I want to be careful how I say this, because it's not a complaint and it's not a criticism of the people involved. The people, in my experience, were almost always good. Smart, motivated, genuinely invested in the work.

This is about structure, not people.

For the first decade of my career — starting out in Istanbul, eventually moving to London — the professional goal was always to go bigger. The logic was obvious: bigger clients meant bigger budgets, harder problems, more prestigious names on the portfolio. And I got there. Volkswagen. L'Oréal. Turkish Airlines. Anadolu Group. These were real projects with real scope, and I don't regret any of them.

But they were slow. Not slow because anyone was lazy. Slow because of what I now understand is simply how large organisations function.

A creative decision in a large company doesn't belong to any one person. It gets made by committee, which means it has to survive a sequence of approvals. Each approval is a potential point of resistance, and resistance usually comes from discomfort with risk. So the process optimises for safety. The bold version of the idea gets rounded off. The sharp headline becomes a neutral one. The distinctive visual direction becomes a more conventional one. Not because anyone wanted that — but because consensus, at scale, tends toward the centre.

I'm not built for that pace. I think fast, I form opinions quickly, and I want to see the work live. Watching a good idea die in a committee meeting was genuinely painful, and it happened enough times that I started to question whether the tradeoff was worth it.

What I found when I started working more with startups was something I hadn't expected: the smallness of the table was a feature, not a limitation. A founder can say yes or no in the room. There's no sign-off process, no brand governance committee, no legal review for a headline. The decision is made, and then the work continues.

That speed doesn't make the work less serious. It makes it more honest. You either made the right call or you didn't, and you find out quickly. There's no bureaucracy to absorb the consequences of a bad decision or share credit for a good one.

The work I do now isn't smaller in ambition. Some of these startups are building things more interesting than anything I worked on at a large corporation. The difference is just in the pace, the directness, and the feeling — which I've come to need — that what I do on Monday has a chance of being real by Thursday.

Istanbul taught me to work fast, London taught me to work strategically, and startups taught me that the two don't have to be in conflict.

For me, that's the right table.