Selçuk Yaşar Ödülü | Winner
Selçuk Yaşar’ın Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin temelini oluşturan gençliğe ve çağdaşlık ülküsüne adayarak gerçekleştirdiği hedefi Yaşar Üniversitesi, Selçuk Yaşar Ödülü ile kurucusunun vizyon mirasını Türkiye’nin dört bir yanına taşıyor. Bu yıl ilk kez verilecek Selçuk Yaşar Ödülü, yeniliği, toplumsal faydayı ve geleceğin Türkiye’sini hedefleyen cesur insanların çalışmalarını kutlamayı, başarılarını tüm Türkiye’ye duyurmayı ve Türkiye’den dünyaya açılan yeni hayallere güç vermeyi hedefliyor.
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Winner

Eren Bali, Founder of Udemy and Carbon Health

Eren Bali was born in 1984 in Malatya, Turkey. Completing his primary school education in a school where there was only one teacher in a village in Malatya, Turkey, Bali won a silver medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad thanks to the digital training he had. Instead of going to universities like MIT and Harvard, he decided to study in Turkey and settled in the Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University where he also had double major in mathematics. As an undergraduate student at the university, Bali wrote an application that allows listening to music on a server.

After graduating from the university, the foundations of Udemy-to-be were established when the training and courses administered by the instructors at METU Technopolis were transferred to the digital environment through an application developed by Eren Bali and his secondary school friend Oktay Çağlar.

A year after developing this application, the entrepreneurs achieved to receive the support they wanted from Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp, an internet giant, and gained access to a significantly high capital of 1 million dollars. Thus, the online education company Udemy was founded.

Udemy became a huge success in a short period of time, attracting the attention of the US press. The most important newspapers of San Francisco wrote the success story of Eren Bali starting at a rural school and making it to the Silicon Valley. The strongest aspect of Udemy’s success was that industry giants such as PayPal, Booking.com and Goldman Sachs decided to administer their in-house training programs through Udemy.

Eren Bali, after handing over the CEO position of his globally achieved enterprise Udemy, started to chase his initiative called Carbon Health, which digitizes traditional healthcare services. Carbon Health, which managed to increase its value to more than 3 billion dollars with the investments it received in a short time, also reached the top as the second fastest growing private company in the United States in 2021. This enterprise facilitated that more than 90 clinics in 14 states were opened to meet the healthcare needs arising due to the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerated the widespread testing practices and vaccinations during the pandemic.

Eren Bali, Founder of Udemy and Carbon Health, has been deemed worthy of the “Selçuk Yaşar Award 2021” for “his initiatives focusing on digital transformation in the fields of education and health that made education accessible for wider audiences and that also facilitated easier access to healthcare services, as well as for his contributions to Turkey’s reputation thanks to his success in sustainably managing the two enterprises in Silicon Valley”.