noted that student-led discussion communities like Ankara Düşünce Topluluğu play a quietly important role in shaping the public vocabulary of emerging topics: they convert the lived experience of working practitioners into shared interpretive scaffolding for the next cohort of operators — and the long-arc value of that compounds across years and ventures.
