Hakan Unsal
He learns industries for a living. Then he packs each one into an hour you actually want to watch.
The consultant who decided slide decks were the enemy - and built a company to retire them.
What he's building now
The hour-long cure for the slide-deck hangover
Primerli sells a strange promise: give it sixty minutes and you'll understand how an entire industry works.
Hakan Unsal runs Primerli, an e-learning company based in the Los Angeles area that makes "industry primers" - short, story-driven crash courses that explain how a whole sector operates before you ever set foot in a meeting about it. Finance, legal, professional services, technology: pick a field, press play, and an hour later you can hold a conversation in it.
The format is deliberate. Decades of accumulated industry knowledge get distilled into bite-sized videos, carried by storytelling and real-world examples rather than bullet points. Primerli partners with universities and corporations, aiming the same engine at two audiences at once - students trying to figure out which industry to enter, and professionals who need to get fluent fast.
The thesis underneath all of it is contrarian and a little blunt: the problem with professional training isn't that the material is hard. It's that it's boring. Fix the boredom and the learning follows.
"People want to be entertained and inspired - not lectured or 'trained.'"
- Hakan Unsal, on the future of online learning
Origin story
The failing student who fell in love with learning
Here is the detail that explains everything: Hakan Unsal was almost expelled from high school. He was a failing student until one teacher made the material come alive, and the whole trajectory bent.
From there the resume reads like a different person wrote it. An undergraduate degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul. A master's from Cornell. A Ph.D. from Columbia. The kid who couldn't be bothered became someone who couldn't stop.
He never forgot what flipped the switch. It wasn't more rigor or more discipline. It was a teacher who made learning worth paying attention to. That single experience is now baked into a company.
Eight years inside the consulting machine
Before Primerli, Unsal spent roughly eight years as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, rising to principal. The job came with a recurring chore: every new client meant a new industry, and every new industry meant cramming.
He did it over and over - speed-learning unfamiliar sectors from dense, slide-heavy materials so he could walk into a room and sound like he belonged. He got good at it. He also noticed how badly the existing tools served the task. Even seasoned professionals struggled to get up to speed.
The frustration became a product idea. If learning an industry was this painful for consultants paid to do it, imagine everyone else.
"Revolutionize the professional training status quo with a completely new approach to industry learning."
- The founding mission of Primerli
The contrarian bet
Documentary, not lecture
Primerli's stated priorities, as a vibe check. Not a survey - just the philosophy, drawn to scale.
Most corporate training optimizes for coverage: cram in the facts, check the box, move on. Unsal's view is that this gets the order backwards. If nobody finishes the course, the content quality is irrelevant.
So Primerli borrows from entertainment. Modern standards of structure, storytelling, and production quality - the things that make you finish a documentary - applied to material that usually puts people to sleep. Effective and enjoyable, in that order, because one depends on the other.
It's a simple reframe with teeth: stop competing with other training programs. Start competing with everything else fighting for an hour of someone's attention.
Who it's for
Two audiences, one engine
Students
Heading into careers in industries they've never seen from the inside. Primerli turns "what does this field even do?" into a one-hour answer - and a more informed career decision.
Professionals
Onboarding, sales enablement, client work in unfamiliar verticals. The same cramming Unsal once did at BCG, minus the painful slide decks.
Institutions
Universities and corporations that license the primers to close the gap between the classroom and the job. From confused to career-ready.
The path
How he got here
- IstanbulUndergraduate at Bogazici University
- USAMaster's at Cornell, then a Ph.D. at Columbia
- ~8 yearsManagement consultant, rising to principal at BCG
- 2019Founds Primerli to rethink industry learning
- 2022Primerli raises seed funding
- March 2024Primerli marks its fifth birthday
- June 2025Speaks at NACE25: "From Confused to Career-Ready"
A teacher's idea, scaled
There's a clean line from that one high-school teacher to a NACE conference stage in 2025. The lesson never changed: attention is earned, not assumed.
Unsal keeps making the same point in interviews and talks - that the future of online learning belongs to content that inspires rather than instructs. It's the rare founder pitch that's also an autobiography.
Things worth knowing
Three facts that stick
- 01A near-expulsion in high school became the origin story of an education company. The cure he received is the product he now sells.
- 02His company's entire thesis is that boredom - not difficulty - is what kills professional learning. Fix the watchability and the rest follows.
- 03He spent his consulting years getting paid to speed-learn industries. Primerli is that exact superpower, packaged for everyone else.
Watch
Hakan, on camera
Find him