I wasTuna ÖztürkI amTyler Blackford

01The problem

My name does not survive contact with English.

Tuna is a fish in English, and it is the tinned one. Öztürk has two characters an American keyboard does not have, so it arrived misspelled in most of the systems anybody typed it into: calendar invites, contracts, badges, the address line of the reply. For years that was a running joke and nothing more. I was selling to people who already knew me, and a name you have to spell is a small tax you stop noticing.

What changed was the volume. Introducing yourself twenty times at a conference in New York is a different exercise from introducing yourself twice in Istanbul, and the same thirty seconds happened at the start of every one of them.

Said to my face, repeatedly

• “Tuna, like the fish?
• “Sorry, could you say that again?
• “How do you spell the second one?
• “Is Tuna a first name?
• “Sorry, I will just call you T.

02The experiment

I tried a name an English speaker could hold.

In 2024 we opened a New York office and I was writing to companies that had never heard of us. I picked a name that an American ear does not stop on and used it on one round of outreach, the way you would test a subject line. It was not a decision about who I am. It was a decision about what to put on line one of an email.

There was no strategy deck and no naming workshop. I did not tell anyone I was American, I did not move, and I did not stop being from Istanbul. I stopped spending the first half of every introduction on spelling.

03The result

It worked more than it had any business working.

The friction went first, which is what I was after: introductions got shorter and my name arrived intact. Then something I was not looking for showed up. The same emails, from the same company, about the same work, started reaching a second call more often.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because it is the one people repeat. I did not run a controlled experiment and I am not offering you a number. What I can tell you is that the product did not change that quarter, the team did not change, the pitch did not change, and the pattern was consistent enough that I stopped treating it as coincidence. Make of it what you like. I found it uncomfortable and I kept using the name.

04In order

One career, running through both names.

1. 2019 to 2023

   Tuna Öztürk

   Building Neon Apps out of Istanbul with my business partner Destan, under the name I was born with.

2. 2024

   Expansion

   A New York office and a client list that had never met me. Introductions every day, to people with no reason to work at my name.

3. 2024

   The experiment

   I started introducing myself as Tyler Blackford. Nothing else about the company or the work moved.

4. 2024 to 2025

   It stuck

   The friction went, business got easier in ways I had not predicted, and the name stopped being a test.

5. Today

   Tyler Blackford

   The name is official and it is the one on the work. Same person, same company, same city.

05The honest note

I would rather the last part had not been true.

The pronunciation and the spelling I would fix again tomorrow. The rest of it, the part where the same work travelled further under a different name, is not a fact about either name. It is a fact about the rooms, and I only know it because I happened to run the experiment on myself.

I am not recommending it to anyone and I am not going to pretend it was brave. It was practical, it worked, and I have been answering questions about it ever since. Which is why this page exists rather than a rumour.