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Ali Aydan: If you are still carrying a metal key, you are living in the past
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We drive cars that unlock as we approach them. We access our bank accounts with a glance. We pay for coffee with a watch. Yet, when it comes to our most valuable asset—our home—we still rely on a jagged piece of brass invented in the 1860s. It is an anachronism. In 2026, the physical…
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Ali Aydan: The most dangerous time in business is when it is quiet.
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The lights are back on across the industry today. For the last two weeks, the market was silent. The phones stopped ringing. The emails stopped flooding in. For many, that was downtime. For the DORIX leadership team, that was “Architecture Time.” I believe that strategy is impossible to write in the chaos of a…
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Ali Aydan: My prediction for 2026 is controversial.
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We will see the decline of residential facial recognition and the dominance of the fingerprint. For the last few years, the industry has pushed cameras everywhere. “Unlock with your face” became the standard pitch. But at DORIX, we made a conscious decision to avoid it. Why? Because privacy is the ultimate luxury. People are…
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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 most expensive word in business is ‘Yes’.
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Earlier this year, we killed a product feature that was 90% complete. It was a face recognition for one of our smart locks. The R&D team had spent months on it. The capital expenditure was significant. The code was written. Technically, it worked. The market data suggested it would drive short-term sales. But there…
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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…