On 22 February 2020, Vircon Legal co-founder Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu spoke at the Technology and Law Summit held at MEF University, addressing the intersection of technology, startups and law and what founders should anticipate legally as they scale.
Regulation arrives after the product, and then all at once
Technology law is written in response to products that already exist, which is why founders experience it as a sudden obligation rather than a stable framework. The pattern repeats: a market forms, harm becomes visible, and a rule appears that applies retroactively to how the product was already built. E-commerce registration through ETBİS, platform duties under the Digital Services Act and obligations attaching to a general-purpose AI model all followed products, not the other way round.
What founders can do is anticipate the direction rather than the text. Rules consistently move toward transparency about what a system does, traceability of data and a named person answerable for it — so a company that documents its data flows and decision logic while it is small absorbs the next regime cheaply. A conformity assessment is far easier when the evidence already exists. See the AI Compliance Hub, E-Commerce Law and Technology Law.
Author
If this is on your desk
Templates and checklists are free in the Founder Academy; for a specific situation, book a 30-minute intro call.
Founder AcademyBook an intro call