Hanzade Dogan-Boyner is now one of the most successful women tech entrepreneurs in the world. But had she not defied her father and quit her family business, she would not have built what is being called Turkey’s Amazon
Hanzade Dogan-Boyner rushes into her office on the fourth floor of the Trump Towers in Istanbul, overlooking the historic city’s skyline. She is wearing a striking cardinal-red dress and matching shoes, and after a taking a moment to adjust herself, a radiant smile overtakes her face, which is framed by bobbed brown hair. With a recession in full swing, a plunging currency and ongoing credit bust, times are tough in Turkey.
“Such a story is hard to come by in Turkey. When you are a daughter of one of the best-known business families you are expected to work in the family business,” says Muhtar Kent, the former CEO and current chairman of the Coca-Cola Company, a Turkish-American who knows the Dogan family well. “Not start something from scratch and make it more successful than the actual family empire.”
Each night the family would wait for Aydin to get home to eat dinner. “My father used to sit at the head of the dinner table, and when Hanzade was young she made a big issue that she was going to sit at the head of the table,” Dogan-Boyner’s sister Vuslat recalls. “My father didn’t want to give his space to her, but she was stubborn about it.”
After earning her M.B.A. from Columbia University in 1999, Dogan-Boyner finally returned home to Turkey and joined the family business, Dogan Holding, where her sisters were already working. She never doubted she would end up there. In the U.S. the dot-com boom was giving birth to disrupters from Yahoo to Google, and Dogan-Boyner had big ideas. “My vision was our company needs to turn into a 21st-century communications company from a traditional media group,” she says.
In 2004, Dogan-Boyner wanted to strike out on her own, and for the daughter of one Turkey’s wealthiest magnates, that meant spending $10 million of inherited family funds to purchase digital assets she had begun to develop at Dogan Holding. Her three sisters also backed the purchase, each chipping in $10 million of their inheritances. Dogan Holding’s board was happy to unload the assets.
Hepsiburada has also avoided running the enormous financial losses associated with other fast-growing global online retailers like South Korea’s Coupang. The company really started to scale in 2015, when Dogan-Boyner opened up the platform to third-party merchants. For years, she was concerned that outside merchants would dilute the good reputation Hepsiburada had built with Turkish consumers. To help finance the move and the consolidation of its warehouses,for around $110 million in 2015.
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