String Ventures

A New Breed of Venture Capital: Technology Holding Studio

Connecting Turkey to Silicon Valley

String Ventures (SV) is founded in 2013 by Can Saraçoğlu and Emrah Yalaz.

SV operates in Istanbul and San Francisco.

Philosophy: We follow Peter Drucker’s principles; (a.) that business has only two basic functions: innovation and marketing, and (b.) entrepreneur’s purpose is to create a customer. We invest in entrepreneurs using scientific Product Innovation know-how, fuelled by Growth Hacking methods, measured with Data Science practices, applied within Lean and Agile principles, from day one.

Strategy: As cost of starting up declines, founders get more powerful and selective. Therefore, “maker” VCs with innovative product design and creative marketing chops will edge out “finance” VCs in early stage deals. We offer an analytical method to iteratively design, test, build and grow commercially viable products that significantly (10x) outperform the competition.

Approach: 1. Win the talent war early by scouting technical and design talent at top universities.

2. Inject seed funding, product design and growth marketing know-how with founder-friendly terms to generate quality deal-flow. 3. Groom top performers for Silicon Valley, particularly YCombinator.