Gulay Ozkan

This week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg joined the highly prestigious Neural Information Processing Systems academic conference in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. At the event, he announced Facebook’s artificial intelligence laboratory headed by Professor Yann LeCun of NYU and some of the world’s leading deep learning and machine-learning scientists. Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, visiting a highly prestigious academic conference was a shock for the academic world but it’s also part of a larger shift.

Some actors fully immerse themselves in their roles. They become their character for the duration of the shooting by adopting their accents, mannerisms, and personalities. Very rarely do they stay in character beyond the wrap party.

I left Istanbul in mid-June to join a 10-week program in Silicon Valley to solve global grand challenges through technology. On the first day, futurist and director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, and futurist and CEO of X PRIZE foundation, Peter Diamandis, laid out our mission at Singularity University: Create a positive impact on a billion people in a decade and create disruptive innovation. The first thing that came to my mind were the demonstrations and police crackdowns I had just left behind in Turkey, and whether there was a way to disrupt this failed system of governance.

It often feels like the entire city of Istanbul, the driver of Turkey’s rapidly emerging economy, is under renovation. I live near Taksim Square, and the adjacent Gezi Park is among the last public green spaces in the neighborhood.

Entrepreneurship is a revolutionary act. It is the desire to change the world. Creativity and innovation are the basis of entrepreneurship and are fed by everything in a market, from national policies and attitudes towards science and technology, law and intellectual property, democracy and government, ecology and the environment, arts and the media.

“Can women have it all?” The corporate response still seems to be  a resounding “no.” In many parts of the world, women are still waiting for employment legislation and office politics to change and for management to be convinced of the merits of flexible work hours so that women can have a better work-family balance.

We are entrepreneurs. We work day and night for years to turn our dreams into a reality that we hope will transform society and improve lives. War is the complete opposite. It can destroy those things we dream of in a single day.