steyn knollema.

When I was a kid I took apart everything in the house. My parents stopped buying me nice things for a while. I just wanted to see how stuff worked, what was actually going on behind the plastic. I still do that, except now it's products and companies instead of clocks.

I'm Dutch. At fifteen I moved to the US for an exchange year with a family I'd never met, which looking back was kind of insane. Then I studied design engineering and business at the University of Twente, spent a year in Seoul, and now I'm at Penn doing an MSE in Integrated Product Design across Wharton, Engineering, and Design. I also do triathlons. I like doing things that are hard, getting out of my comfort zone, and learning fast.

Most of what I've worked on comes from the same instinct: something felt like it should exist, so I went and built it. Serpent Robotics started because I watched arborists do dangerous, repetitive pruning work and thought a robot should be doing that. ChatIT started because small Dutch companies needed AI tools but couldn't afford consultants. The investment fund was different, I reviewed 400+ startups and got better at telling the difference between ideas that sound good and ideas that actually work.

Finishing an MSE in Integrated Product Design at Penn this summer. Co-founded Serpent Robotics during the program. Before Penn I built an AI consultancy in the Netherlands and published a peer-reviewed paper on AR safety systems that came out of my bachelor's thesis.