Fully Committed

It's one of the only such concessions Çelebi has made. Turkish businesses tend to be family-run, with "a big-man, pasha form of organizing," as Jim Stroup, an American with a consulting business in Istanbul, puts it. Employees take direction, not initiative. When Çelebi discussed his plan for AirTies with expat Turks in the U.S., most thought the idea that he could outrun Turkish traditions, along with government regulations, absurd. "We didn't think starting a business in Turkey was a good idea," says Müjdat Pakkan, a Turkish engineer then living in California. "We thought he was crazy."

But Çelebi thought recruiting American-trained Turkish managers could help create an American-style start-up. Turks have long gone to America for postgraduate degrees and jobs. Especially in the late '90s, when U.S. tech jobs were plentiful and the Turkish economy was spiraling into inflation and a massive recession, it seemed the obvious choice. "At the time I graduated, there weren't good job opportunities here. That was the pull of the United States," says Nurettin Atalay, an AirTies engineer who recently moved to Istanbul from Massachusetts. His return, and the return of a dozen other AirTies employees, suggests an interesting trend: Where America was once the destination for these engineers, visa restrictions and growing economies back home have reduced its appeal.

The $300,000 that got AirTies started came from Silicon Valley investors. Even with American funding and American-trained workers, however, the company didn't easily take on an American spirit. The majority of its employees hadn't worked in America, and Çelebi has to remind them to flout that pasha style, take initiative, and set their own deadlines. He found practical skills differed, too. Accountants in Turkey, for example, learn to prepare--and often fake--books for government taxes, rather than traditional P&L accounting. So AirTies trains accountants to prepare two sets of books--one to satisfy the Turkish tax codes and one that tells Çelebi where he's actually making and losing money.

Even seemingly minor things like paperwork encumber him. Here, he's required to sign his name twice on nearly every sheet of every document he submits to the government--he signs once as himself and once as his company's representative (and then, he usually has to get them notarized). He's also had to hire a driver. "I wouldn't think of hiring a driver in a million years in the U.S., but here, there are documents that have to be delivered right, left, and center," he says. "In the U.S., you'd put things in the mail."

By now, though, other than the excessive number of papers he must sign, Çelebi's approaching his job like a U.S. entrepreneur. During a week in early February, he spent Sunday night setting pricing for a contract bid with Turk Telecom. On Monday, he finalized the proposal and sent his staffers to Ankara to submit it. Tuesday he ran the monthly operations meeting, at which each division reviewed how it was doing against goals and what problems had arisen. Tuesday night he had dinner with AirTies' customs brokerage house. By Wednesday, he'd found out his Turk Telecom bid price was only the second lowest, so he pushed suppliers to lower their prices while lining up other potential suppliers. That night, he ate dinner with his Greek distributors. Thursday he had a board meeting and Friday he met with Turk Telecom.

He's made the company "American" enough to persuade even Pakkan, the onetime naysayer, who joined AirTies' engineering team in 2006. "It was comforting to me that I was going to come here and work for a U.S.-style company," Pakkan says. And though a driver may be waiting outside his office, Çelebi's created an American feeling inside the office, says CFO Okan Karliova, who returned after 12 years in the States. "The culture of the company is, when you step out, you're in Turkey, but inside it's so much the United States." AirTies is earning money American-style, too. The company had just $700,000 in revenue in its first year, 2004. In 2006, it had $24 million, and this year, Çelebi is projecting $50 million.

"Turkey is a shame culture, while America is more of a guilt culture." That's the Çelebis' 14-year-old son, Aydin, discoursing, as he does his homework at the dining-room table, on the different punishment frameworks of the two countries. Timur, Aydin's 10-year-old brother, is bent over the long wooden table, sketching muscles on a formidable red monster. Their amused parents are watching them from the sunken, latte-colored living room, where they're sipping Turkish wine and eating fleshy local olives. The Çelebis' duplex is in a part of town called Etiler, in a complex of new and boxy apartment buildings. The lower floor is serene and open, with glass doors overlooking a small garden; upstairs, the narrow hallway is littered with children's shoes.