‘There is always the next challenge’

On the Promoting Enterprise portal, we are talking to the entrepreneurs on the 33 Under 33 list. This Secrets of Success initiative aims to shine the spotlight on a selection of successful young entrepreneurs, documenting their stories in an effort to inspire others to consider entrepreneurship as a career path. Today it is the turn of young Turkish Taylan Erol.

Taylan is from Turkey and has a degree in mechatronics engineering, thanks in large part to his hero – Tony Stark. Even though he is a fictional character, it was after watching Iron Man that Taylan decided to study mechatronics engineering for his undergraduate education. He believes that his entrepreneurial spirit is part of his character – he always wanted to develop his own technology without any bureaucratic boundaries. His company Appsilon Enterprise produces lab-grown diamonds.

Tell us about your business 

At Appsilon Enterprise, we aim to disrupt the status quo in the diamond industry with ethical, sustainable, and affordable diamonds backed by extensive research and development, not just for jewelry but also for high-tech applications such as optics, quantum computing and sensing, electronics, and batteries. It’s far from easy to create diamonds above the ground, yet we use advanced technologies to mimic the Earth’s conditions to form real diamonds in our cutting-edge facilities in Turkey and the Netherlands.

Where did you get the idea from? 

We did not even know that it was possible to synthesize diamonds above the ground before a visit to a governmental institution back in 2016. Here we had our first encounter with two dysfunctional MPCVD reactors. The officials allowed us to synthesize diamonds if we were able to fix the machines. So, once we were successful and ready to sell the diamond product, we had to establish a company for billing.

How old were you when you first decided you would start your own business? 

Since the beginning of my high-school years, I wanted to start my own business.

How did you get it off the ground? 

We took angel investors on board to develop prototypes and, once the gemstone was successful, we took a venture capital investment. Together with family offices in Turkey, we started to scale the business and, in August 2022, we had a private equity investment for serious expansion.

Who did you turn to for help? 

Since our investors invest in many companies, they can guide us effectively once we face challenges. Also, we have both technical and business advisors that help us along the way. We have a peer-to-peer relationship rather than an investor-founder or advisor-founder relationship.

Describe some of the obstacles you faced as a young person starting out in this business.

This business is 30% chemical recipe, 30% reactor technology, and 40% infrastructure. Even though we are competent in reactor technology and recipe processing, the infrastructure has to be sustainable and we faced problems along the way. Since this is a special process that needs to operate 24/7 and should not be disturbed, it has to work like a highly efficient factory. We made mistakes related to infrastructure but learned lessons from them and gained experience.

How do you define success? 

I think if you want to be successful you have to work very hard, be at the right place at the right time and find the right resourceful people with a similar vision and make them believe in your story. But, I believe that there is no such thing as permanent success, there is an endless road that you travel trying to reach success. I will never define myself as someone who has reached the ultimate success, there is always the next challenge.

What was the most challenging aspect of setting up your business? 

Since we are doing a very niche business, and it is a more capital-intensive field than the software industry, it is difficult to find investors who will believe in your story. However, our current stakeholders are people who understand this challenge and share the same vision as us. What’s more, material startups are not popular or common in Turkey, and the experience of both entrepreneurs and investors is therefore scarce.

What has been the most rewarding part of your journey so far? 

The most rewarding part of our journey is to see our young teammates starting from scratch and working with us to become even more competent than we are.

What are the future goals of your business, and how will you go about achieving them? 

We actually have two goals. The first is to scale our reactors and team members to increase our revenue a minimum of five times in a maximum of five years in our facilities in Turkey. The second is to integrate diamond in quantum and semiconductor technologies through our R&D facility in the Netherlands. We are already collaborating with universities on research projects, and we want the diamond to become the next silicon for information technologies.

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs out there?

Always hire people that are better than you are, make room in your team when you discover talented people, and do not ever give up!

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