About
I grew up in Fenghua, just outside Ningbo. Merchant country. People there have always left, built something somewhere else, and carried it back. Nobody framed it as ambition. It was just what you did.
I studied in Nanjing for four years. Thermal energy and power engineering, at an aeronautics university. Turbines and combustion.
Then I came to Germany and did a master's in robotics and AI at KIT in Karlsruhe. Which is why I have been watching this field from the inside for years, long before it became the only thing anyone talks about.
Germany was supposed to be the answer. Stability, healthcare, paid vacation, no overtime culture. For a few years I believed it.
What I actually learned is that the system rewards you for optimizing around safety and quietly punishes you for having ambition. You can be useful here your whole life and never be respected. That is not a complaint. It is a description. Once you see it clearly, you have to decide what to do about it.
I decided to build things closer to the people who use them.
I spent a few years as a software engineer in Munich: a web slicer for industrial 3D printers, then computer vision deployed at the edge for customers. In 2025 I joined hallo theo in Berlin as a founding product engineer and built their tenant portal from nothing.
On June 2nd, 2026, I left that job to try building an AI company of my own. Along the way I ran Entrohub, a community of immigrant builders in Berlin and Munich, and learned more about distribution than any engineering job had taught me. In August I paused it.
What I want now is a team with a hard problem and real users, where I can put AI into the workflow and own the result end to end.
The one thing I am actually good at is sensing pain. What someone is carrying underneath the version of themselves they are showing you. Real pain and performed pain look identical from the outside and feel nothing alike.
That is what I look for in people, and it is why I write. Most of what I publish started as something I noticed and could not name yet.
If you are building something and the hard part is the part nobody sees, write to me at hello@yulifang.dev.