Tulip Institute

FOUNDER

MEET SIAMAK

Most people who understand how technology companies get built don't trust the humanities. Most people who trust the humanities don't understand how companies actually get built. I've spent twenty years standing at that exact fault line, and it turned out to be the only place the real question was visible.A product design veteran who designed and shipped multimillion-dollar products for multinational companies across two decades in Silicon Valley. At the pinnacle of that career, I went to MIT Sloan, not for a credential, but for an answer. What I found instead was a confirmation: the design-led model that had quietly explained everything I'd witnessed in twenty years of practice was nowhere in the curriculum. The most elite business education in the world wasn't teaching it. That absence was the loudest signal I'd ever received. Twenty years of shipping real products had already taught me that the humanities aren't decoration, they're the load-bearing structure underneath every technology decision that actually holds at scale.Top business schools couldn't explain what I kept seeing: why certain companies dent the universe while better-funded incumbents optimize toward irrelevance, despite equal resources, equal talent, equal market access.Burning out at the pinnacle of "success" didn't just slow me down, it handed me the most honest data point I'd ever had. I had executed the conventional model from the inside. I knew exactly how it broke and why it broke quietly. That forced a more uncomfortable question: what if entrepreneurship itself had been misdefined into a soulless pursuit of over-optimization, systematically disconnected from what actually preserves human judgment and meaning at scale?A quest for the answer became an obsession. Why do design-led companies consistently outperform the S&P by more than 200%? Why does success so often conceal fragile human systems that fracture precisely when scale accelerates? The answer wasn't another strategy framework. It was how these companies are wired: Human, Innovation, and Autonomy in the right order. That became POETPRENEURS.No pure technologist writes that book. No pure humanist gets taken seriously enough to build what came next. No academic builds it as a startup. The synthesis required standing in the middle long enough to see what neither side could, and being willing to pay the cost of that position.If you are a builder who has always felt that the existing paths, the accelerators, the MBA programs, the VC playbooks, were designed for a version of ambition you don't quite recognize as your own; if your instincts live at the intersection of craft and technology, of meaning and scale; if you've been told your range is a liability rather than the point, Tulip Institute was built for you.Tulip Institute is what that cost made inevitable: a design-led entrepreneurial lab for the next generation of poetpreneurs, builders who lead ventures at the intersection of technology and the humanities, in the age of AI. Not a program. Not a degree. A new institutional model for a category of founder the existing system was never built to serve, launching now, because the convergence of AI, organizational collapse, and a generation of founders who refuse the false choice between meaning and scale has made the moment impossible to defer.Tulip Institute is the applied extension of that research — four years in, and building.