In January 2026 Andy was a freshman building a to-do app for students. You typed whatever was on your mind and the app sorted it onto a board. It worked. But it kept turning vague thoughts into obligations the student never actually chose.

He could not fix that without understanding why. The app became a research question: every way a tool, working exactly as designed, can quietly start deciding for the person using it. The question became a method. The method became a company.

Today Andy co-founds crest with Jameson Ackerman, building agency-provenance infrastructure for human-agent work. Its axiom is the answer to the freshman’s problem: no agency without provenance. He leads the Applied AI Club at Penn State and studies Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Smeal.