Alumni Spotlight: Kenneth Rhee ’20

ICS alumnus Kenneth Rhee has traveled a computer science path since childhood, from the curiosity of a fifth-grade gamer to attending a specialist CS high school and later working at Amazon, GOAT and Dassault Systemes. In just six years since graduating ICS, he has also founded two companies and is currently chief technology officer and co-founder of Neuron Industries.

Rhee graduated from UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) in 2020 with a bachelor’s in science degree in computer science. His ICS experiences included winning first place in the Butterworth Product Development Competition in 2019, which played a pivotal role in his success after graduation.

Here, Rhee shares his journey from ICS student to thriving entrepreneur.

What brought you to UC Irvine and ICS?

I grew up in New Jersey and went to a magnet high school for computer science, and I started doing software engineering internships in New York City in the tenth grade. So by the time I was applying to college, I already knew what I wanted to do with my life. What I did not have was proximity. If I was going to build software, I felt like I had to be in California, because that is the tech capital of the world, and everything I wanted to be near was out here.

I visited a lot of campuses, and UC Irvine was the one that stopped me. It was beautiful and serene in a way that none of the others were, and I could picture myself doing four years of hard work there. It also mattered that ICS was its own school rather than a few classes inside an engineering department. Once I got there, what actually kept me was the people. I was enamored with how talented the professors and the students were, and that raised my own bar immediately.

What first sparked your interest in computer science?

I always wanted to work on computers. As a kid, I played a lot of video games, and Roblox was what first made me curious, because I didn’t want to just play a game, I wanted to make my own. That meant Lua scripting, and as a fifth grader it was genuinely difficult. I didn’t really understand what I was doing. But I understood that there was a way to make the thing in my head into a real thing other people could play, and that idea never left me.

The moment it turned into a career was in ninth grade. I built a GPA calculator, because kids at my high school were obsessed with their GPAs, and it blew up across the entire school. Everybody knew who I was. That was the first time I saw how fast software scales and how helpful it can be to people, and how little it takes to start: no capital, no permission, just tenacity and persistence. That is when I fell in love with software. Getting into a magnet high school for computer science is where I learned the actual discipline behind it, computer science and software engineering as fields rather than as a hobby.

What was your experience at ICS like?

It was a really awesome journey. Two things stand out. The first is that ICS let me upskill into the harder material, the algorithms and data structures courses, and that reinforced the academic side of what I had been doing informally since high school. The second is the people. I met genuinely talented, smart students who were passionate about computer science, and those are friends I still keep in touch with to this day.

The professors were what made it, though. They were passionate about teaching, not just about their research, and that is not true everywhere. My favorite had this collection of funny stories that kept programming genuinely entertaining while still substantiating the knowledge underneath it. They treated the class the way a coach treats a team, which is a rare thing in a technical course, and it’s the reason why the hard material stuck with me.

Two others stand out for the same reason. One professor was great at teaching us how to reason, and was rigorous without ever making it feel punishing. The other pointed computer science at research problems well outside of software, which changed how I thought about what these tools are actually for. All three of them were simply very good at teaching, and having three people like that in a row is what makes a program worth attending.

How has your experience at ICS influenced your work after graduation?

After ICS I worked at Amazon, GOAT, and Dassault Systemes, and then I founded two companies. The higher-level coursework, algorithms and data structures especially, shaped how I think at work when I am designing complex systems. It doesn’t seem applicable while you are taking it, but you do use it constantly later.

Coursework matters more now, not less, because of AI. Your fundamentals are what keep you from producing AI slop. If you don’t understand what the machine is handing you and you can’t tell good output from confident nonsense, you certainly cannot debug it at three in the morning. The fundamentals keep AI tools safe to leverage.

Today I am the co-founder and CTO of Neuron Industries, in El Segundo, and we came out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 batch. YC is about as competitive as it gets, roughly one percent of the companies that apply get in, and the alumni list runs from Airbnb and Stripe to DoorDash and Coinbase, so being accepted was a milestone of its own. The more useful part is the density: You are suddenly surrounded by people who have already done the hard version of what you are attempting.

What we build is the Cortex AIC, an AI-native industrial controller meant to replace the PLC, the computer that runs the conveyors, pumps, and process lines in essentially every production and factory line in the country. My side of it is the software: the stack, the developer experience, and how a plant engineer actually programs the computer. The way I put it is that software engineering got 30 years of continuous innovation, version control, testing, code review, fast feedback, and controls engineering got almost none of it. We are trying to hand that industry the tooling my own field has taken for granted since I was sitting in ICS lectures.

Looking back at all of it, the biggest single factor in anything that worked out was persistence. You might not be the smartest person in the room, and honestly you can never be the smartest person in the room, because there will always be someone smarter. But if you have persistence, you can do anything.

Has winning the Butterworth Product Development Competition had an impact on your entrepreneurial journey?

A huge one. It was the first time I took an idea all the way through as a product rather than as code. We had a genuinely good idea, one that other people actually enjoyed, and then there was the whole process around it: building it out, standing in front of judges, pitching it, answering for it. That is where I learned what it actually takes to create a company, and I did it at university, before I founded WorkIPO.

It was also just exciting, and I think that matters. Winning gave me evidence that I could do the founder part, not only the engineering part, and that confidence gave me the boost to start something real. Everything I did at WorkIPO for the next three years was a bigger version of that same loop.

That line runs straight into my first company. I founded WorkIPO, a software development consultancy in Irvine, CA, and ran it as founder and CEO for three years, bootstrapped, growing it to a team of ten while it generated revenue. We built mission-critical enterprise systems, ERP, MES, and CRM platforms, for clients in manufacturing, construction, and industrial operations. That work is what first put me on factory floors, watching how the software that runs an industry actually behaves, and it is the direct line to what I do now. There is also something fitting about having built that company in Irvine, a few minutes from where I learned to do all of it.

I would encourage every ICS student to consider becoming an entrepreneur. I think being a founder is becoming a more important job, and one that more people will hold, because as LLMs and AI get more powerful, they empower more people to actually build the idea they’re imagining. The bottleneck moves from writing code to knowing what is worth building and being able to convince people of it. The Butterworth competition on campus is a great way to start.

Do you have any advice for ICS students and alumni?

Be open-minded and meet as many people as you can. Find clubs on campus that you actually enjoy, and build deep connections with your fellow students, not just a big contact list. UC Irvine and ICS are full of smart people, which is a real advantage, and every one of those connections end up being useful somewhere in your journey. More than useful, honestly. Having the community and support around you is what carries you through the hard parts.

These are the people you are going to be with for the rest of your life. My closest friends are still the ones that I met at UC Irvine. So invest there while it is easy to make relationships.

Anything else you would like to share?

Just this: Be bold and be persistent. Go outside of your comfort zone and explore what the world has to offer you, because it is endless. Empowered by UC Irvine and the ICS community behind you, you can go far. Do not be afraid to explore.