Onur Tekin Turhan

Onur Tekin Turhan

Now Writing

I’m Onur. I'm curious about: Building with AI, scaling digital businesses, creativity, movement, how we learn, what makes us adaptable.

What I seem to be good at is forming a rough map of an unfamiliar field rather quickly and noticing where it connects to the stuff I already know. The way I use this is to take something complicated and make it easier to understand and navigate for other people.

In 3 cases, this led me to build marketplaces — loans and credit cards with Hesapkurdu, insurance with Koalay, now solar and energy with Piagrid.

These were markets where the information is scattered, the sellers know far more than the buyers, the stakes are high for the buyers and nobody compares the options clearly.

In my last initiative it led me to education. LearnButWhy is where I work on how we learn and teach, and how to change myself and my school to adapt to a world that keeps changing so fast. This may be the slowest and possibly the most stubborn thing I do.

Underneath this work is my expertise - plus appetite to learn more on - building and growing digital businesses.

Getting in front of people at a super low cost using no-code tools, AI and very small teams.

Outside all of this: being truly present for my wife and 3 kids, movement improvisation, reading a lot of science fiction and working on a slow writing project that’s still cooking.

What I’m working on

Piagrid

Türkiye’s independent energy marketplace, started in 2023. Solar first, then the rest of the stack. It’s built very lean — tens of thousands of people a month, most of the operation AI-automated with almost no headcount. Implementing the same playbook as in Hesapkurdu, but this time as someone who’s already made the mistakes :)

LearnButWhy

A platform and community for educators exploring what learning should look like in the new world. I write a newsletter called The Why, build tools and training and work with schools trying to change how they teach. Lately our focus has started shifting to working with young people directly. I am very open to collaborating on this, so please reach out if you’re building something or already operating in this space.

The Why is my monthly newsletter — subscribe by email or follow it on LinkedIn.

All the stuff that’s actually occupying my head these days is on the Now page.

How I got here

In 2010 Ömer Paksoy and I left our private equity jobs and started Hesapkurdu. It became Türkiye’s leading financial comparison marketplace with millions of monthly users, a team of 100+ people, and the country’s top organic search visibility in banking, credit cards and loans.

Founders of Moltiply Group / Mavriq, Marco Pescarmona and Alessandro Fracassi backed us personally from the very beginning and stayed with us the whole way. Other investors followed: MAP, NN Group and BHL Group, the team behind Comparethemarket. BHL, by then our majority shareholder, bought most of the remaining shares in 2023 at a $65M valuation and I moved on. Hesapkurdu is now part of Mavriq, the comparison arm of Moltiply Group, which Marco chairs. It ended up back with the people who started out with us.

Koalay, the insurance aggregator, merged with us in 2019. I ran digital marketing and sales operations while also handling regulation, compliance and our work with the industry associations such as the Insurance Brokers’ Association and FINTR, Türkiye’s first fintech association.

Before any of that: 2 years at Turkven Private Equity, one of Türkiye’s leading private equity firms. Turkven was an amazing training ground for understanding and growing businesses in different industries.

A year before that I was at TEB - BNP Paribas, doing business development in retail and small business banking.

And 3 years at Capital One in Virginia, on marketing strategy and CRM. I led direct marketing at a scale I had never seen before — segmenting customers, coordinating the teams that ran the campaigns, and travelling around the country sitting in on focus groups to decide how we spoke to people. Every decision was tested against data and analysis. Capital One shaped most of how I think about customer acquisition, and about building the right company culture.

I studied at Robert College in Istanbul, then electrical and electronics engineering at Boğaziçi University, then an MBA at the University of Maryland.

Another thread that ran alongside my career involved arts and education. I started dancing in my second year at university, moved onto performing and teaching and am still exploring movement today. If you like, you can learn more about this on the movement page. I started focusing on learning and child development in 2000, and that also grew with me. Read more on the education page.

Press

Everything else

Get in touch

If any project here connects with what you’re doing, please write to me at onur@onurtekinturhan.com

I also take on a small number of advisory engagements focusing on businesses ready to scale through digital acquisition. Feel free to get in touch if you're interested.

Short bio

Onur Tekin Turhan is the co-founder of Piagrid, Türkiye’s independent energy marketplace, and the founder of LearnButWhy, a global platform for educators rethinking how we learn. He previously co-founded Hesapkurdu, Türkiye’s leading financial comparison marketplace, which BHL Holdings acquired in 2023 at a $65M valuation and which is now part of Mavriq. He managed digital marketing, sales operations and regulatory affairs at the digital insurance broker Koalay. Earlier he worked at Turkven Private Equity, TEB / BNP Paribas and Capital One. He holds an MBA from the University of Maryland and a BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Boğaziçi University. He lives in Istanbul and has three children.

Elsewhere

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