Yigit Ihlamur - Managing Partner - Vela Partners

He was born and raised in Turkey by a mathematician mother and a father who started and ran a successful technology company. He observed their love relationship and witnessed the positive impact of math, technology and entrepreneurship in my life. His parents' presence, values and parenting style define who He is. His father took risks when no one was talking about startups or knew what computers were. Every night he would wait for his father to carry his computer on his shoulder and walk up 5 floors to our apartment. He would code and take his computer back to his office before Yigit woke up. He leads by example, is open minded and has a positive outlook on life. He grew up with him as his role model. His mother is a super woman. When he was growing up, she carried the whole household. She was the main breadwinner while his father was building his business. She was the angel investor in his father's business, taking her savings from under her pillow and asking her father to invest in the company as well. She has supported the whole family tirelessly for decades. She has high conviction, which most people lack. Yigit feels fortunate to observe that love, and to have found his wife, another super woman who has been supporting him with high conviction since day 1. He was exposed to computers at a young age. As any 4 year old would do, he started playing DOS-based games and shell commands. That turned into IRC-based socializing, then hacking, designing and coding. His father started involving him in his business during my teenage years. He was exposed to strategic business decisions and high-stake activities such as scaling a reseller network, meeting enterprise customers and hiring/firing executives. In retrospect, that encoded his DNA and strong business intuition. In principle, he valued being a good human being and working unbelievably hard. The rest follows. He will continue doing what he is doing until the last day of his life. Build new products, solve real problems and work hard with excellent people whom he can learn from.