Melek Pulatkonak is an adviser, speaker, systems thinker, and entrepreneur, equally fluent in maximizing shareholder value and social capital.

For nearly three decades, her work has spanned the United States and Turkey, often at the intersection of leadership, purpose, and change. She is the Founder of Turkish Women’s International Network (TurkishWIN), which she has been building and growing since 2010. Through TurkishWIN, Melek has been implementing her vision of the Act2WIN system — an approach to designing human-centered ecosystems that help women build careers they love through mentoring, storytelling, and collective action. TurkishWIN represents the first node of this system and a living laboratory for learning, unlearning, and scale.

Melek is widely recognized as one of Turkey’s trusted thought leaders in women’s empowerment and inclusive leadership. She is a five-time TEDx speaker and a frequent keynote speaker and facilitator, contributing to global conversations on leadership, equity, and the future of work. Her work reflects a deep calling to help leaders build systems and communities that mobilize people and drive meaningful, lasting change.

Prior to working full time at TurkishWIN, Melek worked at Microsoft, serving on the Global Startup Business Team and earlier as Deputy General Manager at Microsoft Turkey. Before returning to Turkey, she was President and COO of Hakia, a semantic technology company she co-founded in New York. These roles gave her hands-on experience in technology, innovation, scale, and execution — perspectives she continues to draw on in her advisory and systems-building work.

A lifelong learner and TEDster, Melek is deeply engaged with questions of psychological safety, unlearning, and what it truly takes to build cultures where people can show up fully. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, a B.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is a proud graduate of St. George’s Austrian High School.