Yaz A. Caleb.
Left school at 16. Built my first company at 14. Now building the infrastructure AI needs to operate in the real world—authorization, safety, sovereignty.
Agents will book flights, move money, sign contracts. There's no kernel-level answer yet for "on whose authority?" That's the problem.
Backstory
Backstory
Born Yağız Erkam Çelebi. Grew up in Ankara, half-Albanian. Self-taught English and CS, finished high school three years early. Most of what I know came from CS50, MIT OCW, and YC Startup School.
Mentored at NASA Space Apps 2023. Started Clade AI from my front porch - hardware-native assistant that ran inference off-device. Part of 1517 Fund's community and Buildspace N&W S5. Grew to 30+ people, shut down when the team split. Same year I got early access to GPT-3 and DALL·E 1 before public release, gave a TED-Ed talk on Terms and Conditions.
Since then: essays in public, small composable tools over platforms, systems work over features.
6'4". ADHD. Isolation lifts, tennis. Turkish/Japanese/Italian food in that order. Eight-year-old labrador named Princess Maggie.
Library
Library
Finished or will finish by 2026. Ribbon = highly recommend.
Essays
See AllNow
Plaw (cofounder) — building VulnZap (security for AI-generated code) and Veto (agent authorization). Closing $1M pre-seed—angel spots open.
Part-time at ASU — CS/Econ classes, research in their AI/cybersecurity labs.
Hiring 2 founding engineers (AI/ML, systems, security) and a product designer.
Still hands-on:
History
AI meeting notetaker. Creative copywriting.
ThirdLayer (YC W25)
AI browsing copilot. Product engineer.
HyperCover
Tinder for job apps. Didn't work.
Clade AI
Hardware AI assistant. 30+ people, shut down.
Decentralized search. Web3 authenticity layer.
Current commit, and the first one.
"When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it." — Christopher Alexander