Building Scalable Businesses with Grit, Vision, and Strategy

How does a childhood spent crafting toys out of boxes in Istanbul evolve into a career of scaling impactful businesses and driving innovation across industries? For Melike Abacioglu Gunes, the answer lies in persistence, strategy, and embracing challenges head-on. A Stanford and Harvard alumna, she has transformed bold ideas into measurable results across industries like healthcare and SaaS.

We interviewed Melike as the new VP of Marketing at Mixpanel. These days Melike is focused on establishing Mixpanel as the leader in digital analytics, driving growth globally, and evangelizing data-driven decision making. Through user and market insights, she helps inform Mixpanel’s product strategy to ensure they stay ahead in the evolving analytics landscape.  In this interview, Melike shares key lessons from her career, advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and her forward-thinking vision for the future.

Your story begins in Istanbul. What was it like growing up there, and how did your early experiences shape your ambitions?  

I grew up in a household where resilience was woven into every bedtime story. My grandmother, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, shared tales of the hardships she faced as a single mother, raising her children and building a new life from scratch in Turkey. My father, who lost his father at the age of 10, never wavered in his pursuit of education and his dreams. My mother, the daughter of a farmer in Turkey, left her town to chase an education in the big city. She never gave up on her career while raising four children, encouraging each of us to think beyond borders and pursue opportunities far from home. Their stories inspired me daily, instilling in me a deep appreciation for perseverance and a commitment never to take my education or opportunities for granted.   As a child, I was always the curious one, tearing apart gadgets to understand how they worked and questioning why things were the way they were. In fact, I never asked for toys—I would simply draw something on paper, cut it out, and bring it to life through my imagination and made-up stories. This resourcefulness and ability to envision new solutions have stayed with me, shaping both my creativity and my career. Following my sister’s lead, I took Turkey’s private high school entrance exams and earned a place at Istanbul’s American Robert College, the most prestigious American high school outside the U.S., where only the top hundred or so students out of a million test-takers gain admission. There, I excelled academically while embracing leadership roles, including participating in Model United Nations and founding the school’s first foreign language magazine. A defining moment in my journey toward global impact was applying to Stanford for my undergraduate studies despite being told that international students rarely received scholarships. Undeterred, I applied, was selected, and became a recipient of the McCaw Scholarship. This experience reinforced my belief that persistence and daring to dream big, when paired with hard work and strategic decision-making, can open doors once thought impossible.  

You’ve studied at both Stanford and Harvard. What did these experiences teach you about leadership and innovation?

Stanford was a transformative experience, providing me with both technical rigor through my Chemical Engineering degree and resilience—nothing feels hard after chemical engineering (laughing). My courses, such as fluid mechanics, taught me how to think rather than just memorize formulas. Beyond academics, leadership roles like serving as President of Stanford Women in Business and launching a student-alumni mentorship program reinforced my ability to inspire others and the power of strong networks. Harvard was equally impactful but in a different way. Graduating in 2014, amid the rise of mobile technology and consumer-driven healthcare, I was compelled to do my own startup. My experience working in management strategy consulting, spending long hours hunched over a laptop, sparked my interest in addressing sedentary lifestyles. I soon discovered that musculoskeletal diseases ranked as the third-highest healthcare cost for self-insured employers, and back pain was the second biggest reason for missed workdays - sparking my mission to turn ideas into scalable solutions. Harvard Business School refined my understanding of value creation, helping me transform imagination into impact—and impact into revenue—while connecting me with a network of now-successful entrepreneurs and business leaders.   Melike Abacioglu Gunes, with her co-founder having been accepted to YCombinator for her start-up in 2016.

Your first startup focused on promoting active lifestyles. What lessons did you learn as a founder?

The startup was born from a passion for improving health through technology, aiming to combat sedentary lifestyles by incentivizing movement through a tech platform. The journey was as much about learning as building, with key lessons standing out: the importance of solving a specific problem—chronic diseases linked to inactivity—made it easier to attract users and partners; relentless iteration based on direct feedback that refined our interface and reward system; and leveraging strategic opportunities, like joining Y Combinator, provided invaluable resources and credibility to drive early traction. This experience became the foundation of my understanding of execution, team-building, and scaling in tech—knowledge I’ve carried into every role since.  

Your career spans industries like healthcare, SaaS, and analytics. How do you approach transitioning into new industries?

Throughout my career, I’ve been drawn to complex problems. Whether it was growing a new business unit at Alto Pharmacy, driving growth at Rippling, or advising early-stage startups, my approach has always been the same—first-principles thinking, structured execution, and a deep focus on outcomes.  The most important thing that my background in management strategy consulting and my studies in engineering taught me is learning to ask the right questions and thinking from first principles. You can apply these skills to many industries once you learn how to ask the right questions and break problems into smaller parts.  I have chosen growing and scaling B2B (business to business) tech companies as my area of expertise. Within B2B, I have seen job transitions as opportunities to pick up new skills to become a well-rounded growth leader while doing what I am best at - developing businesses. At Alto, I owned P&L responsibility as a General Manager, and I scaled our pharmacy offerings to health systems and brokered partnerships with medical practices - practicing key skills product marketing, sales enablement and enterprise sales. At Rippling, a Human Capital Management Software company, I did growth marketing - developing key skills in generating pipeline at scale. At Mixpanel, a product analytics software, I have owned GTM strategy and operations - determining how to grow the company globally, applying my learnings across sales, marketing, and business development, while looking under the hood and building systems that fuel repeatable business outcomes.  Each transition required me to adapt, work with different cross-functional teams and different types of end-users, and learn quickly. My ability to navigate ambiguity and drive cross-functional alignment has been a key asset in every role I’ve held. 

Grit and execution seem central to your philosophy. Why are they so important in driving success?

Grit fuels perseverance through inevitable challenges. From securing the McCaw Scholarship at Stanford to scaling businesses at Rippling and Mixpanel, grit has kept me grounded and forward-focused. Execution transforms ideas into reality. Throughout my career, I’ve seen brilliant strategies fail due to poor execution. I’ve learned that success requires prioritization, discipline, and empowering teams to perform at their best. It’s about translating vision into actions and actions into measurable results. 

What challenges have you faced as a leader, and how do you avoid common entrepreneurial pitfalls?

Leadership in startups means navigating uncertainty, having the conviction to illuminate an unpaved path, and motivating your team to build it alongside you. This requires defining an exciting problem, assembling a team passionate about solving it, and maintaining grit to push through challenges. Even with the right foundation, founders often make three key mistakes:

Lack of Focus: Many founders spread themselves too thin instead of solving one critical pain point exceptionally well. The best approach is to identify a specific, high-value problem people will pay for and gain traction in a small but engaged market. While multi-product, all-in-one B2B solutions are trending, most successful companies start by excelling in one area before expanding to complementary offerings.

Underestimating Execution: Ideas are easy; execution drives success. Let’s say you found a problem that people are willing to pay for. Ask yourself, “Am I solving the pain point well?” To get your next 5- 10 customers, you need to start telling a story. You need to show that your solution is solving the pain point. You need to own customer success and listen to your users. If you look up Mixpanel on LinkedIn, you will see that we are featuring videos of our customers who share their successes in driving business results. Our goal is to make our customers the champions - focusing on making them successful. Help them, and they will help you in return.  Secondly, think about your marketing strategy - distribution. Can I reach this customer and the person who is going to approve this budget? If it’s going to take 12 months, then you need to make sure you find an investor willing to fund you for that long. Long enterprise sales cycles are what kill a lot of B2B startups. VCs look for the repeatability of your business success. Focus on a segment where you can show repeatable traction.  Lastly, think about how to drive a repeatable go-to-market motion and make your offering stickier. At Alto, our CEO  asked me to develop a repeatable playbook to scale our new business lines. I spent extensive time on the field, talking with prospects and existing customers to develop 3 new offerings. Driving the adoption of these 3 solutions within the first 6 months of a new customer joining Alto became our sales and account management playbook, which led to compounding growth. 

Building the Right Team: As a founder, you might be tempted to hire people like yourself, but true success comes from finding complementary talent. If you’re technical, partner with a strong business leader who can craft your product narrative and drive sales. 

Looking ahead, what are your goals for the next decade?   What excites me most is building and scaling businesses that not only achieve revenue growth but also create meaningful impact. My long-term vision is to take a company public, mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs, and contribute to the startup ecosystem in a way that empowers others to build with purpose. I thrive at the intersection of strategy, execution, and leadership—turning vision into reality one step at a time. As part of my work, I haveworked on product expansion and growth strategies. Hence, I’ve developed my own frameworks for assessing new market opportunities and playbooks. I have been inspired by Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and combined them with my experiences. These frameworks integrate economic viability, product-market fit, and execution with regard to internal and external forces. I aim to continue applying these principles while building innovative solutions that create lasting value. 

Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs? Choose a problem that deeply resonates with you and is painful for a group of individuals or businesses eager to solve it. This passion will carry you through challenges. Surround yourself with complementary talent because no one can do it alone—the right team is crucial. Finally, focus on execution; ideas are just the start—what truly matters is how you bring them to life.