Good People of vitruta: Başar Başaran

Welcome back to Pera, Başar! Let’s introduce you to vitruta followers. Who is Başar Başaran? How did it all start, what’s he been up to, and how’s it going?

Başar grew up in a small Aegean town in a family of educators. Along the way, starting in high school, he met some wonderful people who influenced his journey. During university and his early career, he got to know himself deeply. He had the chance to travel and live in various places – from a small town in the Midwest to Mumbai and San Francisco, with shorter stints in Amsterdam and Jeddah.

While focusing on his own education, he realized how important education itself was to him, and he’s been involved in it ever since. Recently, he’s been working on Kunduz, a project he started with his college friends while pursuing his MBA.

Kunduz has achieved amazing success. What does it feel like to create an educational initiative that touches so many people?

In the early years of my career, when I thought about what kind of work would make me feel lucky, the answer was creating something meaningful with people I love that would positively impact people’s lives. I feel grateful to have reached a point that fulfills this purpose through a mix of searching for meaning and trial and error.

So, stepping away from Kunduz for a moment—what inspires you in life?

The usual suspects: reading, listening, watching, and traveling. It’s not the most original answer, but these are the things I try to stay loyal to. Working in startups is incredibly exhausting, even more so than I could have imagined. The share of intellectual pursuits in my life is much less than it was during university or in my early career when I had more time for myself. These days, most of that time goes into reading. My movie preferences, for instance, have shifted from arthouse to sitcoms and feel-good films.

Walking, in particular, inspires me on a broader level. It helps me synthesize what I consume or am exposed to daily. No matter where I am, I feel both peaceful and energized when I walk for hours. Cities open up entirely different perspectives in the mind while walking. Honestly, I feel quite lucky that my work allows me to do this in various settings.

Apart from that, there are things like music and chess that have stuck with me since childhood, though they’ve remained at more of a consumption level with my current pace. Still, the inspiration they bring is unique in its own way.

Can you recommend three books?

• The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus. Accepting the absurdity of life as it is can fast-track decisions about how you truly want to live. It’s not the easiest book to digest, but it saved me a lot of time in my searches during and after college.
• The Talent Code - Daniel Coyle. If you’re interested in contributing to education or improving future generations' lives in any sense, this is a book I’d recommend. It’s written without an academic tone but tells inspiring stories that resonate.
• Atomic Habits - James Clear. If you want to inspire others to change, you first have to be willing to make changes yourself. It’s enjoyable to make promises to ourselves and plan new routines, but they’re challenging to implement. This book offers practical principles for building the habits you aspire to without diving into abstract questions—just focusing on application.

So, what does clothing mean to you? Let’s say you’re waking up to an ordinary day, a classic Başar day—what are you wearing?

As we’ve talked about before, I see clothing as a direct and consistent form of self-expression. Everyone does this, consciously or unconsciously. Even those who dress without a second thought convey a message. For routine-driven people like me, who are looking to express themselves, it’s a highly practical medium. In this sense, I find vitruta’s role in society invaluable.

What I wear often depends on the kind of message I want to convey in that day’s meetings. But for internal team meetings or even with investors, I enjoy dressing in a lumberjack shirt, shorts, or sandals. Part of it is about showing where I stand in terms of hierarchy, especially given the unfounded sense of importance common among investors in Turkey. Similarly, I find it valuable to convey to the team that they shouldn’t view me any differently just because I’m a founder.