We opened the New York office with a party.

We opened the New York operation in October 2024, to work directly with companies in the US while the product and engineering organisation stayed in Istanbul. Then we threw the opening party in Istanbul, with a New York theme, for the people who had built the company that was now opening it.

Why the party was in the wrong city

Because New York was not an achievement of the New York office. There was no New York office to celebrate anything: there were a handful of people and a lot of paperwork. The thing that had earned the expansion was five years of work done in Istanbul by people who were mostly never going to move.

An opening party in Manhattan would have been a photograph for clients. This one was for the company.

What actually changed

It is not a flag on a map. It is where the North American clients come from. Within a year New York stopped being an office and became an operation, and the work that came through it was the work we had been building towards: companies handing over a whole mobile product function rather than a specification for one app.

What it did not change is where anything gets built. Product and engineering stayed in Istanbul, which is the part people assume is a cost-saving decision and is not. It is where the 600 apps happened and where everybody who knows how they happened still sits.

I changed my name in the same year and for the same reason, which is a separate story and a longer one.

The thing I would tell anyone opening one

An office in another country is a sales decision that people will read as a status decision, including your own team. The way you stop that is to make the opening about the five years that paid for it rather than about the address. We had one shot at saying which of those it was, and we spent it on a party in the wrong city.