Digital Proust Questionnaire: Yoldaş Ertuğrul

Emakina Group has rapidly grown in recent years, in part thanks to our managing directors leading the way. But who are these MDs, besides leaders in digital, creative and business growth? Let’s sneak a peak inside their heads with this new series: Emakina’s Digital Proust questionnaires!

The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlour game popularised (though not devised) by Marcel Proust. The French essayist and novelist believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature. This is an adapted basic Proust Questionnaire for the digital age.

Yoldaş Ertuğrul is managing director of Emakina TR, having worked his way up the Dutch-Turkish company Relephant, which joined the Emakina Group in 2013. He is motivated by the fight of small firms against digital media giants, and wants to change people’s lives for the better – not least, the four students he is sponsoring through college. And a little secret: he’d like to be reborn as Batman.

1. What is your idea of happiness?

Knowing that I’ll be remembered by at least a few people for having changed their life for the better.

2. What is your greatest fear?

To have had no meaningful impact on the life of others, at the end of this ride.

3. Which historical figure do you most admire?

Karl Marx

That face when the class war speech just ruined your date.

4. Which living person do you most admire?

Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and philosopher.

5. Who is your favourite writer?

Michael Parenti

6. Who is your favourite fictional character?

The Joker, Batman’s nemesis.

Illustration by Darwin Ortega Castillo

7. What part of the digital media industry makes you happy?

The ability to win battles as David versus the Goliaths of this world, something that is impossible in any other industry.

8. What part of the digital media industry makes you unhappy?

The inability to win the war itself against the same Goliaths.

9. Who/what inspired you most in your career?

Robert Goedemans, one of Relephant’s founders and now an Emakina board member.

This is Chomsky, not Robert Goedemans, but here was the best place to add a picture.

10. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Not finished yet, but currently sponsoring four people to get through college.

11. What tech company do you wish you had started?

Google.

12. What digital project would you have most loved to be a part of?

Uber

13. What is your favourite digital app/ tool?

Uber.

14. What digital app/tool that does not exist would you would like to create?

Health analytics app that would help discover illnesses/diseases earlier.

15. What is the trait you are most proud of in yourself?

Never intimidated.

16. What is the trait you most admire in others?

Patience.

17. What is the trait you most dislike in others?

Slowness

18. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

Batman

Fat Face Batman Rises by Fat Face & Me

19. What is your most treasured possession, and why?

Can’t think of any possession that I “treasure”.

20. What is your motto?

Be a man’s man.