I was born in Istanbul in 1983, and most of what I do now — for better or worse — traces back to two industries I fell into in my twenties: advertising and music. I spent some real time in agencies, doing the kind of work agencies do, and a longer stretch in the music business, close enough to see how a good idea gets made and how easily it gets ruined by the wrong people agreeing with it too quickly.
Both taught me the same lesson from different angles: having the right idea is maybe a third of the job. The rest is getting it into a shape other people can actually see.
I started The Plane — a boutique brand strategy and design studio. We're selective about who we work with on purpose, and most of what we do is closer to strategy than decoration, even though the visible output usually looks like design.
In parallel, I'm building Delphoy, a travel platform trying to solve a problem I ran into personally: most travel recommendations are based on where people say they want to go, not where they'd actually be happiest. It's psychometrics applied to something as ordinary as picking a destination — which sounds more serious than it is, most of the time it's just me trying to figure out why I like some cities and not others.
Outside of work, I'm mostly curious, in a way that isn't always convenient. I travel more than makes financial sense. I read more than I probably should, across subjects that have nothing to do with each other. I take electronics apart that were working fine, just to see how they were built — my track record putting them back together is mixed.
And I have a genuinely low tolerance for people who talk with more confidence than they've earned — MLM recruiters, fake gurus, travel vloggers narrating a place they clearly don't understand, anyone selling a PDF or a course dressed up as expertise. If someone tells me something works, my first instinct is to ask how they know, not to believe them because they said it with confidence. It's part of why I like reading the same historical event through a few different cultures' versions of it — the gaps between the accounts are usually more honest than any single one. That instinct shows up in how I work, how I read the news, and apparently, in the kind of joke I thought was funny enough to put on my own homepage.
That's the long version. If you got here from the short one, thanks for reading further than most people do.