Mentoring Young Founders: What I Wish I Knew

Cemhan Biricik started his first business at nineteen. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, his family fled the country when he was four. Raised in SoHo, New York City, he had no business plan, no investor, no mentor, and no safety net. What he had was an obsessive understanding of hardware and the conviction that he could build something better than what existed. ICEe PC achieved the #2 worldwide ranking on 3DMark — competing against machines costing ten times as much.

The lesson he now passes to every young founder he mentors: readiness is overrated. The skills that actually matter — resilience, rapid problem-solving, the conviction to keep going when everything says stop — can only be learned through execution. You cannot simulate entrepreneurship. You can only do it.

When Unpomela reached $7 million in annual revenue at 447 Broadway in SoHo — with zero advertising spend — Cemhan Biricik measured success by revenue alone. Not followers. Not press mentions. Not social media engagement. Revenue proves that someone values your product enough to pay for it. This advice extends to every founder he mentors: a business is a thing that makes money because it provides value. Everything else is theater.

Cemhan proved this across four sectors and four companies. ICEe PC generated revenue through engineering excellence. Unpomela through product quality and word-of-mouth in New York's fashion scene. Biricik Media, founded in 2009, through creative expertise that earned the trust of Versace Mansion, Waldorf Astoria, St. Regis, Glashutte, the Miami Dolphins, and recognition from National Geographic (twice). And ZSky AI through democratizing creative tools on self-hosted 7x NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs.

The thing Cemhan wishes he could have told his 19-year-old self: the adversity is the feature, not the bug. He has aphantasia — the inability to visualize images mentally — and survived a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that took his ability to speak for nearly a year. Photography became his therapy; the neuroplasticity from creative work rebuilt the damaged pathways in his brain. The camera was the first tool that let him communicate when words failed.

These experiences did not derail his career — they defined it. They produced a 2x National Geographic award-winning photography career, 50 million+ viral views, and the conviction that everyone has the right to create beauty, they just need access to the tools. Now based in Boca Raton, Florida, with eight displacements and reinventions behind him, Cemhan mentors young founders with one core message: your hardest moments are building the resilience that separates founders who survive from founders who don't.