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In part because of their early travels, the Çelebis daydreamed about moving to Turkey; too, Bülent's father felt he owed the country something and hoped one of his sons would return. And, despite the awkwardness of Bülent's teenage years, the Çelebis were fixed on raising their two boys in a different culture. In 2003, when Bülent left his job as CEO of Ubicom, a microprocessor company in Silicon Valley, he and Maria figured it was their chance. "You have to understand and appreciate other cultures and be able to relate to other people," Bülent says. "If you're going to do well, I think you need to be flexible and be able to adapt to many different ways of life and philosophies and values. The world is becoming this big global place."
It's easy to see that globalization is happening. It's manageable to address it in a business plan written from the States. But Çelebi found that the reality of it--trying to bring an American-style start-up to a country where CEOs are expected to pay bribes, where laws aren't obeyed, where most of his employees aren't familiar with the American style of management, and where his family has had to adjust to being immigrants--was more difficult than any business plan could predict.
In his corner office, Çelebi unpacks an AirTies router, his thick peaked eyebrows sitting solemnly on his forehead. At age 51 he talks and listens with an engineer's air of appraisal. When he smiles, though, flashing a boyish gap in his teeth, it's easy to picture him as the child who knocked out the electricity on his block in his hometown, Ankara, while experimenting with a motor.
The router may look simple--white plastic, the size of a book--but it reflects Çelebi's sense of the changing world. His idea is that big router companies don't bother with consumers in emerging countries. Traditionally, routers are made in several steps. A semiconductor company designs and builds the guts of the product. The router company adds technical flourishes and hands the whole thing off to an East Asian manufacturer to be encased in plastic, badged, and packaged for consumers. The product, then, is pretty far removed from the end user. This is fine in large markets because the semiconductor companies pay attention to American consumer preferences. But they have little interest in asking consumers in Cairo what features they'd like. Çelebi thought that if he could create routers that worked in local languages and with local networks, he could sell to small businesses, consumers, and telecom companies in Turkey and in the countries all around it.
With Turkey's young and educated work force and cheap operational costs--along with a location that is ideal for ruling the region, as the Ottomans figured out when they conquered Istanbul in 1453--he knew he'd have a huge advantage. Çelebi pays about a third of what he'd pay in Silicon Valley for comparable employees, and about 70 percent less for other costs such as shipping and printing. (Energy is an exception--gas costs $7 a gallon due to taxes.)
From Istanbul, it's a short flight to Kazakhstan, Greece, and Russia, the first international markets AirTies tackled; next up are Egypt, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine. Çelebi's first requirement for a market is high-quality distributors. Using distributors gives him a single ship-to address and means they, rather then he, have to chase down resellers' payments.
Fittingly, his supply chain is international. He uses American-made chips for the manufacturing of his routers in Taiwanese and Chinese factories. But manufacturers want big orders--he can't request a few Kazakh versions of his router and a few Turkish ones. So the manufacturers ship a nearly complete product to Turkey, where a local contractor uses AirTies programs to customize the software's language and telecom configurations for each region, adds country-specific user guides and setup CDs, and ships them off. Couldn't competitors do the same? "If they worked on it, of course they could," Çelebi says. He's applying for patents to protect the technological specifics, but he assumes competitors will focus on big markets, not Bulgaria.
If the supply chain sounds complex, it's hardly been the most difficult part of establishing AirTies. Çelebi knew business was done differently in Turkey. He didn't quite realize how differently.
Cacophonous and young, the AirTies office is populated with girls wearing T-shirts and skirts and guys wearing turtleneck sweaters and slouchy jeans. And then, just when it seems like a San Jose start-up, an apron-clad woman walks by, balancing a tray that holds porcelain teacups and water glasses on doilied saucers. She is the tea lady, whose sole job is to serve and clear drinks. It's a concession to the established way of doing business in Turkey.
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