Chapter 320: Building the Foundation
The team celebrated in the pitlane, taking a commemorative photo with their four cars lined up in front, along with all the trophies they had won during the entire season—more than forty-five when all the rookie, race, and constructor wins were counted. Thanks to their drivers’ performance, at the end of every week, they were taking all nine trophies awarded for the best in every category.
Fatih and his fellow drivers each sat on their respective car’s front tire, helmets on their laps. Once that was done and the team had finished cleaning up, the entire team went out for a celebration dinner with both the team members and all their family members present, following Fatih’s invitation as a thank-you for their hard work.
After making them rebuild the car more than three times and even going as far as having the team buy him a completely new chassis, this was a long-overdue dinner for the whole team.
......
"Are you sure you want to talk about it while you are still in that condition?" Rümeysa said as she slid into a dining room chair.
"A cast doesn’t really hinder my thinking or talking, so it’s fine," Fatih said as he tapped on the cast that already had three people’s signatures and doodles on it. The grade-two sprain had developed into a grade three, requiring the total immobilization of his arm for it to have a stable position to heal.
"I’m all ears," Rümeysa said as she slid the clipboard that was in the middle of the dining table towards her, picking up a pen and clicking it on, ready to take notes.
"I would like to build two companies," Fatih said with a mischievous smile on his face. He had more than a billion dollars of capital, so there was really no reason why he should be frugal. He wanted to go all out in implementing his ideas.
"Two?" she asked, surprised. Fatih had already asked her to create one that would be responsible for research in a specific field, and although it was in its first year, it was still expected to cost two million dollars to operate, a figure expected to rise with each following year as they expanded.
"Yes, I had an idea, and I have been thinking about how to implement it to ensure we still have a way to earn more money with more assurance."
"More money?"
"If I’m going to be wasting some of it on research with no revenue, I need to earn more to offset that, right?"
"Haaah!" Rümeysa sighed when she heard what her son was saying before she said, "I’m all ears. It’s about time we put our teams to work." Since the final sale of the bitcoins was completed and they had more than eight hundred million dollars in cash, she had immediately gotten to work building a family office and a structure that would allow that wealth to keep compounding. The moment Fatih showed interest in research, she knew that wasn’t going to be the end.
So she built a team specifically responsible for taking his vague ideas and going into the details of feasibility, what was needed to achieve his goals, who to recruit, how much to pay, where to register the company, and more, all to be done internally to guarantee as much privacy and quality as possible.
"The first company I want to build is an analytics company that deals mostly with satellite images as a means of intelligence gathering," Fatih said, finally getting to the point before reaching into his pocket, removing a neatly folded piece of paper, and handing it to his mother.
"Go on," she said as she set the paper aside and continued putting her full focus on him.
"They will mostly be building a machine learning system that will then parse through data from satellite imaging companies to learn about the active development of events and invest based on that data," he explained.
"Give me an example, the more comprehensive, the better," she said as she took notes. This was going to be handed to the team, and they needed to understand exactly what was on Fatih’s mind.
"Let’s say one company is rumored to be in the middle of acquisition discussions. We can learn more information by looking at satellite images of the parking lots of the two companies’ HQs, specifically the executive parking lot, to check for the number and type of cars there and compare it to the usual number. We can then parse through data to check if they are rental cars, giving us more detailed information.
It operates in the same way the Pentagon’s pizza index works. When a large number of orders come from the Pentagon, you can know with certainty that something major is about to happen, and from there, you can use that knowledge to invest ahead of time before the rest of the market becomes aware of the information, and you lose the first-mover’s advantage."
On the surface, it really looked like just an idea that had broad applications, and it did. But Fatih had a specific reason for wanting that capability: it was to use the data collected and analyzed by the company to point out the early signs of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through vehicle information in the parking lots of all the hospitals in Wuhan, the number of ambulances, heat signatures giving the approximate number of people in the hospitals, and satellite images of the market where it was rumored to have originated from, this, along with the rumors that would be circulating then and dismissed, should act as enough convincing evidence for his mother to give the go-ahead for them to fully recover their currently deployed investments and immediately short the market while everyone else was still unaware of the disease and the stock market was still rising.
That was the only reason he wanted to found this company, and even if they wasted twenty million before the pandemic for everything required to make it operational, the amount they would earn from being an early mover would be hundreds of times more than that.
It would also save them a headache from financial regulators, as they would have a paper trail they could point to as the origin of their idea, as it would be impossible to make them believe that he was someone who had been reborn, and he would be suspected of insider trading or maybe even worse.
"The idea is pretty solid," she said, nodding as she noted down everything as clearly as possible. While doing so, she was trying to keep her expression neutral, as she was very impressed by her son’s strategic and long-term thinking, making her wonder what he would have been if he wasn’t so into motorsports.
