đ Merhaba, Iâm Burak. Each week, I share lessons from 26+ years of building, investing in, and mentoring startups across emerging markets, from the early internet days to todayâs AI revolution. đ§ż
A short note from the field.
I recently received an email from one of our portfolio companies. I read it. And I was furious.
Iâll be honest, my reply was a little harsh. Maybe more than a little.
Because the pattern was obvious. They werenât building. They were playing the company game. Looking for positions. Obsessing over titles. Polishing their LinkedIn pages. Designing org charts instead of talking to customers.
I wonât name them. Thatâs not the point.
The point is: I see this pattern everywhere. And I wanted to write about it. Not to call anyone out, but to be honest with founders about something that quietly kills startups.
The Pattern
Iâve been watching this for years.
Founders, early-stage founders, copying big company culture. Big company processes. Big company behavior.
They have 3 people on the team. Zero revenue. No product-market fit.
But they act like theyâre running a 100-year-old holding company.
The Symptoms
Hereâs what it looks like:
Board meetings with no board
Fancy titles nobody asked for
Corporate language in every Slack message
Layers of hierarchy in a 5-person team
Formality everywhere, urgency nowhere
And the biggest red flag of all?
No product-market fit.
Many of these founders come from white-collar corporate jobs. Theyâre used to structure. Hierarchy. Politics. Titles that mean something in a system of 10,000 people.
So when they start a company, they recreate the only thing they know.
The corporate machine.
I Call This âStartup Theaterâ
They are playing founder.
They are performing CEO.
But internally? They are not acting like entrepreneurs.
They want to look like a startup founder to their social circle.
They donât want to be one.
Thereâs a big difference between building a company and performing one.
So What Is a Startup, Really?
Letâs go back to basics.
Steve Blank said it best:
âA startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.â
Read that again. Slowly.
Temporary organization.
The goal is not to stay a startup. The goal is to find something that works and grow.
Designed to search.
You are not there to execute like a Fortune 500 company. You are there to ask questions:
Who is our customer?
What problem are we actually solving?
What is the right product?
What is the right price?
Do we even have product-market fit?
Repeatable and scalable.
Youâre not just looking for any business model. Youâre looking for one you can repeat. And scale.
Thatâs the whole game.
Search First. Scale Later.
You are not a visionary CEO building an empire.
You are a founder searching.
Testing. Talking to customers. Running MVPs. Breaking things. Rebuilding. Iterating. Getting your hands dirty.
Youâre trying to find something repeatable and scalable.
If you act like a large corporation before you find your business model, youâre skipping the most important phase.
And that phase? Itâs supposed to be messy.
Messy is normal.
Uncertainty is normal.
Experimentation is normal.
Thatâs not a bug. Thatâs the feature.
The Bottom Line
If you want structure, stability, and status, join a corporation. Seriously. Thereâs nothing wrong with that.
But if you want to build a startup?
Stop playing company.
Stop the theater.
Drop the titles.
Cancel the unnecessary board meeting.
Get out of the building.
Talk to customers. Ship something. Learn fast.
Search first. Scale later.
Thatâs how real startups are built.
The Founder Compensation Playbook
How to pay yourself, hire your first team, and use equity without guessing
A strategic guide for early-stage founders to build a compensation system that protects runway, ensures fairness, and attracts the right talent.
Also there is another role play, acting ânot corporateâ but âsuper visionary founderâ like Steve Jobs. Dressing and acting like him.