The Edelkrone Story and Kadir Köymen

I stumbled onto a YouTube series called “Başka Bir Şey” (“Something Else”). A bunch of unusual people were chasing unusual things, and I loved what they were making. A bit of digging led me to a company called Edelkrone. Kadir Köymen used to shoot short films and teach video production on YouTube. Today he designs and manufactures his own patented products with Edelkrone, one of the most innovative companies in Turkey.

I really liked their office and the “incubation centre” concept they had built. A few weeks later I was in Ankara for something else, so I got in touch with Kadir Bey to meet him and hear the Edelkrone story, and we set a date. On a Saturday around noon he was at the Tomorrow office with his family, and he welcomed us warmly. We had planned to talk for an hour, but the conversation flowed so naturally that two and a half hours went by without us noticing. In this post I want to share Edelkrone’s and Kadir Köymen’s different story.

In short: Edelkrone was founded in 2009 and makes award-winning camera accessories. It’s a visionary brand that always puts innovation first, and one of the companies with the most patents in Turkey.

Kadir Köymen studied mechanical engineering and business at the University of Nottingham, and through all of it kept making short films. He is deeply in love with cinema.

The “Tomorrow” office

The part of the company that deals with today runs from another location. The part that deals with tomorrow lives in what they call the Tomorrow Office, something like an R&D centre. I visited with a friend, and the office is far from standard: playful and inspiring. Nobody who works there has their own desk. There are no fixed job descriptions either; people work by project, so they keep moving around. Rooms are designed for how they’re used. One example is a focus room closed off with a slow roller shutter, so nobody disturbs you. They picked a shutter on purpose: it opens and closes slowly, so once you’re in, you stay and keep working for hours. There are no working hours, and there’s a very different management model, which I’ll get to later. We grabbed our coffees and settled into the armchairs in the corner.

First we talked about ourselves, and then the conversation found its own way.

“Nobody is chasing anything new”

The man in front of me was genuinely different. That’s the only word I have for it. I’ve listened to plenty of talks and presentations about entrepreneurship and read a lot of articles, but he is one of the rare people who made me think this much and look at things from new angles. I came without any prepared questions so the conversation could flow, and every answer raised new questions for me anyway.

When we started talking about entrepreneurship in Turkey, he said nobody is really chasing anything new. At Edelkrone, even when putting a finished product on sale makes commercial sense, they won’t release it unless it brings something new compared with what’s already on the market.

Not the idea: the problem

People aren’t trying to solve problems. We should focus on the problem to the point of obsession. What matters isn’t the product, and it isn’t the idea. It’s the problem.

Sometimes, after a good event or at the end of a great week, I find myself motivated and ready to work. But something is missing: I don’t have an idea I believe in and want to chase. I had been stuck on this “idea” question for a while. When I asked how they move forward on projects and how brainstorming works for them, he said the key is to focus on the problem.

Discipline = rest

I asked what he does about time management, one of the most important skills today, and how he handles it. He said time is critical, and people who manage their time well can actually achieve anything. “Give anyone enough time and they can think of anything.” I told him that I’m easily affected by outside factors, so my motivation depends on what’s around me. “That’s where discipline comes in. You have to find a way to motivate yourself. Discipline actually means rest. Disciplined people never get tired.”

1 + 1 + 1 ≠ 3

When you bring the right people together, their value doesn’t add up, it multiplies. By complementing each other, they can make great things.

If someone has already done what you’re doing, stop forcing it. Find a new field and go after your passion.

I hold the film industry apart from everything else. I’m passionately attached to it. As a society we need stories, our drugs, and cinema plays a very important role there.

Becoming a brand means making people feel good. If you’ve given people confidence that they’ll be happy with what you make, you’ve become a brand.

Meanwhile we were snacking on almonds from the coffee table, and the conversation turned to why snacking matters. “We’re actually very simple, primitive creatures. Snacking during the day convinces our brain that there’s food around and no famine.” I honestly don’t know how we got there, but it was a lovely conversation. We hadn’t noticed the time passing. Kadir Bey needed to send an email, so we looked around the office a bit more. All the odd tech toys around the office caught my eye, and of course I made sure to take a photo of his bookshelf. We got something to drink and picked up where we left off.

“As a kid, I was a real maker”

As a kid I wanted to make something new out of everything I found. When I was eight, we got a camera at home. I shot films with it everywhere, on the streets and on holidays, and then edited them by hand on analog tape. Even though it was a very technical, expensive device for its time, my family never stopped me from playing with it. Conscious parents matter so much for children. Let children make mistakes and learn from them. As long as it won’t kill them, let them make mistakes about everything. Stop scaring them and stop protecting them.

If you ask me, this applies to adults too. We always learn more from our failures. Stop protecting and scaring adults as well, so they can take risks.

Schools don’t raise entrepreneurs; they raise employees for entrepreneurs. Some people take the position of leader and gather followers behind them. A leader can’t understand a follower, and a follower can’t understand a leader.

A very different way to run a company

Now let me tell you about a system I really loved. Edelkrone has 60 employees, and they decide their own salaries, holidays and working hours, who gets hired, and which projects get approved. How?

They built a carefully designed piece of software. First, authority plans are defined. Then every employee distributes their 100 authority points among their colleagues. Nobody knows who gave points to whom; that’s stored only in the software. Whenever a decision needs to be made, everyone votes, and the software weighs each vote by the share of points that person holds. That’s it.

So every single employee, down to the least experienced, has a say in how the company is run. When someone new is hired, their salary is cut from everyone’s pay and paid from a shared pool, and the employees make the hiring decision. Twice a week, ideas and projects are put up and challenged openly, and whether a project continues or gets dropped is again decided by vote. In my view, this system has created something truly collective, and great teamwork. I believe its success will be proven soon.

“We won’t file patents anymore”

I mentioned that Edelkrone is one of the companies with the most patents in Turkey. Kadir Bey tells me they won’t file any more. When I ask why, he says it matters more to earn the people’s patent: even if someone copies their products, people will stand with them and choose the original. I hope that’s how it plays out, but if you ask me, Edelkrone is too honourable for this league.

“Idols don’t become idols by looking at idols”

Then I ask him about the people he sees as idols. Like all of us, he says, he has learned things from certain people, but he doesn’t dwell on them. Instead of idols, he thinks we should focus on the people we serve; that’s where the answers are. Once again, he hits from an angle I didn’t expect.

Give it five minutes a day

If you have something new in your head, if you want to get good at something, give it just five minutes a day. Half an hour might feel like too much, and you can find excuses for fifteen minutes, but five minutes costs you nothing. Do it every day. On the day you can’t give it even that, you shouldn’t be able to look yourself in the mirror. Be ashamed when you skip it, and keep going with determination.

Einstein made relativity on a deadline

Set yourself a deadline and leave yourself no choice but to meet it. You only see how strong you are when being strong is the only option left. Einstein only managed to finish relativity a few months before his deadline. We do things when we have to.

Work is a bit like sport

Even after your brain feels like it’s exploding, push a little further. That’s how you grow, and that’s how you find your limit. It’s like training: push and you improve. Convince your body that it can do it.

We have to think global

Ideas launched in our country today usually start with the local market. Going global is easy now, especially for software. Even if you don’t speak English, hire a translator, add an English option to your website, point your ads abroad. Unless we export, entrepreneurship can at best bring us up to the pace of developed countries. It can’t make us better than them.

Today Edelkrone makes almost all of its sales abroad. I completely agree with this way of thinking. As big a market as Turkey is, we need to think bigger.

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I told Kadir Bey that the visit felt like therapy for me, and that we’d love to see him on stage more often. I wrote this so we can all take some inspiration from it. If you have any comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.