The story
Sidar Şahin was born in Istanbul and left Boğaziçi University after his first year to become an entrepreneur. Before Peak he founded the mobile game studio Funpac in 2003, launched the video site Izlesene.com and was a partner in Trendyol. According to the Founding MENA short, he also lost more than $10 million of his own money on ventures that failed and blamed himself for chasing too many ideas. In 2010 he founded Peak with Rina Onur and Hakan Baş, determined to do fewer things well. Peak closed games that still made money so the team could focus, ending with card games and puzzle games. In 2017 it sold its card games business to Zynga for $100 million, leaving Toy Blast and Toon Blast, which had 12 million daily players by 2020. That year Zynga bought the whole company for $1.8 billion, Turkey's largest start-up acquisition. The short says he saw Peak as a school for future founders and stepped down as CEO about 18 months after the sale.
