Yaz A. Caleb.
Founder. Architect. Outlier.
Hi there, I'm Yaz, 16, building what Silicon Valley forgot.
Full-time founder at PlawLabs since '22. Nomad, remotely based in London.
Dropped out to build agent-native tools, write iconoclastic essays, and live like the internet's still a frontier.
Teenage years aren't for waiting. They're for shipping and betting.
Backstory
Expand to read moreCollapse
• Born Yağız Erkam Çelebi in Ankara, Turkey.
• Turkish, with full paternal Albanian origin.
• Self-taught in English and software - learned from Harvard, MIT, and YC Startup School. Pursuing GED.
• Diagnosed with ADHD. 6'4. Plays tennis. Sucks at basketball.
• Passionate about fitness, longevity, and self-mastery.
• Gave a TED-Ed talk at 14 on data privacy ("Terms and Conditions").
• Proud son of a wrongly imprisoned former governor - named in his ECHR case.
• Built the world's first general-purpose AI assistant (Clade AI) at 14 - a hardware-native Alexa alternative. Turned down a $21M seed offer from the UAE. Shut down after team collapse.
• One of the first civilian testers of GPT-2 and DALL·E 1. That's when the obsession with generative AI began.
• Philosophically post-nationalist, contrarian yet conservative, pro-America, and a believer in tribal merit.
• Interested in theology, sociology, anti-populist politics, and entrepreneurship as tools for building better civilizations.
• Believes in intentionality: meet to date, date to marry.
Essays
Projects
Now
→ Raising $2M pre-seed for VulnZap (at $10M post). → Renaming PlawLabs to Plaw Inc., moving to SF. → Hiring 2 founding engineers + a lead designer. → I move fast, team with high-agency people. And believe in giving back.
When I'm not in meetings or strategizing, I still ship code & design:
Current commit, and the first one.