Türkiye’s startup world is usually described in terms of young founders, technology, speed, scalability, and the prospect of becoming a unicorn. Look more closely, however, and the problem extends well beyond a shortage of funds: entrepreneurship is being suffocated within a wider economic order governed by rent-seeking. Add the economic crisis of recent years, and the result resembles less a functioning ecosystem than an environment that leaves its entrepreneurs struggling for breath.

Entrepreneurship needs an environment in which products and capabilities are rewarded. Competition must work, investment must finance growth, and founders must be able to devote their time to products, customers, and teams. When markets operate through connections, privileges, and control, that foundation shifts; a good product alone is no longer enough. This erodes the basic assumption of the startup model. A startup is not merely a new type of company; it presupposes a market system in which product quality and innovation can genuinely determine success. When that system deteriorates, the language of entrepreneurship remains, but its material foundations weaken. How many of us in Türkiye can still say, with complete confidence, that ‘the company with the better product will succeed’?

Changing Measures of Success

The deterioration becomes visible first in how success is measured. In a healthy market, a company’s value depends on product quality, market fit, and its capacity to scale. In a rent-seeking order, what matters increasingly is whom you can reach, which networks you belong to, and how early you surrender control to powerful actors. Products recede; networks of relationships move to the foreground. Entrepreneurs survive not by building better products, but by finding their way through a distorted game. Beyond the shortage of capital, the logic by which capital operates is just as important to founders.

The Mismatch Between Investors and Founders

A deeper mismatch lies behind this. A substantial share of investors have accumulated their wealth through the channels of the rent-seeking economy rather than through entrepreneurship or exports. They therefore bring the same mentality to startups. Unfamiliar with the logic of products and long-term scaling, they seek early control, strong guarantees, and restrictive terms that narrow the founder’s room for maneuver. This is not simply a matter of individual character; it follows naturally from the wider economic order. Where wealth has been made by dividing up a fixed pie rather than growing a company, negotiations are often framed as win–lose, or even lose–lose.

Distrust does not operate in only one direction. If a market is built on privilege and short-term gains rather than competition and transparency, investors demand more control, while founders under that pressure cannot develop sound governance in their companies. Weak governance then deepens investors’ suspicions, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. Both sides’ behavior is shaped by the same distorted environment.

The Pressure of the Crisis

The economic crisis has made this structure even harsher. High inflation, high interest rates, and uncertainty have constrained already fragile startup financing. Patient capital has retreated, and funds genuinely established to support entrepreneurs are struggling to raise fresh money. The shrinking availability of accessible and effective investment is now one of the ecosystem’s most immediate problems.

The character of investment also changes in a crisis: financing becomes smaller, more short-term, and more defensive. Capital for long-term product development and market building gives way to risk aversion. Demanding a majority stake for a modest investment ceases to be ordinary bargaining; it signals a desire to seize control of a company early rather than create future value together. As uncertainty increases, founders find themselves negotiating from an ever weaker position.

The Fragmentation of Founders’ Energy

Entrepreneurship is inherently uncertain. Add distrust, excessive demands for control, pressure for short-term gains, and drying-up financing, and founders spend more energy defending their position than building a company. Instead of developing products, they try not to be squeezed at the negotiating table; instead of building teams, they struggle to avoid losing control; instead of reaching markets, they focus on survival. Entrepreneurial energy flows in the wrong direction.

Nor does the problem end at the investment table. In a market where relationships rather than product quality determine winners, startups cannot face a genuine test of competition. Founders wrestle with invisible hierarchies rather than innovation. Under these conditions, entrepreneurship ceases to be a force that challenges the economic order and becomes an exercise in adapting to a distorted game.

Looking Abroad as the Space Narrows

When money was abundant, some structural problems could be concealed. Today, when capital retreats amid high interest rates, global crises, and wars, what remains is the institutional foundation. That foundation forces entrepreneurs to contend simultaneously with distorted markets, troubled investment relationships, and shrinking financing.

This is why capable founders increasingly move their companies abroad. Not because conditions elsewhere are perfect, but because they seek an environment in which the relationships among product, investment, and control are at least more predictable. In many cases, founders must relocate because foreign investors insist on holding their money in another jurisdiction. The decision reflects not only market size, but also a need for institutional breathing room.

Conclusion

Türkiye’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has moved far beyond the point where more accelerators, competitions, or showcase events can solve its problems. Unless the underlying economic logic that suffocates entrepreneurship changes, changing the language of the ecosystem will not change the outcomes. A rent-seeking order does not reward productive risk, and the crisis economy compounds the problem: one distorts the market, the other dries up financing. The entrepreneur is left trying to compete through products while being squeezed both in the market and at the investment table.

On such foundations, we can either continue expanding the rhetoric of startups or console ourselves with success stories that emerged despite the ecosystem rather than because of its support. We can content ourselves with the jobs created by operations that founders who have relocated abroad still keep in Türkiye out of loyalty to their country.

The solution is to demand forcefully that every political party we vote for dismantle our nine-headed dragon, the rent-seeking economy—and, if necessary, to join those parties or create new political movements to stand alongside people working toward that goal. We have no other way out.