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Fully Committed

Let others proceed gingerly. Bülent Çelebi has set up an American-style company in Turkey, where he enjoys advantages his competition can only dream of.

Blasts of horns erupt from the gridlocked streets in Istanbul's Mecidiyeköy neighborhood, a business district crammed with 1970s-era concrete buildings. Men in suits and women in fractured-streets-be-damned stilettos, or, infrequently, headscarves, race through the traffic, trusting some Istanbullu maxim of move fast and you'll probably be fine. At the stoplights, hawkers swarm the cars: sallow-looking adolescents brandishing squeegees, a teenager fanning out cards, a saggy-faced beggar woman knocking pitiably on car windows--everyone's a hustler. The stoplights count down the time drivers must wait: 40 seconds...10 seconds...3 seconds...go. And the drivers step on the gas, the pedestrians leap onto sidewalks, and the city seems to be yanking at its reins.

Here in Mecidiyeköy, inside one of those concrete buildings, is a company that's taken the capitalist ambition of the squeegee boys and ramped it up about a thousand notches. This is no ordinary Turkish business. This is AirTies, a maker of wireless routers started by Bülent Çelebi, a Turkish-born, American-trained entrepreneur who's attempting to create a global company in this unlikely place.

Four years ago, Çelebi was far away from this smog and bustle, sitting on his porch in Palo Alto, California, and thinking about what a global business might entail. He wanted to build routers, given his engineering background, and sell to emerging countries where broadband penetration was low but rising fast. He could use American chips, and manufacture in Asia. But he thought he could gain a real advantage if he based his business in Istanbul.

Turkey, as Çelebi knew even then, doesn't have the vigorous economy of a China or India. Its regulations are onerous; bribery and corruption are common. Yet in Turkey, he could save money on salaries and operations, take advantage of economic incentives, and set up an ideal location for selling to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He could bring back American-trained Turkish engineers and institute an American management style: the spirit of Silicon Valley, but with a lower price tag. After writing his business plan on his porch, he packed his bags. And at the end of the school year, his wife quit her law firm, pulled their two boys from their California schools, and joined him in Istanbul. Bülent Çelebi was going all in.

Çelebi knows more than most people do about moving to a different country. When he was 7, his father studied education on a Fulbright scholarship in California. The family returned to Turkey after a year and a half, but his father, seeking better jobs, moved the family to the Bay Area again in 1970, when Bülent was 15. "The first time, I totally lost my Turkish and learned English. And then when I moved back to Turkey, I totally lost English and relearned Turkish. And when we moved back to the States, I essentially had to restart," he says. Having lost contact with most of his Turkish friends and finding it tough to connect with the California kids, he focused on math and science. He found more of a groove at Berkeley, where he majored in electrical engineering and computer science and, on the side, launched Process Control Equipment Co., which he built to $3 million in contracts.

Çelebi met his future wife, a Greek-American named Maria Lianides, in 1985 when she was a junior at Santa Clara. On their first date, she had him translate radical political posters that she'd brought back from a recent trip to Turkey. That spelled romance for him, and he proposed 18 months later. Just after that, National Semiconductor (NYSE:NSM) offered Çelebi a job running its Asian marketing. Maria was planning to start law school that fall, but she deferred, and over two weeks in the summer of 1987 they married and moved to Hong Kong, sight unseen.

In three years, Çelebi took the division from $100 million to $300 million in sales. But the time in Hong Kong was the real reward. It was a melee of different cultures. The Çelebis learned Mandarin, traveled to Malaysia and India, and lived a roaring life among the expats. "We loved it. The people who went there were risk takers; we liked being exposed to different cultures," Bülent says. Back in California, where they'd spend their next 13 years, life seemed slower, more beige.