In a startup era obsessed with scaling teams and offloading decisions, Gurhan Kiziloz has gone the other way. At Nexus International, the company behind the $400 million platform Megaposta, the founder is also the operator – by design, not by necessity. There’s no executive buffer, no layers of approval, and no inclination to delegate unless it’s absolutely required. Kiziloz isn’t trying to be a figurehead. He’s trying to stay close to the work.
“Give me an idea. If I like it, I go get it done,” he says. That’s how most decisions flow inside Nexus. There’s no formal pitch process. If something makes sense in the moment, it moves. The benefit is obvious: unmatched speed. But so is the risk, bottlenecks, lack of diverse input, and a system where one person carries all operational weight.
Kiziloz isn’t unaware of those concerns. He simply doesn’t care. “We move fast. Really fast,” he says. “No approvals, no politics, no waiting.” For him, speed isn’t just a priority; it’s the entire point of keeping Nexus self-funded and structurally flat. With no investors to please and no board to navigate, decisions come down to instinct and timing, not process.
Nexus’s growth supports the argument. Since launching Megaposta, the company has gone from zero to $400 million in revenue in a single year, without raising capital or hiring a traditional C-suite. The growth trajectory continues upward, with internal projections aiming for $1.45 billion by the end of next year.
Still, Kiziloz’s leadership style doesn’t follow conventional playbooks. Once a product finds traction, founders usually begin to scale themselves out of the equation, hiring VPs, building executive teams, and focusing on long-term strategy. Kiziloz does the opposite. He avoids external involvement not just financially, but operationally. “If I can build it myself, I will,” he states. “I don’t want anyone else’s fingerprints on this.”
The decision is personal as much as practical. There’s a clear thread running through his philosophy: pride in autonomy, distrust of consensus, and a distaste for dilution, whether that means ownership, ideas, or momentum. Kiziloz believes too many voices slow down execution. He built Nexus specifically to avoid that drag.
The result is a company where action is favored over alignment. There are no steering committees, no strategic off-sites, no pre-planned quarterly pivots. That agility has enabled Nexus to launch features and respond to trends faster than most well-staffed competitors. But it also raises questions about long-term sustainability. How does a founder stay deeply involved in every decision as the business expands? How do teams stay aligned without hierarchy?
Kiziloz’s answer is clear: not everyone will. “Not everyone is designed to take a ride in a rocketship,” he said. The message is unfiltered. Nexus isn’t meant to accommodate everyone. It’s meant to execute at speed. Those who thrive under fast-moving, high-pressure conditions stay. Those who don’t, don’t.
That mindset defines more than just hiring. It defines culture, too. At Nexus, clarity replaces communication. Direction comes from the top, not through consensus. And while some may see that as rigid, others would argue it’s why the company hasn’t slowed down. Every team knows where the decision-making sits, and how quickly things can go from idea to deployment.
This founder-as-operator model isn’t new. It echoes early-stage builders like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, who both maintained deep involvement in product, logistics, and hiring long after their companies scaled. But Kiziloz’s model is more extreme. He’s not just delaying delegation, he’s avoiding it deliberately, even as revenue surges past thresholds where most founders would be preparing exit plans or investor rounds.
For now, it works. The speed is real, the numbers back it, and the cultural clarity is hard to replicate. But the tradeoffs will remain. As Nexus moves toward larger markets and global expansion, the system will either bend or break, or, perhaps, continue to hold under the weight of singular leadership.
Kiziloz seems unbothered by the question. He’s not looking to optimize for scale, comfort, or balance. He’s optimizing for speed and for full control of what he’s building.
In an era where leadership is often diffused across multiple roles and responsibilities, Gurhan Kiziloz’s approach stands out. He’s not trying to be a founder in the modern sense. He’s simply trying to build, without pause and without compromise.
