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Ali Aydan: My latest thought piece is out on the Forbes Business Development Council.
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It started with a question I couldn’t answer about my own industry. Name ten security companies. Now describe what any of them actually stand for. Not what they sell. What they believe. I drew a blank. And I’d been in the sector for years before founding DORIX. That silence told me something. The access…
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Ali Aydan: Control your home from anywhere.
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There’s a test we run on every piece of software before it goes live. I hand it to someone who didn’t build it and say nothing. No tutorial. No walkthrough. No PDF guide. If they can’t figure it out in under sixty seconds, we’ve failed. This sounds obvious. It isn’t. The smart home industry…
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Ali Aydan: What is on my desk.
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Every founder I know has a book that arrived at exactly the right moment. Not the one everyone recommends. The one that found you when you needed it. For me, right now, it’s “Secrets of Sand Hill Road” by Scott Kupor.Kupor spent two decades inside Andreessen Horowitz. He wrote this book from the investor’s…
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Ali Aydan: The line between commercial and residential is blurring.
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And most buildings aren’t ready. Walk into a new co-working space in Shoreditch, and it looks like someone’s living room. Velvet sofas. Soft lighting. A kitchen island where the reception desk used to be. Walk into a new luxury flat in Battersea and it feels like a members’ club.Concierge. Controlled entry. Digital access management…
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Ali Aydan: London is changing. Security must adapt.
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In 2024/25, the Met recorded over 951,803 crimes across the capital. Robbery is up nearly 9% year on year. Theft from the person runs at five times the national average. I’m not sharing those numbers to frighten anyone. I’m sharing them because most people I speak to, smart, successful people, have no idea how…
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Ali Aydan: Hardware is a transaction. Security is a service.
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For decades, the access control industry operated on a very simple model. You build a metal lock, sell it once, and walk away. The customer takes all the risk from that moment forward. At DORIX, we realised this transactional approach is fundamentally broken. A physical lock is static. The threats it faces are dynamic.…
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Ali Aydan: The “key under the mat” is a commercial liability.
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Ten years ago, the short-term rental market was built on personal handovers. You met the guest at the door. Or worse, you hid a brass key under a plant pot. That was acceptable when you managed a single property. It becomes a logistical nightmare when you manage fifty. The lesson for property operators today…
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Ali Aydan: A product name is a promise.
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In 1604, Sir Edward Coke wrote a sentence that defined British property rights. “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” At DORIX, we build the modern drawbridge. When we name a new piece of hardware, we reject random numbers and meaningless acronyms. A product name must carry weight. It must reflect a sense of place,…
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Ali Aydan: The smartest home is the one you ignore.
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The biggest failure of the modern “Smart Home” is clutter. You have an app for the lights. An app for the heating. An app for the blinds. An app for the music. That is not a smart home. That is a digital chore. True luxury is the absence of friction. If you have to…
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Ali Aydan: It is not a label. It is a promise.
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There is a cynicism in the modern market about the phrase “Designed in the UK”. Some see it as a marketing trick. They think it is a way to justify a higher price tag while the product is actually assembled in Shenzhen. But to an engineer, that label means something specific. It is not…