On August 2, 2018, our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu spoke at the second edition of the NishNova Together series organized by Nişantaşı University, hosted at Maslak 1453 NeoTech Kampüsü. The session was dedicated to Entrepreneurship and Law, and brought the StartupHukuku and Cübbem teams together with the university’s students.
The central thesis of the talk was clear: building a startup in Turkey today is not a sequential exercise where a founder first builds a product and then “calls a lawyer” — legal architecture is part of the product itself, and the founders who learn this earliest tend to be the ones who close their rounds, structure their cap tables and exit their companies most cleanly.
Speakers and format
The session featured Berk Tüzel (Cübbem) and Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu (StartupHukuku) — two practitioners working at the intersection of law, technology and entrepreneurship — followed by a Q&A with students. The event closed with the customary plaque presentation to the speakers.
Why law belongs inside the founding team
Mümtaz walked through the most common early-stage legal failure points he sees in Turkish startups: incomplete founder agreements, IP assignment gaps, premature share issuances, and convertible structures designed for one jurisdiction and used in another. The argument was consistent: legal mistakes made in the first six months become the most expensive line items in a Series A term sheet.
The new generation of legal professionals
The discussion closed on the changing profile of the lawyer. Mümtaz argued that the lawyer who sits next to the founder must read product specs, understand cap tables, model dilution, and engage with technical and commercial decisions as a peer — a posture that diverges sharply from the classical defensive lawyer archetype.
