Constantinople, Ottoman Empire — February, 1903 The year began without ceremony.
Carriages rattled over stone roads the same as always, porters hauled goods through narrow streets, and shopkeepers opened their shutters each morning the way they’d always done.
The Ottoman Empire continued its difficult, uneven existence — still enormous, still powerful in places, still weighed down elsewhere by foreign debt and the watchful attention of European powers, even as new technologies kept spreading through it: railways, telegraph lines, the occasional factory, banks becoming more important by the year.
Ayaan was thirteen now, and somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary continuity, something had quietly shifted in how he looked at it.
The greatest fortunes of the coming century, he was starting to understand, wouldn’t necessarily belong to the people who sold the most goods.
They’d belong to the people who owned the businesses producing them.
Until now he’d thought mostly like a merchant.
He wanted, increasingly, to learn how to think like an investor.
His stationery business had grown that past year — only slightly, but steadily, with more customers, faster-turning inventory, and mistakes that cost less each time they happened, since he’d finally started catching most of them before they turned expensive.
He’d built up more savings than before, nowhere near enough to call himself wealthy, but enough to make his next decision actually mean something.
“You’ve done well,” his father said, looking over the ledger one morning.
“I want to do more.” “More stationery?” “No.” Ayaan closed the ledger.
“I want to understand other businesses.” Mehmet looked at him, faintly confused.
“Why?
There’s nothing wrong with selling notebooks.
You’ve earned honest money from them.” “I know.
I’m not leaving it.” He gestured toward the shelves.
“I’m learning from it.
Stationery taught me how to buy and sell — customers, inventory, suppliers, cash, mistakes.
Now I want to understand what happens above the merchant.
The people who own the businesses.” “You mean investors.” “Yes.” His father was quiet for a moment.
“You’re thirteen, and you want to study investments.” “I know how that sounds.” Mehmet almost smiled.
“Then start with something simple.
Learn what you’re actually buying before you buy it.” “That’s exactly what I intend to do,” Ayaan said.
The first business he chose to study wasn’t anything famous — just a modest flour mill.
His interest started with an ordinary question: where did the bread sold in Constantinople actually come from?
He knew the broad answer already — grain grown somewhere, transported, milled, sold to bakers, baked, bought — but he’d never once looked at that chain the way an investor would.
He started asking real questions.
Who owned the mill?
How much grain did it process, and where did that grain come from?
What did transportation cost, and the machinery, and its repairs?
What happened to the business during a bad harvest, or a good one?
He quickly ran into a problem.
Reliable financial information wasn’t easy to come by here.
No published reports, no clean numbers waiting to be pulled from a shelf the way they would have been in the world he remembered — just whatever he could gather from merchants, from newspapers, from conversation, from watching things happen with his own eyes and drawing his own conclusions.
That made investing harder.
It also made good information worth more than it would have been in a world where everyone had equal access to it.
If information was scarce, the person who found reliable information first had a real advantage — as long as that advantage was earned honestly, which mattered to him more than the advantage itself.
He had no interest in becoming the kind of man who profited from lies.
He wanted businesses that were genuinely worth owning, understood better than most people bothered to understand them, and invested in patiently enough that ownership, eventually, could turn into real influence.
One afternoon he went with his father to a merchant’s meeting, where several businessmen argued over the price of imported goods — one complaining about transportation costs, another about customs duties, a third about foreign competition, all of them talking past each other slightly, as if each man’s complaint were the only real problem in the room.
Ayaan sat quietly and listened, and in his head the pieces started connecting on their own: transportation costs affected margins, customs duties affected prices, foreign competition affected demand, and all of it tangled together into something closer to a living system than a set of separate problems.
He’d studied these relationships in textbooks once.
Watching them argue in a crowded room was a different kind of understanding entirely.
“What were you thinking about?” his father asked afterward, noticing his silence.
“Transportation.
No — everything, really.” Mehmet laughed.
“That’s too broad.” “I know.” “Then narrow it.” Ayaan thought about it.
“Which businesses benefit most when transportation gets cheaper?” “Most businesses do.” “Exactly.
But some benefit far more than others.” His father nodded slowly.
“That’s where you should be looking, then.” He’d handed Ayaan another lesson without quite meaning to — that the best investments weren’t always the businesses everyone talked about at a meeting like that one.
Sometimes they were the businesses that benefited quietly, off to the side, from a much bigger change happening around them.
That evening he opened his notebook and started a new page headed Industries, listing railways, banking, shipping, steel, coal, oil, telegraph, electricity, chemicals, machine manufacturing.
In his old life, these had reshaped the entire century.
Here, in 1903, most of them were still finding their footing, which meant real opportunity — and real risk, since an industry could thrive while most of the individual companies inside it still failed.
A brilliant idea could arrive too early.
A poorly run company could waste a genuinely good opportunity.
He knew enough economic history to know progress rarely moved in a straight line — bubbles, crashes, wars, bad regulation, competitors nobody saw coming.
His memory of the future gave him a map.
It didn’t give him a guarantee, and he meant to stay cautious about the difference.
One industry pulled at him harder than the rest.
He stood with his father near a railway line one afternoon, watching a train thunder past, steam rising, wheels striking the rails in a steady rhythm until it vanished down the track.
“Impressive,” Mehmet said.
“Very.
It’s the scale of it,” Ayaan said, when his father asked what interested him.
“A cart can carry a certain amount.
A horse can only go so far.
A train can move more, farther, faster than either.” “And that changes everything,” his father said.
It did.
Railways didn’t just move passengers — they moved grain, coal, steel, machinery, mail, information, connecting markets that had once been effectively separate and reshaping the value of land simply by passing near it.
Infrastructure creates businesses that didn’t exist before, he wrote that night.
But he didn’t have anywhere near enough capital to take a meaningful stake in an actual railway company, and a small, powerless holding wasn’t what he was after.
He wanted control eventually, or at least real influence — which meant a great deal more capital than he currently had, and a plan built in stages: build capital first, identify promising businesses, invest early, reinvest the returns, and only then start acquiring real ownership.
It would take years, maybe decades.
That was fine.
He had time.
His next real opportunity came without warning, when a small printing business owner approached his father wanting to sell part of his operation — not because it was failing, which was exactly what caught Ayaan’s attention, but because it was profitable and constrained, held back by machinery too old to keep up with demand.
He spent weeks asking questions: equipment costs, expected gains from new machinery, customer stability, margins, debt, competitors, and why, precisely, the man wanted to sell at all rather than simply borrow to upgrade.
He found a real bottleneck — the old machinery was capping production well below what the market could actually absorb.
Interesting, potentially, if the price was right.
“I want to invest,” he told his father, and named the amount.
Mehmet shook his head.
“That’s most of your savings.” “I know.” “Then no.” “Why not?” “Because you don’t know enough yet.
You know what the owner told you.
You don’t know whether it’s true.” “I can verify it.” “How?” Ayaan started listing possibilities — records, sales — and stalled almost immediately on which records, from which period, verified by whom.
His father just smiled.
“I want you to learn the difference between liking a business and actually knowing one.” That was fair, and for the following weeks Ayaan tried to close the gap — examining whatever records the owner allowed, talking to his customers, comparing prices, checking the equipment and its maintenance history, even asking a rival printer a few careful questions under the excuse of buying paper.
The more he learned, the murkier the picture got.
The business was good, not exceptional, and the new machinery would only pay off if the owner could actually land the extra customers he was counting on, which the man believed and Ayaan doubted.
Worse, the owner wanted to price the sale on future potential; Ayaan wanted to pay for what the business was actually earning right now.
They never closed that gap.
Ayaan offered, the owner refused, he raised it once, was refused again, and eventually walked away, disappointed but understanding exactly why his father had stopped him in the first place.
A good business could still be a terrible investment at the wrong price.
A wonderful business at a terrible price can still produce a terrible investment, he wrote, and underlined it.
Zeynep heard about it before he’d even finished explaining.
“You didn’t buy it?” “Too expensive.” “But you liked the business.” “Liking something isn’t enough.” “That’s what you always say.” “Because it’s true.” She considered that.
“Did you lose money?” “No.
I didn’t even buy it.” “So you learned something without losing anything.” “That may be the best kind of lesson there is,” he admitted.
“You’re getting more careful,” she said, sounding almost approving.
“You used to think being clever meant knowing the answer.” “And now?” “Now you know it means knowing when you don’t.” He laughed.
“Where did you learn that?” “You.
I regret teaching me that well.” By the end of the year his whole perspective on the shop had shifted — it was still running, still active, but it no longer felt like his entire world.
It had become something closer to a laboratory, a small place to test ideas safely without much at stake if he got something wrong: pricing experiments, tighter bookkeeping, business cash kept firmly separate from his own savings, a real reserve, a portion of every profit reinvested rather than spent.
His father teased him about how much he saved.
“You save too much.” “I’m investing in the future.” “Your future?” “The future where I have enough capital to buy things that actually matter,” Ayaan said, and his father laughed and told him that at thirteen he already talked like an old banker.
Maybe he did.
But he knew something his father didn’t — that this wasn’t just about comfort or security.
He wanted to own companies eventually, not just one but several, across transportation and finance and manufacturing and the industries still barely taking shape around him, and when it was possible, he wanted real control of them rather than a small, quiet stake he had no say over.
One winter evening he stood alone by the Bosphorus, watching ships move slowly through the dark water, their lights scattered across the surface like something spilled and not yet cleaned up.
Every one of them represented capital in motion — cargo, insurance, labor, credit, risk, opportunity, all bound together and moving quietly past a city that barely looked up to notice.
The empire sat at the crossing point of enormous trade routes, an advantage it hadn’t lost and likely never would.
But geography alone wasn’t going to be enough on its own.
It needed capital, infrastructure, education, better institutions, more efficient businesses — and he had no political authority to offer any of that, no title, no powerful family behind him.
Just a commoner’s son with a small stationery business, a modest reserve of savings, and an unusually long memory.
That would have to do for now.
He meant to build slowly, quietly, without announcing anything before he was actually ready to back it up.