The Founders
Two engineers who think computing should feel like a conversation.
Felix Schlegel and Marvin von Hagen started the Interaction Company of California in Palo Alto. Between them: degrees from Stanford, Cambridge, and TUM, and time spent building at the companies that define modern engineering ambition.
Marvin von Hagen & Felix Schlegel
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
01Co-founder & CTO
Felix M. Schlegel
Felix builds the systems that let an assistant act in the real world without breaking it - the orchestration, the memory, the guardrails that keep Poke fast and trustworthy at scale.
A computer scientist by training, Felix spent his early career deep in the engineering rigor of TUM in Munich, where Germany's most demanding technical program shaped how he thinks about reliability and systems design.
Before Poke, he worked at the frontier of applied engineering, where shipping software that controls physical, high-stakes systems leaves no room for hand-waving. That discipline is now baked into Poke's harness: every action the assistant takes is observable, reversible, and accountable.
02Co-founder & CEO
Marvin von Hagen
Marvin sets the product's point of view: that the future of computing should feel less like operating software and more like delegating to someone who already gets it.
Marvin studied at Stanford and at the University of Cambridge, with roots at TUM in Munich - a path across three of the world's most selective programs that fused research depth with a builder's impatience.
He spent time inside the kind of companies that bend hard problems into shipped products - the Tesla and SpaceX school of engineering ambition - before turning that same intensity on a softer, stranger problem: making an AI assistant that people actually want texting them every day.
03The bet
Why they built Poke.
- The premise
- Software makes you do the work of telling it what to do. The next interface should do the opposite - understand the goal and carry it out.
- The medium
- Not a chatbot window or a productivity suite. The message thread - the place attention already lives - where a great assistant can simply reach you.
- The bar
- Poke has to be good enough to trust with the things you'd hand a real chief of staff. Anything less is a demo, not a product.