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Ali Aydan: The lights are on here at 19 Berkeley Street
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Ali Aydan says; Conventional advice says a CEO should ‘unplug’ today. We are told to seek balance. I respectfully disagree. If you are building a legacy, you do not punch a clock. You cannot unplug from a mission you believe in. But you can shift gears. The danger for a Founder is not working…
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Ali Aydan: Tonight, the technology should disappear.
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Ali Aydan says; For 364 days a year, my team and I obsess over encryption protocols. We analyse battery life curves. We debate the tensile strength of hardened steel components in the War Room. But on Christmas Eve, none of that matters. When you close your front door tonight, you are not interacting with…
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Ali Aydan: The door handle is the first handshake of any building.
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Ali Aydan says; I recently walked through a prime residential development in London. The lobby featured imported marble. The glass was triple-glazed. The location was perfect. Then I reached for the front door. The handle was light. The lock mechanism rattled. It felt hollow. In one second, the illusion of luxury collapsed. The human…
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Ali Aydan: For a decade, the investment memo was simple.
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Purely digital. Zero inventory. Infinite scale. The market convinced itself that British manufacturing was a nostalgia play, not a business strategy. Capital chased lines of code because they were cheap to replicate. It avoided machined steel because it was heavy, complex, and required patience. But the tide is turning. The digital sector is now…
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Ali Aydan: I hired two senior leaders from the biggest giants in our industry.
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The standard advice for a founder is to be careful with corporate veterans. People warn you that they are used to massive budgets. They say they have forgotten how to build from scratch. Often, that is a valid risk. But sometimes, you find the exception. I did not hire these leaders just for the…
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Ali Aydan: We do not manufacture SKU numbers
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We build castles. In the hardware industry, products are usually defined by codes. XS4, S-Pro, X-Series. These codes are efficient. They are logical. But they are also cold. They tell the engineering team that this object is a commodity. It is just another unit on a spreadsheet to be cost-optimised and shipped. We wanted…
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Ali Aydan: My CFO asked if we should run a Christmas promotion.
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I said NO. The argument for a December sale is seductive. A 20% discount spikes Q4 volume. It pads the cash flow statement before the year ends. It clears inventory. But it destroys something that is much harder to build. Brand equity. At DORIX, we are not in the volume gadget business. We are…
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Ali Aydan: The smart security market is noisy.
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We are betting on silence. In 2025, the access control industry obsessed over adding more. More integrations. More flashing lights. More complexity. Competitors raced to pack functionalities into door handles until they looked less like architectural hardware and more like toys. We took a different path at DORIX. We analysed the market and realised…
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Ali Aydan: I stared at my screen yesterday and realised something was missing.
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For two years, I have shown up here every single day. I wrote about leadership. I shared lessons from over 20 years of building companies across the globe. My goal was always to help professionals grow faster and avoid the mistakes I made in the past. But recently, I felt a disconnect. The advice…
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Ali Aydan: Think you’ve got it all figured out?
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Early in my career, I was convinced I had the answers. I’d seen what worked, what didn’t, and I truly believed I knew how to build the perfect cross-functional team. Then reality kicked in. Like many others, I hit the peak of Mount Stupid — high confidence, low actual understanding. And as I tumbled…