Building a fintech powerhouse: how Midas’s Egem Eraslan sticks to first principles

All great founders start in discord with the world. Profoundly dissatisfied with the status quo, they hold an ambitious vision for something better. Business is the medium through which they close the gap between these two points — a journey no one more represents better than Egem Eraslan, founder of one of the region’s fastest growing fintechs, Midas. 

When I first met Egem, before we co-led the mobile investing app’s seed round in 2022, I was struck by his aversion to mediocrity and his adherence to principles, exactly like our approach to business. He had a clear vision to build a financial platform that could offer as beautiful and iconic an experience as products from companies like Apple. 

Just shy of four years from founding Turkey’s first fully digital stockbroker, Egem and Midas have reached 3 million users, launched FX, crypto, interest, mutual funds, and margin investing, and raised tens of millions from global investors. 

On day 1423 of Midas — Egem tracks the days since founding religiously —, we caught up to discuss his unconventional journey from school principal to fintech founder, his go-to mental models for decision-making, and where he wants to see Midas in 10 years.

Unlike many founders who set out with entrepreneurship as their goal, Egem simply knew that the world around him didn't match his ideal.

"I never thought about if I wanted to be an entrepreneur," Egem reflects. "But from a very young age, it was obvious to everyone around me that my ideal world was very different from the one I was in."

After working as a software engineer in the US for a year – "one of the unhappiest years of my life" – a family crisis sparked his first entrepreneurial journey. His brother called about financial troubles with his grandfather's construction project. Egem left for home the next day, eventually taking over the entire construction project. He later ran the school they had built, becoming principal, HR manager, finance director, and operations lead all at once.

This is one of the most unusual backgrounds we’ve seen in a founder and was one of the reasons for initial skepticism when we passed on Midas’s pre-seed round. But this experience was fundamental for Egem — something we also saw in time. It was the first time he saw how he could make his ideal a reality, and it readied him to build Midas. 

What drove Egem to enter fintech wasn't market research or careful validation. It was curiosity and a visceral reaction to the reality: the poor quality of existing products and lackluster industry talent. He saw the opportunity to build “a beautiful product.” 

We also saw the opportunity. Digital banking adoption is high in Turkey, but despite strong demand for foreign equities, easy access to stock investing has been limited through traditional banks. Given how important a local presence and network would be to the success of such a platform, the Robinhoods of the world weren’t likely to be rivals but blueprints for execution success. 

His North Star for measuring product excellence was “number of problems solved”. Delivering this vision meant tackling thorny infrastructure challenges that most founders would avoid early on. This included how to reduce the time it took for money transferred to Midas accounts to be usable or how to seamlessly onboard users when Midas was still required to send papers for signing to their homes. 

"We weren't logical in the early days. We were just obsessed with the experience. That's what got us to solve these massive infrastructure problems that made our lives so much harder. But that was the only way we could do it."

Now that many of those initial hurdles are behind Midas, how does Egem think about how to work towards the North Star metric of solving the most problems? Mental frameworks. 

He says he has two modes for prioritization: 

• identifying one thing that will have maximum impact ("What's one thing that I can be successful in this year that will double Midas?") and 
• addressing experience issues that drain motivation ("If we are not going to be proud of that experience we give customers, I'd rather work over the weekend, at night, solving it than live with that problem").

At the core of Egem's leadership is another distinctive mental framework for decision-making that he describes as "peeling the onion." It’s also very similar to how we think about being honest about the essence of a problem before trying to solve it. 

"Almost all decisions originate from a reality, and that reality is someone else's reality, not my reality," he explains. "What I try doing is take that reality and, like an onion, peel it by diving deep to uncover the core truth under that reality. Because reality and truth are very different things."

This approach led to one of Midas's most pivotal decisions – rejecting the embedded finance trend that was sweeping fintech during COVID. When banks offered to integrate Midas's services into their apps, promising to 20x their revenue, most investors were enthusiastic. But Egem's first-principles analysis led him to a different conclusion that we at Bek shared with him based on our own careful analysis: that embedded finance would not take off in Turkey. Midas needed to own its distribution channels. 

The “onion” approach to decision-making is also reflected in Midas’s culture of "productive friction."

"Our culture is very confrontational, and we have a lot of friction at times in teams," Egem says. "When people's realities clash, the truth gets uncovered." 

This philosophy acknowledges that reaching truth requires discomfort and time. "My decisions take two minutes, but uncovering the truth takes a week or two. You need to be willing to do that work."

Egem knew from the beginning that his ambitious vision would need similarly ambitious capital, so he approached his search for investors intentionally. When he reached out to investors, Egem says he always asked to meet with teams and not just a partner. This helped him gauge whether the investor’s talent met his bar. 

When he met the Bek team, Egem recognized a partner in first principles: deep listeners with a strong analytical approach to decision-making and sharp situational awareness. 

“In the first meeting, I talked for 55 minutes, they talked for five,” he remembers, adding that 10 minutes after the meeting, Oguzhan from the Bek team had sent him a spreadsheet with a timeline and tracker for to-dos that they could work on together. “It was a very different approach from other investors, and it worked with me — it attracted me.” 

I’m also flattered to learn that I am his go-to resource on fundraising advice. “Bek are so involved that they have a better understanding of our business than any other partner we have. When we are in a position to fundraise, they have a good idea of our situation” and give counsel putting their own position aside. 

Talent acquisition has been one of Egem's greatest challenges – and a source of valuable lessons. Initially, Egem made what he now recognizes as a mistake: hiring for experience and track record rather than potential. "I should have hired from first principles," he reflects. This is also something that we also believe strongly in at Bek, and we put a premium on potential in talent. 

Egem’s strategy for hiring people to an industry not seen as attractive was to first find people willing to take “massive risks” and then build a winning culture that would attract more. "I wanted people to be attracted by how we won the market, how smart we were, how some of the things we did were things that no one saw."

One of his most significant realizations was the importance of a strong HR and recruiting function – something he initially undervalued. "I did a talk a year-and-a-half into Midas where I spoke about how you shouldn't hire HR. I was so wrong," he admits. "It's very important to have an HR function that is going to listen to you, understand the future you're trying to build, and go out there and find the people who want to build that future with you."

Today, he has three first principles for hiring: "Do I think this person has the ambition to build the future, and do they understand the hard work that has to come with it? Are they smart? And are they flexible?"

In five years, Egem’s vision is unambiguous: "We should win trading and investing. There shouldn't be any other place where you should even consider putting your money."

His ten-year vision is even more ambitious – transforming Midas into what he calls an "intelligent company." This concept, crystallized in his mind this year with advances in AI, represents his solution to the scaling challenges that plague growing companies.

"With big companies, execution descales as you grow," he explains. "This whole layoffs moment in companies... all of this comes from your execution descaling, bad execution and hiring a bunch of people who were not a fit.” 

An intelligent company, in Egem's vision, does not lose the ability to execute well and quickly, no matter what the size. That means integrating new tools to build fast in a smart way, making sure all parts of the business are connected, and keeping the quality of talent high. When all systems are connected intelligently, he says, “you’re going to be able to talk to your company. In the future, I think we're going to be able to ask questions like, 'What problem should I be solving right now?'"

It’s this blend of first principles and ambition that has guided every major decision in Midas’s journey, from getting his first million users to famously delivering Series A funding on day 999 (after promising his team capital would come before Day 1,000). Question everything, build your own reality, and solve problems others avoid. The beautiful products – and beautiful companies – will follow.