Family Dinner Recap: Izzy Mokotoff

These days, Northwestern alum Izzy Mokotoff is a recognized entrepreneur, featured in CBS News, ABC7 Chicago, and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Chicago list. But before SteadyScrib became a venture, it was simply a granddaughter’s attempt to give her grandfather his written words back.

At Family Dinner on Tuesday, Mokotoff shared with Residents her journey of co-founding SteadyScrib, the first manual writing tool designed specifically for people with Parkinson’s disease, a venture she developed with support from The Garage.

The set includes a pen with a weighted core and wide grip, magnetically stabilized by a clipboard to minimize tremors and muscle stiffness commonly experienced by individuals with Parkinson’s.

“We created our sets for and with people with Parkinson’s. We really took their input to heart and created our design to fit the population we were trying to serve,” Mokotoff said.

When Mokotoff’s grandfather lost the ability to send weekly handwritten notes to Mokotoff as a result of the disease, Mokotoff was distraught to find no products in the market to address this issue – despite more than 10 million people worldwide living with the disease, according to the Parkinson’s Foundation.

One of Mokotoff’s first lessons to Residents is that sometimes, the perfect co-founder is right under your nose. For Mokotoff, that was Alexis Chan ’24, who lived just down the hall in their Northwestern sorority house when they founded SteadyScrib as sophomores.

“My instinct is to not try things out until I have a very structured plan in place, while [Alexis] was like, ‘Let’s go do it,’” Mokotoff said. “The balance of that has in large part made us such successful co-founders.”

After taking home $51,000 at the VentureCat 2024 competition, Mokotoff shared that the pair of co-founders received the funds necessary to finance their first round of sales in December 2024.

At the time, the SteadyScrib waitlist was over 4,000 people long.

“Don't create a solution in a silo. Don’t create something because you like the concept but there aren’t real communities that are invested in it coming to fruition,” Mokotoff advised the Residents. “Create a solution to something that a population really needs.”

During the Q&A, Residents asked Mokotoff about how she balances her involvement in SteadyScrib post-graduation with her full-time job as a Strategy Analyst at Deloitte.

Mokotoff explained that she and Chan did a lot of “heavy lifting” as undergraduates to make sure the infrastructure was in place for them to pursue additional commitments after graduation.

“When I’m working full-time and she’s in med school, we can manage when things go awry, but we can’t be responsible for the fulfillment of every order,” Mokotoff said. “We were very intentional when we picked a manufacturer to ensure that they could be an end-to-end production partner, meaning they handle everything from sourcing the materials to manufacturing and assembling.”

In a room full of student entrepreneurs, Mokotoff stood where she once sat just a year ago—no longer an audience member, but the invited speaker. Her advice was clear: never underestimate the power of being a student.

“News coverage is really how we’ve gotten out there in the past. People love to cover students,” Mokotoff said, noting that media interest in a startup can wane after its founders graduate. “Being a student is such a superpower. Use that to your advantage.”