A guest lecture in the ITU MBA Entrepreneurship course

I spent Thursday evening with the MBA students in the Entrepreneurship course of Prof. Dr. Mehmet Erçek at Istanbul Technical University. Two hours, from seven to nine, on the one thing most startup advice gets wrong: the order.

Most startup advice is right — and arrives in the wrong order. Books, podcasts, accelerators, angels with opinions: all eager to tell founders what to do. Most of it is correct on its own terms. But disconnected from everything around it, and out of sequence, even good advice fails. What a founder needs first is a coherent view of the whole system — then conclusions about what to do, and when.

That is what I walked the class through: The Founder's Sequence, the 7P Framework of Entrepreneurship. Seven steps, in order — Purpose, People, Pain, Product, Prove, Profits, Persistence. Why before who. Who before what. What before how and when. Like a staircase, you cannot skip a step and expect to arrive safely at the top.

Before I put the framework on the board, I asked the class to fill in the blanks themselves — starting from zero, what would you say a founder must get right, and in what order? The best part of any lecture is that moment: the room reasoning out loud, then the questions that follow. Thank you to everyone who made it interactive, and to Prof. Erçek for the gracious invitation.

One more note I will keep here rather than abstract away: my son Uygar, who starts high school this year, listened to his father speak for the first time. He tried to hide himself — he is on the far left of the photo.

The slides I shared in class are available above. If you want to go deeper, the full argument lives in the free e-book, The Founder's Sequence — From Purpose to Profits.