Years active 2008–present Name Tolga Tanriseven | Role Entrepreneur | |
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Occupation President of GirlsAskGuys Alma mater Isik University, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville | ||
Tolga Tanriseven (Turkish: Tolga Tanrıseven) is a Turkish American entrepreneur from St. Louis who since 2008, has served as the president of GirlsAskGuys, a multilingual platform that allows men and women to pose questions to those of the opposite gender about social life, which is currently based out of University City, Missouri. Tanriseven received his Bachelor's degree in computer engineering from his native Turkey in 2001, and received a full scholarship to emigrate to the United States and attend Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) where he started graduate school in 2003. However, he left after being offered a software engineering job at MonsterCommerce in 2004. His inspiration to start GirlsAskGuys stems from wanting to minimize the gender gap, after feeling "sorry for the guys stumbling around in downtown bars" trying do get dates:
I kept seeing a lot of rejections from both sides...It wasn't about who approached who. Instead the issue I kept seeing was guys were approaching girls the ways they thought was right or cool instead of figuring out how girls liked to be approached. Vice-versa was true as well in the rare cases where a girl approached a guy.--Tolga Tanriseven
Tolga Tanrisevn was able to raise $1 million for GirlsAskGuys in order to "add other languages at the rate of one every two or three months", making this social media platform reach an international audience, in addition to its current English-speaking users, as well as its Turkish-speaking audience. As such, in May 2014, Tanriseven added Spanish compatibility to his brainchild, GirlsAskGuys.
In 2015 Tolga was included on the "40 under 40" list on the St. Louis Business Journal. He has been featured in media like Forbes, The Next Web, Huffington Post and the Search Engine Journal.