Our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu delivered a Startup Law 101 training at the İstanbul Bilişim ve Teknoloji Merkezi (BTM) campus — one of Istanbul’s anchor public-private incubation and acceleration centres for technology founders.
The central thesis of the training was clear: BTM sits at the funnel where Istanbul’s deepest pipeline of early-stage founders meets institutional infrastructure — and the cheapest, highest-leverage intervention into that pipeline is a clean, practitioner-grade legal vocabulary delivered before founders incorporate.
The 101 curriculum
The session covered the core legal building blocks of a Turkish startup: entity choice, founder agreements, IP assignment, share structure, vesting, the mechanics of fundraising instruments (SAFEs, convertible notes), early share issuances to angels, and the structural decision of whether to flip to a U.S. parent or remain Turkey-domiciled. The format was deliberately introductory — designed to give the BTM cohort a working map without overwhelming them.
Why BTM matters in the ecosystem
Closing the training, Mümtaz reflected that incubation and acceleration centres like BTM are one of the highest-impact public-private legal interfaces in Turkey: a single founder cohort that leaves with a clean legal mental model converts into dozens of cleaner cap tables, smoother first rounds and fewer expensive remediations across the next several years.
