Where are you from?
I’m from Terme, a small town on the Black Sea coast of Turkey.
Where do you live now?
I live in NYC.
What have you been doing since you graduated?
After graduating in 2005, I worked at IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm in San Francisco. In 2011, I wrapped up my tenure there and started working on my own tech startup, Itemology.
What is your current job? In 2 or 3 sentences, can you explain what your position is and what some of your responsibilities are?
I’m in the process of building a new product. Since we are still early stage, majority of my time is spent on overseeing the product design and development. As we get closer to launch, I will likely to spend more time on fundraising and marketing.
Can you tell us about a recent project you’ve worked on that you were really excited about?
Itemology makes it easy for you to re-discover your belongings and sell with one click on big markets like eBay and Craigslist. We are on a mission to liberate people from the stuff that make their lives bloated and create a friendly environment for trading goods as an alternative to buying new. I’m really excited about this project because Itemology embodies some empowering trends such as access trumping ownership, self-improvement through tracking, and collaborative consumption. We are currently testing our early product and hoping to invite people in soon. Stay tuned! You can also request an invitation at itemology.com.
How do you think the program helped prepare you for your life after Georgia Tech?
Needless to say, Georgia Tech corridors are full of artifacts from the future. I always enjoyed exploring the richness that came out of the research projects envisioning possible futures. I believe that being surrounded with such richness shapes one’s ability to imagine what may be next. Also, the multi-disciplinary setup, both the coursework and the students, helped me explore different paths of technology and design. By the time I was graduating, I had a working hypothesis of what I wanted to pursue.
Do you have any advice or words of wisdom you would like impart to current or future Digital Media students?
I believe finding great people to work with is still a bigger challenge than most things that seem impossible. The project-driven coursework at Georgia Tech is a nice opportunity for not only exploring new content/technologies, but also meeting and collaborating with interesting, talented, and hard-working people. I would invest in those relationships beyond the class projects, because they have the chance to turn into great working relationships after graduation.
