Paraşüt is rocketing
“Close your eyes and imagine that you are on the edge of a cliff. Down there, there is a valley where only people who ‘made it’ can live. Only successful people populate the place. You want to be there, but in order to do that, you have to take a leap of faith … Would it not be easier if you had a parachute? That’s why we named our company Paraşüt,” said Sean Yu, the CEO of a company that is helping companies in Turkey better manage their cash flow.
Yu is a Chinese-American who was born in China but moved to Unites States when he was 7 years old. He began to learn coding at the age of 12 when he was admitted to a program for the gifted. He then graduated from Harvard and spent a few years in investment banking before embarking on an adventure that led him to work at Endeavors’ Istanbul Office.
He joined Grou.ps in 2011 to help Emre Sokullu realize his dream and in 2013, he left the company to realize his own dream at Paraşüt.
He said that there were a few main drivers for his move. First, he said that there was a clear lack of an easy-to-use platform for small firms to keep their books in check. That’s something he learned from his experience at Grou.ps.
The second driver was his belief that if a viable option is given to SME owners, they will adapt technology very fast, in contrast to many Turkish people who told him that SME owners are mainly conservatives who don’t understand technology enough to implement it in their work. Yu believes that SME owners are working primarily for their immediate family, in the sense that the future of their family depends heavily on the future of their establishment. Therefore, he underlined that if Paraşüt can create positive value for SMEs, then the owners would not hesitate to use the platform.
Right now, there are 5,000 paying customers that are proving Yu right. Their aim is to triple that number in 2017. They are still not at the break-even point, but Yu is confident that as they continue to create value for their customers, their customer base will grow, and as the customer base grows, they will be able to find funds to fuel further growth. So in a sense, Paraşüt will try to rocket sales in the coming years. That’s why they recently appointed a marketing director, Bora Şahan, to oversee this growth.
I believe that they have a serious shot at meeting their goals as all companies will be looking to cut costs and find a solution to better manage their cash flow, which is exactly what Paraşüt does.
