The moderator introduced me as a teenage entrepreneur. I watched the room recalibrate. Arms uncrossed. Smiles appeared. The expressions shifted from "peer" to "how interesting", which is a polite way of saying "not serious."
Labels are efficient. They compress complex information into a word or two. Teenage. Entrepreneur. Turkish. Developer. Each one activates a set of assumptions in the listener's mind, and those assumptions are almost never checked against reality.
The word "category" has a history worth knowing. It comes from ancient Greek, where it meant accusation or charge. To categorise someone, etymologically, is to level a charge against them. To assign them a position they did not choose.
This is not a coincidence. Categories are acts of power. The person who categorises decides what matters and what does not. When someone calls me a "teenage entrepreneur", they have decided that my age is the most relevant fact about me. Not the company, not the team, not the work. The age.
I have been called many things. Prodigy. Wunderkind. The youngest founder of whatever. Each label carries its own freight.
"Prodigy" implies natural talent, which erases the work. Six years of writing code, managing teams, shipping products, making mistakes, and fixing them. The word "prodigy" makes it sound like I woke up one morning and it all came naturally. It did not.
"Young CEO" implies a qualifier. It says: you are a CEO, but. The "young" is not a compliment. It is an asterisk. It tells the listener to adjust their expectations downward.
"Turkish developer" flattens both the Turkish and the developer parts. It places me in a geography and a role and closes the file.
The Turkish thinker Cemil Meriç had a phrase I keep returning to: "Labels are the gravestones of thought." Once you have named something, you stop looking at it. The label becomes a substitute for understanding.
I see this in business constantly. A client hears "18 years old" and their next question is always about supervision. Who is really running things? Where are the adults? The label "young" has triggered an assumption, and no amount of evidence will fully override it. The assumption was made before the conversation started.
There is a psychological concept called anchoring. The first piece of information you receive about something becomes the frame through which you interpret everything that follows. If the first thing you learn about me is my age, everything after that is filtered through it. The architecture decisions, the team management, the revenue: all evaluated against the baseline of "but he is eighteen."
The only defence against this is to control the anchor. Which is why my website, my LinkedIn, my introductions never lead with age. The first thing you learn should be what I do, not when I was born.
I am not asking for age-blindness. My age is part of my story and I am not embarrassed by it. What I am asking for is the basic courtesy of being evaluated on the work before the biography.
Do not categorise me. Or if you must, at least look at the evidence before you file the charge.