The Difference Between Working Around Startups and Actually Building One
Being on the other side of the table while also trying to build a startup yourself is a strange experience. Messy, humbling, and full of contradictions.
For the last 5 years, I worked around innovation from relatively structured environments.
At Core Strategy, a corporate entrepreneurship consultancy, I observed how ideas painfully evolve into business models. I thought I understood where startups fail to turn problems into solutions.
At Vestel Ventures (CVC), after reviewing more than 1,000 startup decks, I thought I understood what corporate investors expected from founders.
At ITU ARI Teknokent (university technopark), through accelerator programs, mentor feedback, and founders preparing to sell internationally, I thought I had learned how startups should position themselves and communicate value.
Then at Akbank, while working closely with startups trying to collaborate with large bank, I learned how corporates evaluate partnerships, what organizations expect, and how trust gets built between startups and enterprise structures.
On paper, it felt like a strong accumulation of know-how:
- how investors think,
- what institutions demand,
- how venture ecosystems operate.
And to be fair, all of that experience really does help.
But trying to apply that knowledge while building something yourself feels completely different.
Especially because real startup building rarely happens inside frameworks.
That shift became much more real while building Vitsupp by Marin together with Dila, especially as we moved from a consumer wellness idea into a much more operational B2B model working with pharmacies and health retailers.
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Outside the relatively structured and sterile world of corporate innovation, you suddenly deal with completely different dynamics:
- individual investors,
- SMEs with very different expectations
- operational ambiguity,
- customer friction,
- constant iteration,
- finding new team members or losing one
and the reality that execution is usually much messier than the models explaining it.
You also realize how different it feels when uncertainty stops being theoretical and becomes operational responsibility.
- Frameworks still matter.
- Strategy still matters.
- Positioning still matters.
But in practice, startup building becomes much more human than it looks from the outside.
And I think this is where the importance of teams becomes very real.
After spending years seeing how much investors and institutions care about teams, experiencing it firsthand makes you understand why.
You start realizing that knowing strategy, positioning, stakeholder management, or business models is only one side of the equation.
The other side is having people around you who navigate uncertainty differently than you do.
- People who understand different parts of the problem space.
- People who know how to build trust in rooms you’ve never entered before.
- People who can operate inside ambiguity instead of just analyzing it.
For me, working with my co-founder (Dila) made this very visible.
While I was designing structures, positioning narratives, and trying to systemize opportunities, she naturally understood how to navigate relationships within the industry itself. Who to contact from the field, how to approach conversations, and how to create trust directly with people in the field.
Looking back, maybe the strongest thing we built was not just the product itself, but a working dynamic where two very different perspectives could actually make each other operational.
And honestly, that realization changed the way I think about innovation much more than any framework, deck, or workshop ever did.
