Eren Ozmen

She took a $5M chance on a dying company and ended up beating Boeing for a $13.1B defense deal.

Eren Ozmen immigrated to the U.S. from Turkey when she was 22 years old.

She got her MBA by studying at night and working full-time during the day.

She picked up a cleaning job at a small defense company called Sierra Nevada Corporation.

And in 1988, she joined SNC full-time as a financial consultant.

While automating the accounting system, she noticed that SNC was miscalculating expenses and losing money on every contract.

She flagged it, fixed it, and kept the company afloat.

Six years later, in 1994, she and her husband Fatih, both employees at the time, mortgaged their house and acquired the company for less than $5M.

Over the next 30 years, they transformed SNC from a 20-person regional contractor into a multi-billion-dollar aerospace and defense company with 4,000 employees.

Eren became Chairwoman and President.

Fatih took on the CEO role.

Together, they made 20 acquisitions, launched a commercial space division, and landed contracts with NASA, the DoD, the Army, and the Air Force.

For years, Boeing was the undisputed leader in America’s nuclear command-and-control aircraft.

They built the original “Doomsday” planes and held the lucrative maintenance contract for decades.

But one day, the Air Force announced they needed a new generation of those planes.

The project was massive: a $13.1B contract to develop hardened aircraft that could survive electromagnetic pulses, coordinate national security operations mid-air, and act as mobile command posts during a nuclear war.

Everyone assumed Boeing would win.

But Eren started preparing years before the bid.

She invested $175M to overhaul SNC’s digital infrastructure.

Built a $100M hangar near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

And offered the Air Force something rare in defense: speed, innovation, and an open system that returned IP rights to the government.

On April 26, 2024, Eren got the call: SNC had won and is now on the hook to deliver a nuclear-ready airborne command system by 2036.

They’ve already flown the first of five used 747-8s they bought from Korean Air for $675M to their new facility.

This isn’t the first time Eren’s built something from scratch.

In 2021, she and Fatih spun off their space division into Sierra Space, now valued at $5.3B.

They’re developing:
- Dream Chaser, a reusable cargo spaceplane that lands like a commercial jet
- LIFE™ habitat, expandable space living quarters for low Earth orbit
- A new commercial space station in partnership with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin

Eren has been honored as one of Forbes’ Top 10 Self-Made Women in America.

And through her Ozmen Foundation, she’s built the Ozmen Center for Entrepreneurship and Ozmen Institute for Global Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she earned her MBA.