• Erdem Ovacık

     

    ' The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.'     - Elanor Roosevelt

    I'm an entrepreneurial spirit, who seeks social change. 

     

    My professional journey started at McKinsey and took me through three startups in the past seven years, two of which I founded. I have worked on crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding platforms, citizen engagement initiatives, international development projects, social impact bonds, and, most recently, business models involving sharing economy. I have contributed professionally to projects in the areas of business development, product strategy, sales and marketing, finance, and team/partnership building.

     

    A graduate of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, I am passionate about changing the way society makes collective decisions. I believe the way most governments work today does not match our collective capacity for problem solving and preference aggregation. I believe that we need to use disruptive technology to bridge the decision-making divide between the powerful few and the majority.

  • Projects

    Here is what I have been up to in the past 7 years

    Donkey Republic

    Donkey Republic is a bike-sharing platform. It provides fleet managers with smart locks, apps and management platform to create and administer station-less and low cost bike share. The first locks are implemented at Roskilde University, Denmark in October, 2014.

     

    The company aims to increase bike usage globally by making bike sharing more convenient, cheap and easy to implement. 

     

    I founded Donkey Republic with four others, and currently implementing and broadening our service. My role varies from sales and partnerships to managing supply chain.

    Social Impact Bonds

    Social impact bonds (SIB) are payment by results contracts between government and private sector and investors to solve social issues. These can be unemployment, childcare integration and many more.

     

    Public benefits form SIBs, as it will learn about new ways of delivering social goals without the risk of losing funds. Currently, public projects tightly avoid risk, and focus on inputs rather than outcomes. This makes innovation difficult and undesirable. 

     

    I worked with Copenhagen Municipality and with various clients of Social Finance in designing and developing social impact investment cases.

    Wedecide

    Wedecide is a platform for citizen engagement to crowd source policy. 

     

    By launching campaigns for its client organizations, Wedecide enabled citizens to voice their opinions to get in touch with decision-makers. Since its launch in 2011, Wedecide served various municipalities and political organizations, including Europe's 3rd largest party, the Alliance of Liberal Democracts for Europe. These campaigns attracted thousands of participants producing hundreds of collaborative policy ideas.

     

    I've led Wedecide business, including sales and implementation of campaigns.

     

    Wedecide platform is unfortunately unavailable at the moment, but you can see this presentation to get the picture. 

    MYC4

    MYC4 is a peer to peer lending platform, aka crowd funding platform, that aims to channel global capital to African SMEs. 

     

    Founded in 2007, MYC4 has lent more than EUR 20m. The platform is the first international peer-to-peer financing platform, which also protected its borrowers from currency risks. The platform facilitated loans from EUR 250 to 50,000. It also has a bidding facility that ensures the best rates are available for borrowers.

     

    I have been MYC4's business development manager during 2007-2010, both building African supply of deals, and developing its platform to manage operations conveniently for all stakeholders. 

  • Journal

    Here are some thoughts, videos, presentations. 

  • Contact

    What can I do for you today?