by Ekrem Duman | Feb 9, 2026 | Startup, Startup Growth
On September 26, 2016, Zhang Yiming’s company ByteDance launched Douyin, a short-form video app for the Chinese market. The app allowed users to create 15-second videos set to music, effects, and filters, similar to Musical.ly (which ByteDance would acquire the...
by Ekrem Duman | Feb 8, 2026 | Startup, Startup Growth
On June 28, 2015, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station exploded 139 seconds after liftoff. The failure was SpaceX’s third in seven years and threatened NASA contracts worth billions. Elon Musk stood in the Mission Control center...
by Ekrem Duman | Feb 8, 2026 | Startup, Startup Growth
In July 1994, Jeff Bezos was a senior vice president at D.E. Shaw, a quantitative hedge fund in New York, pulling down an enviable Wall Street salary. He had read a statistic that would change his life and reshape global commerce: the internet was growing at 2,300%...
by Ekrem Duman | Feb 8, 2026 | Startup, Startup Growth
On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” from his Harvard dorm room. The website was simple: students could create profiles with photos and basic information, see who was in their classes, and connect with friends. Within 24 hours, over...
by Ekrem Duman | Feb 7, 2026 | Startup, Startup Growth
On September 18, 1957, eight young engineers walked out of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, and resigned en masse. Their employer, William Shockley, had won the Nobel Prize the previous year for inventing the transistor. He was widely...
by Ekrem Duman | Nov 19, 2025 | Startup, Startup Growth
In August 2013, two Brazilian teenagers landed in California with $30,000 in poker winnings, a half-baked payments app, and zero intention of finishing college.Eight weeks later, they dropped out of Stanford—after paying $90,000 in tuition—and flew home to São...
