How I blew it with Mark Zuckerberg and why it changed my life.

and thoughts on the power of the internet.

Two months ago I noticed something remarkable on Facebook. Somehow me, a 21-year-old Turkish product design student living in Milan, Italy had a mutual friend with Mark Zuckerberg. Mark-effing-Zuckerberg.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on how insane this is. I can send a message to the man who created Facebook and managed to get nearly every internet user in the world to sign up, without falling in his “Other” folder. (Probably buzz his phone as well.) This is great news considering at the time I found out about this, I was on my way to San Francisco for Mission Impossible -get seed investment for my startup Remember in 26 days with nearly zero connections nor a final product. If only I could impress Mark Zuckerberg with a well-written message pitching him our vision. I believe Remember can impact the world at the same scale as Google and Facebook did if I play my cards right, and now I had a joker. Well, sort of.

Turns out I had already blown my chances in 2008 when I was just a 14-year-old kid by sending him this rather silly message:

Sadly, this is my actual correspondence with Mark Zuckerberg.

I would be “very cool” indeed. Dear 14-year-old Mert; what the hell were you thinking?!

If I received this message from a teen today, I would discard it. It is written in horrendous and incomprehensible English, has no sign of seriousness, not even a trace of intellect and the kid is clearly trying to use being “Facebook friends with Mark Zuckerberg” as a means of impressing others. (Whoever would be impressed by that is probably not worth impressing in the first place anyways.) Even in the off-chance that you saw my message then, thanks for ignoring it Mark. This is beyond embarrassing for me; which begs the question: Why am I writing about this? Because there is a lesson to be learned here. Maybe one of the most valuable lessons you could teach someone -especially a teen- in 2015. I don’t regret sending this message one bit. Yes it was stupid, and it probably murdered my chances of ever being best buds with Mark Zuckerberg, but these don’t matter.

What matters is that I tried.

This was not the action of a kid who was lost online, these were the footprints of a kid who was just getting the hang of it.

We are living in revolutionary times, where you can reach literally anyone in the world (even space for that matter, shoutout to the astronauts at ISS) with a single click. It would be three more years until this philosophy would start proving quite useful to me.

In 2011 I found a simple backdoor to iOS 5. I didn’t think it was a huge deal. After seeing no one posted about the bug, I sent an email to Gizmodo and my life was changed forever.

The next day I was on every technology blog in the world. My Twitter exploded, newspapers and TV channels started calling to get interviews and I quickly became “the kid who hacked iOS 5” in the eyes of the public. Little did I know, using this article and the same philosophy I had when I shamelessly sent that stupid message to Mark Zuckerberg, I would land a bunch of gigs against the biggest of odds.

Telling my story about the Apple-hacker situation, I managed to impress Ozan Cakmak enough to give me a job as an assistant photographer at one of the best photography studios in Turkey, f/2.8 Studio. Now I had two things to tell the next time I sent a cold email. Around this time, I discovered Timbuk2. They’re an SF-based messenger bag brand with rightfully expensive backpacks that I couldn’t afford. I sent them an email telling my story about the iOS 5 backdoor and the fact that I worked for f/2.8 Studio convinced them to send me free bags and I would take photos of their merch so they could use it on their social profiles. They said yes and I became a “Travel Ambassador” for Timbuk2. Now I had three things to tell. I used the same principle to become a photographer for Betabrand, passing auditions of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and to live on a deserted island becoming an ambassador for Samsung.