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 and constantly trying to go faster or do them better.

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 hundreds of 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.