Mert Iseri
I grew up in Istanbul and pinned the 'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish' speech to my door when I decided to move to the US during high school. Moved to Evanston 3 years later, and started my first company right after graduating college. My whole family is made up of founders, my grandfather built the first mattress company in Turkey. All I'm doing is following in their footsteps in my own way.
Here’s what I’ve been up to in the past decade:
My first co. SwipeSense raised $23M in VC, scaled to $8M+ in ARR, and successfully exited to SC Johnson.
Co-authored Exit Right: How to Sell Your Startup, with Kellogg faculty Mark Achler, which became an Amazon bestseller.
Worked with 100s of startups in Techstars to help them find their first customers through climbing the ladder of product market fit.
Taught the highest rated undergraduate entrepreneurship course at Northwestern University, now co-teaching with Troy Henikoff at Kellogg.
Currently working with amazing enterprise customers like Cvent and SpotOn through my startup 248.AI, helping them sell millions more with our LLM agents.
New Venture Launch (ENTR-466-0)
**This course was formerly known as KIEI-466**
This experiential course is targeted to students who have business concepts that have been tested to determine that there is a compelling product-market fit. New Venture Launch will focus on fine-tuning the business model, building out financial projections and preparing investor pitches. A significant portion of the workload for this course will occur outside of the classroom. Students must be prepared to test and validate their business model hypotheses by engaging with potential customers and industry experts. Within the classroom, students will be encouraged to share learning experiences and help other student teams. The course work will be supplemented by guest speakers who are experts in functional areas related to the business model canvas. In addition, students will have access to a pool of alumni and local mentors who can assist in the development of their businesses.Student teams can be composed of students from other parts of the university, but at least one member of the team must be enrolled at Kellogg.
Acceptance into the course is by application only. The application is available here.
If you are not currently registered for New Venture Development, ENTR 464-0 and you are interested in this class, please contact entrepreneurship@kellogg.northwestern.edu
