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Growing Lean
Exploring the Tech Universe with Murat Ozturan: Career Journey, Business Strategy, and Generative AI
Join us as we venture into the tech universe with renowned tech expert, Murat Ozturan. Tracing his career journey, starting from the basics of computer science to pivotal roles in Formula One teams and Microsoft, there's no doubt that Murat has earned his stripes in the tech industry. We explore his decision to leave Microsoft after almost three decades and start his own business, Nisha's Technology. Get ready to discover how this bold move has transformed his career and opened up new avenues of growth and innovation.
Every business owner knows that technology is crucial in today's digital age, but how do you navigate this complex field? Murat, with his vast experience and wealth of knowledge, shares his insights on how businesses can harness the power of technology to drive growth and outpace competition. His nuanced understanding of customer and business needs proves invaluable as he offers guidance on choosing the right technology to solve business problems. He emphasizes the importance of understanding your business problem first before investing in technology, a perspective that is sure to resonate with startups and established businesses alike.
As we round up our enlightening chat, Murat delves into his vision for business growth and strategy, focusing on the potential of Generative AI. He shares his insight into how he approaches compensation as a consultant, and his ambitious goals for Nisha's Technology. Eager to share his expertise, Murat extends an invitation to all business owners to reach out to him with their technology-related challenges or opportunities. So, buckle up and tune in, as we explore the world of technology and business strategy with Murat Ozturan!
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Welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm very happy to be here with Murat Oztaran, founder and CTO of Nisha's Technology. Welcome, murat, hi, very nice to see you, dylan. Good to have you on To get us started. Can you tell us a little bit about your history and background and how you ended up in the business you're in today?
Speaker 2:Sure, I've been always excited about the technology and computers. I started with the computer science degree. I did it in the United States, but I've been lucky enough to have a very international education. I did my high school in England and I did a French junior high in Turkey, which I'm from there. Then, after college, I found a job in Renault, the car company in Paris. Then I was one of their IT people. I was lucky enough to work in the Office Automation Department, which also I was part of their Formula One team. I was lucky enough to be in the back pit of the Formula One team. Basically, what we did was send data that they collected during the training and the qualifier time, to send it to the main frame and it calculated optimizations and bring back the results. I was responsible for that communication layer. It was a very interesting period of time. Then I moved into financial services. I worked for a large bike in Turkey. I actually run a gravel mine, which is a query as well, which is a much more physical work that I've done due to my dad being sick and I had to take over his business. After that, microsoft arrived to Turkey as a regional office and I was one of their first hires. I spoke French, english and Turkish in technical language. That really helped me to support French-speaking African countries and English-speaking countries, plus the Turkey.
Speaker 2:I moved to South Africa after a couple of years. I lived five years in there. Then I moved back to Middle East and Africa moved to United States. Afterwards, while I'm in the United States, I moved to Singapore for two years. When you look at my career, I've been all around the world except Latin America. That's the place I haven't been. I've been always a technology guy. I'm a gig at heart, but my technology is. It's a very important to be able to do something with it. So I'm geek, I enjoy talking technology, I enjoy understanding technology.
Speaker 2:But one of the best lessons I learned when I work in Renault when they hired me, they took me to. The first week I was there, I started to work and the second day they said you need to go to this address. I go where is this? And they said it's the factory. And I go. Why? I'm an IT person? Why am I going to the factory? They said well, you need to understand that we do cars here and whatever you do in this company should be faster, quicker, cheaper, safer cars, otherwise we don't care what you do. Okay, those are the main things, and I learned a lot by putting tires in the factory floor and understand that this is what they were doing it. They were doing the car manufacturing and that's what they care about. And they didn't hire magic because I was very good in IT and technology. They wanted me to bring that technology into business and solve the problems. So that was a big learning moment for me.
Speaker 2:So all through my career I was very detailed and I was very made an effort to understand the business and business needs and I work approximately 29 years in Microsoft and last year I left and I decided to open up my own company, nishistec. Then I'm supporting and advising some startups in different areas and I'm doing some speeches like this. In talking in there, one of the most important things as a technology person is try to understand what the customers and the business people wants to do, what is the opportunity and what is the problem that they're trying to solve. Quite a lot of time I wasn't the most popular person within the sales team in Microsoft because I would listen to the person CEO or CIO of a bank or insurance company or a hospital and they would explain me their problem. They said I cannot track my customers. I cannot track my patients. I want to cross sell insurance to my banking customers whatever the opportunity is and they will say what do I need to buy? And I would say, after looking their account, I'm like, probably nothing. You just need to start using this technology properly. So it's very important to be able to understand what they're trying to achieve, then start putting the technology to it. I was proud to make presentations within Microsoft for keynote speeches which didn't mention one single product of Microsoft producers, and I feel the same way with all the technologies that exist today.
Speaker 2:It's irrelevant. There's always a buzzword of the week Today is Generative AI. Everybody talks about Generative AI. If you say Generative AI in your posting, people read what's happening there. But is really irrelevant what kind of AI? Or data analytics, or you just need a data scientist to drill down and to do your reason why you want this technology to exist.
Speaker 2:So it's very important to be able to clear what's the problem, but still opportunity for that business, then find the right technology for it. And that could be no technology and there's been cases they have. I met with a customer. They said well, we have like 10 customers and we are following on this thing and I'm like, well, the systems that I'm suggesting is it's great for millions of users or thousands of users, but for 10 users, let's do something much more simpler.
Speaker 2:What can we do for you? So that is the kind of the discussions that I do have with the. It's safe and goes with the startups. Startups, quite a lot of times, trying to solve a business problem and it needs to be very clear what are they trying to solve? Then decide what technology they need to do with it. Quite a lot of times people just finds the technology and try to fit a problem to it and that backwood thinking quite a lot of times results in a very sad situation. That isn't all the efforts has been wasted because they're trying to fit the problem into the technology itself.
Speaker 1:OK amazing. Well you've had a crazy busy background. I love that and you're pretty much a citizen of the world. I'm actually from South Africa. I'm in South Africa right now.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love South Africa. I had a great time in Johannesburg for five years, so 95 to 2000,. I was there.
Speaker 1:Ok, amazing. Well, I'm sure it's changed quite a bit. Oh yeah, definitely. But I'm also very intrigued at your experiences with Reynolds and Microsoft. There's obviously two really big names globally. Can I ask what was the reason you unless it's too personal, but what was the reason you decided to leave Microsoft and start your own business? Because obviously you're there for 26 years. I'm sure you worked your way quite high up. So what was the reason for leaving?
Speaker 2:Oh, 29 years, and I was a CTO for Asia time zone, which is all the from anything from India to China to Japan and Australia and New Zealand as well, and Zee in there. No, I really enjoyed it and I still enjoyed, you know, talking about different Microsoft technologies, but I do believe that I accumulated a lot of experiences internationally and also technology perspective, and one of the things that I really like to do is not only specialize in one technology like Microsoft only. I've been following things like Oracle and Google and Amazon AWS what are they doing? And I was lucky enough to be in the early days of the cloud. We released one of the I mean, I was a GPM one of the first Microsoft business solution, which is Dynamics CRM, and that knowledge.
Speaker 2:I do believe that is needed quite a lot around the world on a lot of companies and a lot of different startups and even larger companies who need somebody who likes to see it from different point of view, just from business perspective. I mean, that is the biggest challenge and understanding the end users and understanding the changing of end users is very important, and I start to explain to people that they should never get comfortable in their business when they are ahead or when they have no competition. Quite a lot of times, I mean, a lot of taxi companies felt that they have no competition because they got the license from a city and they were like we have no competition. We are here, we both licenses for our taxis, but they ignore completely what end users wanted. End users wanted to be able to book something very quickly and be able to see and comment, and there's no reason why Uber and Lyft exist if the taxi companies implemented technology much earlier and created this environment. Same thing with a lot of different things that we are seeing at Airbnb and all the other stuff Like why is this became suddenly important? Because they ignore the end users.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that, for example, I get a chance to meet with a lot of central banks of different countries all around Asia, united States, latin America, et cetera, and central banks when I talked about it like this is what you should be doing it then, et cetera, they go up. We have no competition. We are the central bank of this country. Well, crypto is here, like it or not? One way or another, you need to answer the challenge and the appeal of cryptocurrency. You need to understand what's happening. Maybe you can strong arm people not to use it because you have the governmental laws and legalities et cetera, but still that means there's a competition out there and they're gonna do it. So no business is immune from this competition. And how fast the new companies can come here and quickly become very strong in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. So you're saying that you like to go and find problems that haven't occurred yet and advise based on that, and I love that You're basically pursuing and help people who identify to be able to solve technology wise.
Speaker 2:You know, what can we do to help them solve those problems, you know? So that's why the startups access me a lot, and number one thing that I asked people is like, what's the business problem? What are you trying to solve? Why is this a challenge? Why can't you do it like? Why can't somebody else do it? You know, and that becomes a quite interesting discussion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And what is your overall strategy for your business? I know it's quite new, but what is your strategy for growing your business and your current strategies?
Speaker 2:At the moment. I want to grow it as a mentorship and helping the startups and the large organizations as a consultancy and be able to learn several wins with them. So I'm working with several of them. Some are listed on my LinkedIn profile. Some of them are not, due to several reasons. I mean, there's a lot of IP and there's reasons that they would like to keep it quite until they go public, you know, and so what I do is I want to be able to create a mentorship and a knowledge sharing environment to be able to bring the experiences that I had I had an international background. Quite a lot of people didn't have the experiences to be exposed to such a different markets as I've been, and that's what I would like to bring it and create an organization which really makes these things available for them.
Speaker 2:I'm not a big believer of niche areas, but even my company's name is Niche Stack. Those niches should become commodity very quickly and afterwards it will become an all job as the owner of the companies etc. And I want to create and understand and look at the new niches and look at to that area. You know I said Generative AI is the buzzword of the week. Of course, I do think quite a lot about Generative AI. I'm very excited and I'm thinking of how is it going to change the way the consumers and the clients and the companies are going to start doing their business with this technology is coming out. So I feel like I should be in a kind of a futurist who's looking at 15, 20 years down the line and try to figure out, like, what are the areas that's gonna be really changed with this?
Speaker 1:100% amazing and I'm sure if you could predict that all you'd be a multi-billionaire. Maybe you'll be with these startups.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. It's one of those things that I'm excited about technology. If I can't solve problems with technology, that excites me, and more I solve I get more excited about it, making money with it, obviously. I mean, this is where most of us are in. I'm glad to be able to do something that I'm excited and I'm enjoying it, and I recommend everybody to do the same thing. If we get a couple of billions, why not?
Speaker 1:100%? And for your clients that you're advising do they pay you as like a consultant, or do they give you shares, or how does it work?
Speaker 2:It depends. I have certain clients who are just paying me as a consultant and hourly basis, it's simple. The other ones, I take some shares and I don't take any compensation. If they succeed, I'll succeed with them. If they don't succeed, then I'll. That's what I do. So there's a lot of ranges of different kind of agreements within the companies. Obviously it's important to be able to maintain the company and grow it, so it needs to be certain compensation and depending on the company and the type of business there and the stage of the business. I mean, I'm talking with people like we don't even know what company we're gonna build and we're just discussing at the moment. It's just not even a real thing. Then I'm working with like security startup in coming out and they're gonna be very strong and they have a competition, existing competition within the US market, and we are thinking about different things in there. I talk about being able to have shares, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I'm super excited for you. Where do you see yourself in your business heading in the next, let's say, five years?
Speaker 2:I mean I love talking and giving speeches etc. But I don't like to be the kind of the spotlight person for any company. I would like to be much more assisting and making other people and their ideas successful. So I see myself doing much more mentoring and consultancy to different companies and growing my business with finding people and growing people into this type of approach and consultancy.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's awesome. I'm glad you know what you want and you're heading towards it. That's really cool, and so we're running out of time a bit, but before we go, is there any piece of advice that you'd like to give to business owners looking to succeed in your industry and business owners in general looking to succeed?
Speaker 2:Yes, I would like to give two advice. Business owners, understand your end users, understand your customers. That is the number one thing that is required. I don't think they should be worried about trying to understand the technology. It's other people who specialize on that to do that. It's very important that taxi company owners didn't need to understand internet technology. They just needed to understand what the customers are complaining about, which not being able to find the taxi and that was the key. If they would come up with that technology is easy to find a solution for it. So it is very, very important to be able to identify what is the business challenge, what is the business opportunity?
Speaker 2:One of the great examples I love I don't know, you are young enough, but some of your audience might know Ansiklobedia Britannica. That was one of the biggest Ansiklobedia. People went three times to them and say let us put technology and put it an online version, a CD version, of Ansiklobedia Britannica. They laughed and they said no, we are not interested. We have 2,000 people researchers writing articles for us. We really don't need it. We have the number one in the world for Ansiklobedia. Well, unfortunately, that company doesn't exist anymore and I am a witness that Microsoft went three times and tell them hey, let us put your Ansiklobedia into an online format and let's make you relevant. It didn't work out, so it's not the technology people are going to bring. It's actually the business.
Speaker 2:People need to understand the business that they are in, the customers and the challenges that they are seeing it. Let the technology people do the technology part. I see a lot of business people are wasting their time trying to understand what this technologies means. It's really the buzzword of the day is irrelevant, because you could be doing certain things that you are looking for much simpler than generative pay. So that's the important part and that is what I see to business owners Technology people. I give them an advice that they spend at least 20% of their time to learn new stuff. The technology is changing so fast that you need to be really able to keep it up. Same thing, same business, because technology drives certain businesses, and so business people need to learn what is their business and customers and clients, et cetera, are really doing 100%.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, murat. That was great. I'm sure the audience appreciate you as well. Before we pop off, what is the best way for people to reach out to or get in touch with Murat Ozteran, if you have any offers for them or if they just want to follow your story?
Speaker 2:Yeah, murat at nichescom is my email, but LinkedIn, murat Ozteran OZTURAN, is a very easy way to go up there. And LinkedIn, I would say that I'm there every day at the beginning of the day to see what are the messages and what are the areas, and I'm looking forward and your business cannot be too small or too complex or too simple to think about technology perspective and I'm looking forward to hearing what are the challenges or opportunities that you are facing.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thank you so much again. I've really appreciated your time and insights.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.