Miniseries Tech for Good, Episode 1: Shaping Tomorrow

Welcome to Empires of Innovation. We're diving into the worlds of technology, education, impact and more with the dynamic Ozan Sonmes. Ozan has an impressive background ranging from finance to environmental studies, but is most well known in the startup world as a mentor, accelerator builder, corporate innovator and entrepreneurial educator. Throughout this podcast, Ozan will be polling on his decades of experience living and working as an angel investor, program director, and more throughout the Middle East, United States and his home country of Turkey. For this series, we're bringing it all together to talk about Tech for a Better Tomorrow where we question the impact that technology is making today, how to fund and grow more of this impact in the future, and how founders in this field of technology can make it all happen. So let's jump into this episode. Welcome. Nice to have you here. Yeah, I'm excited to get this podcast kicked off. My name is Claire Messina and I'm here with Ozon Sonmez. Thank you so much for joining. Before we get into the real like nitty gritty of what this podcast is going to be about, this is Empires of Innovation. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you've been up to, what your career path has been so far?

Yeah, I don't want to take the whole time from the podcast talking about myself, but in short, I've done a few things in my life in different careers. Started completely in finance and auditing, did that for about 20 years. 10 years, I'm still doing it a little bit. And then I moved to entrepreneurship and innovation completely out of luck and out of curiosity, which is probably one of the best words that can describe me through the last 10 years. Actually this is the literally the 10th year of my expat life. Moved to Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2014 to run accelerated programs for startups that are global. I stayed here for three years build accelerator programs and then I moved to San Francisco, built different programs and accelerators and incubators and co living co working spaces for a university in Turkey for another three years. After that I did impact related things with UNDP primarily and for the past three years I've been working mostly on corporate innovation, corporate entrepreneurship, helping corporates take advantage of the potential they have in their employees and then taking them into outside world. Those are the couple of things I have done in my life. I'm excited to be kind of doing this new which is something that we had in mind for a very long time.

Yeah, it's great. And you have such a diverse background that we're going to be tapping into all of it. Specifically today, we're going to be talking about the impact side of what you've been doing and the world of tech for good. So technology, innovation, everything that's looking forward for social impact and a better world, ultimately. I hope it's a good word. Right? Yeah, I think first, I'd really love to start out with a broad question about what sort of problems that you see as being the sort of main ones that we need to solve in the coming, you know, five, ten years or so.

So a broad question that I'll probably answer very specifically. I divided the thinking I have into two, two different main categories. I've been involved with impact and impact accelerators, impact programs and impact founders, social entrepreneurship for more than 15 years. I started my entrepreneurship innovation journey trying to help an impact fund from the Netherlands to get established. So that's how I started. And back then, the things that are now called SDGs, the sustainable development goals were called MDGs, like millennial development, because it wasn't even like 2000, remember, it's been a while. So what happened in those limited list of things that we need to get better at as humans? We extend into now 17 different things, but fundamentally I divide them into two, which are things that are related to human and human life and human betterment and things that are related to non human life and non human betterment. In that side you can call environment, water, food, anything that surrounds things that don't have a say of their own. And here things that they have a say of their own, but they don't have the equality or equal opportunity of their own. So I divide them into two. So first of all, what we should be get, what we should get better at is to deal with the things that are non human, especially environment. Because if we don't get this fixed, there is no chance we will be able to get the other one fixed. So that's how I look into startup or impact founders that are working things to clean soil, clean water, or anything that's going to do something with the environment, especially carbon neutrality, maybe carbon capture, but that's a different technology. And then in the meantime, you also have to do this, do the better on the good human side, because if we don't do well on the human side as well, there will be no humans left or in the right setting to be able to save the other part. So there's this chicken and the egg. It's always a seesaw. There has to be balanced. And on the human side, the number one priority is I think education 100%, but education not in the terms of accredited education, tertiary education or literacies. Of course they're important, I'm not saying they're not. But most importantly, education about life itself, education about different cultures, education about different world views, because we are pretty close in messing up that side as well. So unless we have a really good understanding of the humans as a species, and that understanding can come through education, not only like verbal or training or in class education, but worldly education, I think we're not going to be having too much chances fixing any of the other problems. So I see education as key part. And of course after that comes maybe I should say building up systems, they would be more in line with what's going on. So like bridging those two things together so they work together. And I think I look in education from that broader perspective as well.

Yeah, and maybe you didn't touch on it too much, but you are an educator yourself, so you're working. I mean obviously you educate startups, you educate founders, you educate, you know, whoever you're working with, but you also work with the younger generations. And that's, you know, one of the most honorable positions anybody could ever have. So you're really, you're right there influencing kind of every stage of life in that sense, which is. Yeah, and you're a father, so you're.

Influencing at least one that is, that is actually one of the biggest motivations I had when I started developing sage. Sage is the Students Academy for Global Entrepreneurship that's focusing on teaching young adults to understand the world of entrepreneurship, innovation and how integrity, how integral it is to the life that they want to build. So that's, that's an work in progress. I teach in a high school, which I'm really happy, happy and sad at the same, same time. So it's like a kick of adrenaline at the same time. Dopamine, but also it's, it's very tiresome and it kind of could be depressing from time to time seeing how uncurious young generation are and at the same time of course seeing how curious they are. So abundance of information is kind of clouding most of the young generations minds in terms of like getting immediate happiness and immediate dopamine and serotonin. But again, like these, these young people, I don't like to call them kids. They're, they're 14, 15. My daughter's 14 now, so she hates the word kids. But younger people will also need to understand how connected they should be going forward much better than us, much better than our, our parents. So education, that's why it's like not just teaching how to get a diploma, get a job education if they want to, but also how to understand the connection of value creation to value destruction and how they have to be on the value creation side and kind of not destroy as much as they're trying to create, which is usually very difficult thing for people who lived through stress and people who live through different economic events are not understanding this properly. But these young adults haven't been through much. That's why they could be feeling a little bit as happy chicks for externals for others, but they have to be prepared for what can come negatively as well, for sure.

So you know, you're, you're kind of touching on this issue of solving education looking forward. But if we look at technology in general and we look at emerging technologies, what kind of emerging technologies or things that have been developed recently or even have been around for a while, do you really see as solving and creating the most impact in solving these problems moving forward?

So the technologies that are developed are neutral. They've always been neutral. The way humans are putting those technologies in use have not been neutral at all. So it always goes back to understanding the impact of any new technology. I mean, these days it's been AI for the past, actively for the past two years people had been seeing the tangible results of years, decades of work. So AI is not new, AI technology is not new. A lot of companies have been using them for a while, but now it's down to consumer level, where it starts impacting how people are doing business on a day to day level. One of the critical things that we need to understand as professionals in any field is absolutely how we could get things done better, faster and possibly cheaper through the use of artificial intelligence. But that doesn't stop from many others to take advantage of this technology and make it almost impossible for people to feel comfortable around it. Because it could actually be pretty damn scary. So much like in any technology, we need to understand what is good about it, what can be the use cases that are positively impacting humans and everything else around, and what could potentially be impacting humans and everything else around negatively. So I'm a big science fiction utopia, dystopia buff and I have been reading and writing about that for a good number of years. And there is always this common theme of AIs and computers. Before it was robotics, robots taking control, then it was computers thinking control, then it was everything. And then now It's AI taking control of humanity. And yes, I don't, I'm not a, I'm not in a position to say, okay things, everything will be fine, don't worry about it. I'm not at all that optimistic, but at the same time, I'm not that pessimistic as well. The only thing that we need to be cautious about is enabling people and enabling checkpoints where things can be overridden or things can be managed without too much damage. But testing new things require taking risks. So every new technology will create some harm before it gets established. And even after it's established as a norm, it has to be kept in check. I mean, one good case example is always like mobile phones, great. I mean, being connected, being able to do everything all at once, having an AI, having an app for everything makes life so much easier. However, that being said, if you don't put a good check on it, which is mostly the debate with young adults spending almost two days in a week on unproductive endeavors like scanning through others profiles, that is the harmful side. But the thing itself, neither the social media tools, nor the mobile device, nor in connectivity brings harm. It's the use case that brings harm, and that's the use case that's not in check. It's very difficult to kind of stop that overflow of information, overflow of happiness on, on, on the screen and convince kids or like young adults, I get used to kids, young adults to kind of let go of that and do something productive with their life. And that's a challenge, for example, that we have in our courses and agenda, no limits on social media, but you have to create as much as you consume. And that's the, the tricky piece. If you trigger creation and distribution, takes care of itself through the social media, then you're in a positive loop. You create, you get feedback, you learn better, you, you search better and you create better and then that's a positive loop that carries forward. But if you're only just consuming, you consume more and then you feel the need to consume more, and then you feel the need to consume more. That's a downward spiral. And much like anything else, we will need to be very careful with that. With AI in particular, I think we're in a stage where we don't think mobile phones is a thing now. It always existed and we're used to it now. It's almost like a part of our body. And some people feel they're cut away from that body part if you force them to leave it for 24 hours they go, little edgy. AI will be like that. Like we have the word Googling. Google is a company, I think 22 years old. Before that it was search, now it's Googling. We don't even think we're searching, we're googling all the things and we don't think Google as a company when we use the word Google. So it's, it's, it became very part of our lingo. AI will be like that. There's not. Is this going to be done with AI? Yeah, everything will be done with AI. That's not a problem. That's not the question. How will it be done and how aware will we be when we're using that technology? Is the question which we need to find better answers with our past experience in adopting new technology and do things a little different, a little better this time.

Yeah, no, I mean you can look at any innovative solution to any of the world problems. For instance, creating electricity, whatever you look at wind turbines, hydroelectric dams, whatever, they all have a downside. Right. So we can't escape this sort of negative side of all the good that we're trying to create too. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's tricky. We benefit a lot, but we also lose a lot too.

Yeah.

So when you look at sort of the non technology side of solutions to these problems, what do you think are, are the key solutions that we can look forward to developing further in the future? And how do you really like see that influencing us as we move forward? You know, you've touched on education a bit already. Is that really where we see a lot of the change outside of like technological solutions to these, these problems?

So I think one key part of any solution these days, especially that's been organized or thought of by social entrepreneurs is communities. So by far the most impact of a social enterprise will come not only from the technology they, they built, not only from the tech tools or products they built and are making it available for the rest of the world, but through the communication and building up of communities. I think there was a detachment from communal thinking and people, especially in the west, have associated communal thinking and communal work with communism. So I think that's one area of almost like a witch hunt after, especially after the second World War, that the benefits of social coherence, the benefits of doing and working together and building communities have been kind of casted out versus individuality. And there are really good examples of countries and regions that have been able to take the capital growth and capitalist individualistic ideas of wealth creation, etc. And merge them with social benefits and social mindset and communal mindsets, especially the Nordics, the Baltics have been really good at those, both taking care of its people and its communities as well as being able to grow. I think they've been good examples of that. That is something that social entrepreneurs need to kind of think through and prioritize even before they prioritize their product and technologies. So every social entrepreneur will have a bigger spillover effect, will have a bigger influence area. Once they start building communities, which most of them do, they start with mostly communal work, mostly spreading out organically and then bringing that community together for more and more and more impact. We can use Ponzi schemes in a good way, start influencing more people. As more people influence more people, get that ripple effect going if we want to do some change. That's one reason why technology entrepreneurs alone. Technology entrepreneurs are focusing only on the wealth creation side of things. Fundraising, becoming a unicorn, selling the company, that's a nice thing. I have no objections to that. I make my life out of it. However, they don't understand that their effect will get longer and they actually don't care too much about. That's not a KPI for them. So they want to use capital efficiently, to grow efficiently, to sell efficiently at the highest value possible. And that's both the charm and the curse of capital. Only thinking like wealth creation, only thinking we need to be thinking a little bit about the social wealth. And that's mostly social entrepreneurs. So they start thinking about an impact area, whether it's for humans or for everything else. And then they start designing that impact area to maximize the impact, not maximize the personal wealth. And that's how they have to work together, the social entrepreneurs, how to understand the mechanics of work in the capital side of wealth creation side. And hopefully technology entrepreneurs will also stop. No, stopping is probably a stronger word. Will consider other implications of their work, especially if it's negative. So I would be very happy if I don't see negatively impacting technologies being endorsed just because they're technically more profitable and then having them at least a concern for everything else that's around them.

Yeah, it's a. Maybe it's a big ask for our current day and age, but we can hope it. I mean, we're definitely seeing an influx of social entrepreneurs, people that are really focusing not just on their local communities, but also on the global experience. I guess because we're all experiencing climate change, we're all experiencing, you know, negative effects to our environment, our, you know, political situations because of those, you know, there's lots of stuff going on, so lots to be fixed. Anybody who's listening, there are, There are good things to do out there. Yeah. And I think for a lot of people, it's about finding the right information to know where to start from. Right. So you're an educator, you work with young adults. How do you keep them informed about what's happening? And how do you keep them aware about the problems that are on their doorstep? And how can other people really start looking at that, especially if they're interested in, you know, starting a business, starting, you know, developing an innovative solution? Where can they really start from?

So one standard advice I give to young adults is keep a journal. I mean, it's not an advice that I invented. It's been ages long. But keeping a journal of things that bother you, keeping a journal of things that excite you, keeping a journal of things that worry you is a good way. It's not like I did this today, I did this, this happened to me. No, whenever you feel an emotion, positive or negative, keeping a good record of those emotions is probably a good way to start understanding what you care about. I really like this knowledge. Like we. There's a lot of debate, but you are born with a purpose, you just don't know it most of the time. And some, some people die without knowing it. In order to understand the purpose of your life, which has a meaning of itself, you need to explore as a young adult. That's why I'm trying to limit what my daughter is exposed to in social media, because that's not exploration, that's just window screening. Exploration requires testing, requires work, requires doing some things, and then seeing the results, most probably tangibly. And that exploration and that interaction with other people during that exploration phase will guide your inner purpose. If you hate something a lot or if you love something else, actually the same thing, you either want to fix it or you want to make it better. So whenever feelings emerge in anyone's life that those are clues. Look, those are the. The white stones that Hansel and Gretel use in their stories to find back where they belonged. So those explorations are very important for young adults having, again, good use of technology. Discord channels that are based on communication, not just sharing things are actually really good ways in engaging multicultural dialogues, in engaging with different people in different places to understand what's also going on in the macro sense, not just in your little micro sense. Those expiration periods, I keep telling young adults, those are priceless periods. I, I am really sad every time I teach and every time the semester ends. I am really sad that I'm not getting into a semester. I'm not a full time teacher. I wish I was. So having a two, three month break out of everything that you're supposed to be doing is a miracle. It's, it doesn't happen when you grow, grow older and when you start working. I keep telling young adults, like if you want to have a white collar job or blue collar job, doesn't matter, somebody will give you two weeks off in your entire year and a good case, four weeks off in an entire year. You're not going to get months. And we are not built for that. We are not built to keep on working and keep on working and keep on working. There is a lot of rest. There used to be a lot of resting periods. We didn't work like 12 hours shifts. In any one of our lives, any one of our ancestors, things were slow through technology, things got accelerated with its positive sides, but also it just got super fast and we just don't stop. And that's a problem. Young adults has to understand the time they have in their hands until they are, let's say 20, until they are at the age or 22, they're in the age of working, either creating their businesses or working for somebody else. That time frame should be spent all for exploration. And another very critical thing for young adults is they need to understand they are kids who are born after 2000. Individuals who are born after 2000 will probably be the first generation, first millennial group that will on average live above 100. This is not normal as well. Like 50 years ago, life expectancy was 60 on average. On a good case, now it's going to go up to 100. So, well, being in life will become more important and having a full life will become more important. This is not something that the previous generations have experienced. The previous generations worked to get a healthy life and retired life when they're 60, 70, 80, well, they wanted to live beyond 80 when they retired in 1670. So the last 10 years was when they were comfortable and the first 20 years when they were young adults, anything in between, that's the majority of life. They worked mostly in things that are not exciting or not fulfilling socially or emotionally, or maybe only financially. And a good day like the employment has had been always a big problem in most emerging economies as well. So not being able to work is a terrible thing. Not having enough opportunity to work, it is a terrible thing. But on the other Hand. Now, people will be doing a lot different works in multiple occasions, in multiple careers. And a lot of people will be self employed for at least a certain period of their time. If they're not skilled enough. That can lead to a lot of disasters and social disasters as well as environmental disasters. So understanding what your role is in this lonely planet is a critical thing and that can only come with exploration, even for adults.

So for sure, I mean, yeah, you're not, you, you don't have to stop learning the older you get, right? So it's always a, it's always a period of exploring, investigating, being curious. So do you think that that translates the same way for an adult to really, you know, someone who's maybe solidified in their career, career or early career or something like that? If they want to transition into this, you know, tech for good social impact kind of space, how, how can they make that happen?

So I think the hint is always, again, finding the right minded people to guide you through it. Which is again what we talked about in communities. Like doing good things should not be what you do when you retire. So when I retire, I'll dedicate my life to stray dogs and I'll dedicate my life to collecting junk and I'll dedicate my life to giving back and educating young adults. Yeah. Nah, not really. I mean, again, let's use technology to make sure we are able to do what we think we should be doing even when we are alive and working. The easiest path is if you're passionate about anything that's good for life and good for anybody, start publicizing it now. The ability of social media being this enormous tool for distribution of content and information, now you can use it for your good. I keep telling people that everybody should start shooting videos and it's not a matter of oh, there will be you, you'll be a YouTube phenomenal and everybody will keep on watching you. No, just distribute what kind of knowledge you have in to be used for good. If you're in a corporation, just teach people how to do things better in their life, how to plan for their career better in their life by just simply going online, recording yourself for 10 minutes and giving advice and start spreading it out. That's why communities are important. You can just can't say, oh, I build, I have it and it's some link. If you don't distribute, it just means nothing. If, if you want to go out and find people to help, use your communities, use groups, use tools like Reddit, tools like Facebook forums, tools like RSS feeds, Anything that's possible and find the people that are doing good and support them. If you are a professional doing anything that's creating wealth. And again, even adults don't understand this. If you are working in a corporation and the corporation is paying you $5,000 a month, you have to understand as a professional, which most people don't think about this way, that corporation is making a lot more money for the work you're doing. Otherwise they wouldn't be paying you $5,000. Maybe it's too much, maybe it's $1,000, doesn't matter. But whatever you're getting paid somebody else in that corporation. The totality of the corporation is making more. So that's a good value set. So how can you teach people to increase wealth, increase growth by bringing other people to work together? What are the mechanisms? What are the structures? So any professional that is curious enough can take learnings from their corporate experience, can take learnings from their corporate life and translate it into value creation for a social startup. And they don't need to wait until they retire for that. It doesn't take ages and ages to be able to deliver this information and anything that is spent to the good of the environment or the people will have positive impact anyways.

Definitely. I mean I, I guarantee the average person could walk outside their door and if they look close enough, find a problem to solve.

So, or help other people solve it with existing skill sets that they have delivered over the years they have developed.

And you know, I mean, looking at it from a very western lens, loneliness is becoming a really big problem in western societies and it's really a good opportunity to find a community and join to make a better change. Even in loneliness, you could, you could work on just solving that problem in your life first, but you can also join anything. You know, anybody who, who lobbies for more solar power or anything like that really, it's, it's all gonna end up benefiting somebody somehow.

We, we didn't evolve to become lonely. The whole evolution path has always been through social learning and social experiences and socializing in groups. We are better than anything else in species because we can collaborate in large numbers. We can collaborate with projects that require a built in trust and we can collaborate with other humans and build that trust to do great things. That's how we're able to move forward away from a small community of 10, 20, 30, 100 people to millions now working together in something that is the skill set that we've developed. But we also need to be cautious about how we're doing that connections in our real life and to the real world because as Covid has shown, like we can actually do equal amount of work whether or not we're in an office. So nothing significant. Of course the losses are great and everything else is painful. But we managed to improve working together with so many digital tools. But it's not the same as going out and talking and meeting and having these random encounters and serendipity because you can't organize your life to the minute. You're not a robot. You have other needs and other social requirements to fulfill, otherwise your psyche becomes unhealthy. So in order to make your psyche healthy, you need to make your body healthy. You need to feed your soul and body and also feed your social requirements, social needs for sure.

So, you know, before somebody can really get to that social aspect or maybe it's inaccessible for them. If we look at those digital tools, like you've sort of touched on a little bit like AI and you know, the Internet in general, how can we ensure that people use them effectively to learn about these problems and really get started somewhere? How can you make sure also that they don't exacerbate these inequalities? You know, also about learning, what do you recommend for people who really want to start there?

So, as I think the difficult question, everybody will find their own path and everybody will find their own way of doing these things. But learning through good examples, I think is really important. Having good role models is very, very important in anything in life. The human story has evolved. When you look into the monomyth, the cycle of life in every religion, every mythology, every story, every nation's history now translating to every book, every good book, every good movie, there is this hero's journey. And that's been very well documented by people like Joseph Campbell. I actually have a tattoo over it on my arm just to remind myself which phase of my journey I'm in in different endeavors in life. So in that hero's journey, I think one critical outside force is the mentor. When you don't want to move from your ordinary life to the extraordinary life, when you, even when you get called upon, the status quo is the status quo, which we like. Like, we don't want to move, we don't want to change, that is fine. But then what happens is you get a mentor, you get somebody that will guide you through that journey. And I think anybody who wants to be a better version of themselves needs to find that mentor, needs to find that external help, because it's not, we're not made to have an impenetrable shield of will and determination. Like we're, we're, we can give up very easily. Like, that's, that's the, the norm. But if you don't want to give up easily, if you want to kind of pursue the goals and aims of your life, you will need external help. And that external help is through your friends, through your family, through other people. And again, using the world of connected technologies, you can find people that you could learn from, you could get help from anywhere in the planet. Now that's a very easy thing. And I learned this when I was living in the States. There is always 10, 15 minutes everybody would like to spare. If you find the right people, you find the right ask. If you ask them, oh, I want to talk to you can change my life forever. Let's meet every day. So that's not going to happen, but everybody will have at least 10, 15 minutes for somebody else in need. If you approach it the right way, if you do your homework, if you really distill your thoughts, if you really need that extra push or extra kind of door opening, a lot of people have even like the most famous, most wealthy people in the world give time freely to, to do something good. It's in everybody's benefit. So reaching out, not fearing to reach out, I think is a key thing. Doing the homework, doing the hard work of reading and distilling and learning and trying to find your own words in your own life is important. And I think finding help, asking for help when you feel like you got kind of stuck in one point is, is a good skill set that everybody.

Needs to learn, definitely. And that translates to the startup world as well. Every, every founder needs a mentor, needs a support system, diverse team, anything like that. I think, you know, in future episodes we're going to dive deeper into the world of startups and innovation and tech for good. But I, I think this was a great introduction to, you know, anybody who's listening and wants to get into that world of, you know, impacting everybody positively.

Thanks. So starting with so much for your time, then to everything else, every other human and every other living being. And that's kind of almost like the purpose of my life, so.

And I'm glad. It's good to have someone like you around, especially to talk to about stuff like this. Thanks so much. Okay, so we'll see you for the next episode then.

Bye.

We hope today's conversation with Ozan Sulmes has enlightened and inspired you to think about how technology can shape a better tomorrow. Don't forget to subscribe for more insightful discussions and join us next time as we continue to explore the transformative power of tech. For more information about Ozan's work, go to www.mrozonsonmez.com. this is Empires of Innovation signing off.