15 Startup Tips with Peak Games Co-Founder Rina Onur

Two words: “Don't panic.” That's just one of several startup tips from Rina Onur, co-founder and CSO of Peak Games. First and foremost, however, she recommends that you “try to find your angle in what you love to do.” “[And] make sure you have a solid idea about your vision, but be malleable,” she told Benzinga. “Be ready to pivot and make a big change everyday.” Onur, whose background is in finance, said that she has always been a fan of video games, hence the formation of Peak Games. “I was born and raised in Istanbul, but I went to the States for college,” she said. “After studying economics at Harvard, I went to London to work for Morgan Stanley MS in their investment banking department. I then transferred to Morgan Stanley's Istanbul office. After a while, I moved to the oldest and largest private equity fund here in Istanbul – Turkven Private Equity – and looked a lot at retail and payment processing sectors.” Onur later met Sidar Sahin, Peak Games' CEO and other co-founder, after he invested in her brother's startup. “We formed a great relationship and shared a similar vision about the Turkish startup scene and Internet ecosystem,” Onur explained. Her other startup tips include:

• “Be ready to make a lot of mistakes (just hope the rights are enough to compensate the mistakes).”
• “Build the best team you can.”
• “Be a glorified HR person for your team; keep them happy, scout for new talent all the time.”
• “Be sure to launch a product, a service or whatever it is you're doing even if it isn't 100% ‘there.'”
• “Be sure to iterate and polish and keep improvising your product to get it “there.'”
• “Follow metrics, alongside your gut.”
• “When taking in investors, ask whether these people can also be advisors or helpers to you.”
• “Pace yourself; make sure you don't burn out.”
• “Be able to articulate your ideas to someone who doesn't know anything about what you plan to do.”
• “Be able to sum up your long-term vision in 1-2 sentences – if you can't, keep thinking on it! ”
• “Just get started.”

While Onur had not worked on any startups prior to founding Peak Games in November 2010, she didn't come to the business without any experience. “Because of [my] career in private equity, I was responsible for looking at and meeting the management teams of hundreds of companies based in the Turkish ecosystem,” she said. “My job was to find companies to invest in, get to know them, understand their strategy and business model, and then if the fund decided to invest, get heavily involved in the companies that eventually became the firm's portfolio companies.” Onur said that it was an “incredible experience” to meet and work with “so many talented teams from different industries,” which included apparel retail, payment processing, healthcare, and selective cosmetics retail. With regard to Peak Games' founding, Onur said that the “craziest story” was that the company raised $19 million USD in a matter of 6-7 months from three different funds/investors. “The prolific nature and the speed of our funding matched the speed of the company really nicely, actually,” she said. “Looking at the market and how it was booming in every sense possible, [and] as avid gamers in our personal lives, we realized the demand in this market was extremely deserving and underserved,” Onur added. “There was no global player providing specific and targeted content for emerging markets like Turkey, or focusing on providing services for these products or markets. The local gaming ecosystem – in terms of production and service quality – was way behind the global wave (both in the West and in Asia).” Thus, Peak Games started “with the hopes of making games that would connect the people of our region and ultimately that we would love playing,” said Onur. “Having the chance to be a regional company – but have a global effect – is pretty amazing.” A Startup at Heart Despite the company's impressive growth, Onur insists that Peak Games is a true startup at heart. “No matter how big we get, that is the company culture we'd like to keep,” she said. “Having changed offices five times in a year, I can say that our team has seen it all. In our last office, because we were growing so fast, the week before our move, we had about 30 people in a 40-square meter room all cramped up. It was pretty cozy, to say the least! From three people to 150 in 14 months has been a crazy ride.” When asked about the company's speedy growth, Onur said that it is related to both the company's approach and its market. “When you look at Turkey and MENA combined – if this were a country – it would have the third-largest population and the fourth-largest economy in the world. The region as a whole has 65 million Facebook users and over 110 million Internet users, which are both growing at double-digit numbers. Mobile penetration is growing rapidly. All the right signals are here, but it just needs a local angle and people who spend time to understand the users' needs, because they are drastically different than the rest of the world, starting from language, to customer support techniques, to payment methods and gaming tastes.” Onur believes that Peak Games entered the market “at the right time with the right approach, because we're developing games for this region – games that global players cannot understand as well as us.” Financial Performance Peak Games may be on the rise, but Onur couldn't talk about the company's profitability. “I'm not at liberty to discuss [the] financial performance of our company directly,” she said. “But I can tell you that with seven million Daily Active Users and over 20 million Monthly Active Users, Peak has become the top four social gaming companies globally in a matter of 14 months. “Not only do we have incredible traction and scale in terms of traffic numbers, but we're also lucky enough to be servicing a booming region, a young demographic and a critical mass with high disposable income.” Onur said that the Average Revenue Per User Peak Games sees in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates is “usually higher than the rates we see in the US or Germany, reaching 7-8 cents.” “Turkey is an incredibly sophisticated market in terms of gaming consumption,” she explained. “With an average age of 27 and 46 million credit cards (second highest in Europe), Turkey is an extremely appetizing market as well.” Investor Support Onur told us that from very early on, Peak Games was supported by prominent angel investors in Turkey. “With strong funding, even in its very first days, Peak had the opportunity to approach a long-standing social game in Turkey called Okey, which had over three million monthly active users (MAU),” she said. “We found out soon that the developer behind that massive product was a very young technical genius named Safa. When we acquired Okey, we didn't let Safa go. He became a partner in the company and actually co-founded Peak with us, developing it from [the] ground up.” Onur referred to Peak Games' aforementioned co-founder and CEO, Sidar Sahin, as being a “gaming guru” in Turkey, as well as a “true serial entrepreneur.” “He built and exited from many successful Internet and technology companies here in Turkey,” said Onur, “ranging from Funpac, a mobile gaming company, to Game Garden, a browser-based gaming company, and Trendyol.com, which is one of the largest private shopping sites here in Turkey.” More Acquisitions on the Way? “Peak is a very acquisitive company,” Onur concluded. “We believe in inorganic growth as much as we believe in organic scaling. Surely we won't be doing acquisitions just for the sake of doing them, but we're always on the lookout for good products and more importantly teams that can fit into our strategy and help us develop the gaming ecosystem in our markets.” Follow me @LouisBedigian