Serkan Alp, the Services Guy
Serkan is one of our earliest employees and played a crucial role in the development of our platform's look and feel. He spends his days creating new templates and tweaking those little things that, while not directly visible, are very important for user experience. Serkan worked at leading digital agencies in İstanbul for over 10 years prior to GROU.PS, and developed projects for universally known brands. He is a graduate of Anadolu University’s Information Management department.
Ergin Aykut, the Moderator
Each startup must have a jack of all trades like our own Ergin. Ergin graduated from Kavram College’s Department of Media Technologies.
Ahmet Bulut, the Scientist
Ahmet oversees SEM operations at GROU.PS, and strategizes online lead generation. Ahmet worked as a Research Scientist at Citrix Online (Santa Barbara, CA), and as a Senior Researcher at Like.com (San Mateo, CA). At Citrix Online, he was in the core set of people that architected and developed the first scalable and fault tolerant back-end infrastructure for the award winning online collaboration product GoToMeeting. At Like.com, he built the A/B Testing Framework that got widespread adoption across the company, and led automated SEM operations. Ahmet holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Bilkent University, and a Phd degree in computer science from UC Santa Barbara.
Engin Dumlu, the Technologist
Engin is our PHP guru. He introduced the latest ORM and MVC techniques to our team and stubbornly rejected to write a single line of non-PHP code. He currently leads all infrastructure innovations at GROU.PS. Formerly, Engin was chief technologist at put.io and is a graduate of Istanbul Technical University’s Department of Civil Engineering.
Mehmet Emek, the Junior Engineer
Mehmet initially came to GROU.PS as a summer intern. During those three-months he got to know his way around the GROU.PS platform by participating in development testing projects. In fall 2011, he joined our team full-time as a Junior Software Engineer. Mehmet is a graduate of the Yıldız Technical University Computer Programming Department, and is currently studying in the Department of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations at Anadolu University.
Ahmet Hasan Keskinkılıç, the Tester
Ahmet Hasan and our programmers have a deep love/hate relationship: his knack for finding bugs is the number one reason why our team works so late. Ahmet Hasan graduated from Yıldız Technical University’s Department of Electronic and Communications Engineering.
Balamir Nazlıca, the Salesman
Balamir is our Director of Sales & Marketing. Over the last ten years Balamir worked in Sales and Marketing departments for various corporate companies, Societe Generale being the last one. This year he finally caught the start-up bug and joined our team. Balamir studied International Relations at Bilgi University and is fluent in French, English and Turkish. He is also the lead singer of Soaked, an Istanbul bred-and-raised synth pop group.
Ömer Ongun, the Community Head
Ömer is responsible for following up to make sure clients are having a great experience at GROU.PS. A recent graduate of the reputable Boğaziçi University’s Business Administration Department and Summer Academy of Karlshochschule International University in Germany, Ömer brings with him a wealth of work and life experiences in areas including high-level management consulting, multicultural teams, intercultural project management and marketing. He previously ran intercultural educational projects in Turkey, Kenya, the US, Germany and Portugal as part of his training and volunteer work.
İpek Ören, the Customer Advocate
After completing her secondary education at an Austrian High School, Ipek continued her studies at Marmara University's German Language and Literature Department. Ipek started with the GROU.PS Customer Service department after a successful summer internship, and brings along with her valuable experience in support and marketing at the Turkey offices of major firms like PepsiCo and Intel-rival AMD. Ipek is fluent in English, German and Turkish.
Volkan Özçelik, the Frontend Engineer
Designing and optimizing fat-client JavaScript/AJAX infrastructures has always been Volkan's passion. He currently heads up our GROU.PS Mobile projects. Formerly, he was the CTO of Cember.net prior to its acquisition by the German company Xing. Volkan graduated from Boğaziçi University’s Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.
Enes Özden, the Bug Fixer
As one of our earliest employees, Enes knows our platform inside out. Therefore we have bestowed upon him the mission of ridding our platform of any and all bugs. Enes graduated from Sakarya University’s Department of Mathematics.
Bora Sezer, the Artist
Bora is the latest addition to our team and is here to bring a bit of style to our platform. Prior to GROU.PS, Bora was an instructor of information design at Kadir Has University and was the founder of Beyogluin, a popular nightlife website for Istanbulites. Bora graduated from Istanbul Bilgi University’s Visual Communication Design Department and has an MA in information technologies in design of Istanbul Technical University. Bora is fluent in Turkish, Dutch and English.
Emre Sokullu, the Founder
Emre is the CEO of GROU.PS, which he founded in 2006 at the age of 22. Prior to GROU.PS, he was the founder Turkix/SimpleKDE, a Windows-like Linux distribution for the Turkic desktop markets that was snapped up by Armador AS and sold preinstalled with Turkey’s leading laptop producer, Datron.
Emre’s passions span open source, operating systems, artificial intelligence (pattern recognition, knowledge representation, machine translation) and social web. Emre’s articles on some of these matters can be found at http://www.readwriteweb.com/about_emre.php
Emre is a graduate of top-ranked Boğaziçi University and Galatasaray High School in Turkey. He initially traveled to the US to work at the Princeton University Wordnet Project, but subsequently stayed to pursue his aspirations, including getting a picture taken with the Zuck.
Merve Sokullu, the HR
A graduate of University of North California, Greensboro, Merve brings her previous experience at diverse management roles in the textile industry to GROU.PS . As the Director of HR and Assistant to the CEO, Merve is responsible for all things human resources related, and bridging the day-to-day operations of our US and Turkish offices..
Mustafa Şapçılı, the Distinguished Engineer
Mustafa is the first official employee of GROU.PS. Despite being the youngest member of the team, Mustafa is the go-to guy for insolvable technical issues. He has played a crucial role to grow our platform to serve millions of users. Mustafa graduate from Yıldız Technical University’s Department of Electronic and Communications Engineering.
Sean Yu, the CFO type
As the CFO of GROU.PS, Sean is responsible for all things number-related. Sean has always been a technology nerd, although he will never admit this. Embarrassingly, Sean was first introduced to programming through Lisp while attending Johns Hopkins’ CTY summer camp in 7th grade.
Prior to becoming the CFO of GROU.PS, Sean was a Search & Services Fellow at Endeavor Turkey, where he advised a variety of high-growth Turkish start-ups with capital raising and international expansion. Before moving to Istanbul, Sean worked at Gryphon Investors in San Francisco and Lehman Brothers in New York City. Sean holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University.
Taner Yurttaş, the Engineer
Taner is our Selenium guy and makes sure that we know when things break before our users do. He is currently going through the painful process of transitioning from Java to PHP. He is a recent graduate from Süleyman Demirel University’s Department of Computer Programming.
Our advisors are Cem Sertoglu and Turker Ugur Sokullu.
Special thanks goes out to our former employees including:
Ahmet Tatari, Ahmet Ünal, Ali Cumhur Çevik, Ali Şükrü Göksu, Alper Kanat, Altuğ Bilgin Altıntaş, Baran Oğuz, Burak Yiğit Kaya, Eray Usta, Eren Emre Kanal, Gürkan Oluç, İlter Ateş, İsmail İzgi, Mehmet Doğan, Mustafa Özyurt, Onur Karakaş, Özgür Kuru, Tolga Karataş and Yusuf Koç.
