Munich. Stanford. KONUX. A hospital bed at 29. And the question that became my life’s work.
I dropped out of a Master’s at Stanford to build KONUX, an industrial-AI company making railways, including Deutsche Bahn’s, more reliable and sustainable.
By every metric the world cares about, I had made it.
Then, in January 2021,
I ended up in a hospital bed.
My body had kept the score on a decade of optimizing for output over everything else.
Burnout isn’t a productivity failure.
It’s an alignment failure.
The gap between who you are and how you’re living, grown too wide to sustain. No task manager fixes that. And almost no AI even tries.
I came back because of a conviction I couldn’t shake:
The world doesn’t need more AI.
It needs a different narrative around it.
So I asked a different question. What would AI look like if it were built to serve human alignment instead of undermining it?