Birkan Icacan

I got interested in technology because I wanted to play a video game.

Growing up in İstanbul, I got my hands on a copy of Sensible Soccer and didn't know enough English to get it running, so I taught myself basic MS-DOS commands. Playing the game made me curious about what was happening inside the machine. That curiosity eventually led me to study electronics and computer science.

My career began at Google, not in product management but in customer support, helping advertisers solve problems. It turned out to be useful training for a product leader. Customers rarely describe problems using your architecture or your org chart. They describe what they are trying to accomplish and what is getting in their way.

Over the next fifteen years I moved from listening to those problems to building products at Google, Stripe, Notion and Enterpret. The work has spanned enterprise integrations, collaboration, financial operations, enterprise platforms and customer intelligence. Different products, but a consistent challenge: building technology that becomes part of how organizations make decisions and get work done.

I recently joined Rogo, which builds AI purpose-built for finance. I'm particularly drawn to bringing AI into high-stakes workflows where speed matters, but accuracy, governance and trust matter even more.

The scale and the technology have changed since my customer-support days, but my instinct has not: stay close to the real work, understand where it breaks down, and build something people can depend on.

I live in Princeton with my family. I still enjoy understanding what happens beneath the screen, although getting a game to run is considerably easier now.