Introducing Jimmy Chen- Propel
Jimmy Chen is the CEO and founder of Propel, a software company that aims to make America’s safety net more user friendly. Propel grew out of Jimmy’s experience doing a fellowship at Blue Ridge Labs, where he saw first hand the challenges of poverty. Prior to Propel, Jimmy graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Symbolic Systems, and worked as a Product Manager at LinkedIn and Facebook.
Can you tell us more about Propel?
Propel is a software company that aims to make America’s safety net more user friendly. We are a ex-Facebook team. Our current product is called FreshEBT, which is a mobile banking app that allows users on SNAPS (food stamps program) to stretch their benefits and find other resources. Currently, 100 million Americans are on SNAPS. We are a for-profit company funded by a16z and Omidyar Network. We see ourselves as a unique business- we want to serve our users profitably and not take advantage of them.
Tell us how you were inspired to start Propel.
When I was growing up, my family sometimes struggled to put food on the table. Fortunately enough, I was lucky enough to get admission to Stanford, where I studied Symbolic Systems, and then went onto LinkedIn and Facebook to work as a product manager. In 2014, I left Facebook to start a company. I did a fellowship and Blue Ridge Labs, where I learned about challenges of poverty and quickly prototyped solutions to the problem. The singular experience that stood out was the experience of using food stamps in Brooklyn. I saw hundreds of people waiting to see social worker. In this moment, I realized that social services lagged far behind times of what software is capable for, and thereby Propel was born!
What has been your proudest moment in the past year
I would say that it’s the $4 million seed round we closed 1.5 months ago- while this is not a sign of success, it is a significant milestone because it means that we’re building a real business, and we can convince others that we’re building a real business. I am also stoked about our set of investors: Omidyar Network has a track record of investing in great social impact companies, while Andreessen has backed some amazing high growth companies. We are excited to be at the intersection of these two ideas.
Why are you for-profit?
The ultimate reason was our commitment to our mission. We want to do whatever we can to be committed to our mission, and we feel that by being for-profit, we can take whatever money we make and invest it right in our growth, thereby helping more people. We also wanted to give our employees a piece of the company to ensure that they are bought into the mission. Finally, I firmly believe that the deepest form of social impact is impact that is sustainable and can change the market for the long-term, which I think is much easier to do when you are a for-profit company.
I firmly believe that the deepest form of social impact is impact that is sustainable and can change the market for the long-term, which I think is much easier to do when you are a for-profit company.
How do you balance the social mission with the need to make money?
Ultimately, everyone needs to be bought into the social mission. We don’t take any money from an investor if they don’t believe in our mission. We are trying to build a model where social impact and revenue are linked fundamentally. This way, our work isn’t charity, but doing good in the business inherently creates scalable impact. By the way, this was not an easy thing to figure out, and definitely took some time, but I feel good about the place we are at now.
Do the two (social impact and the need to make money) ever come in conflict?
Not really. To understand why not, I think you need to understand our business model. Our business model is essentially a platform for people on food stamps, and our paid customers are organizations that want to reach and market to low-income folks. They can show ads on our app, such as coupons or discounts. Our customers are grocery retailers, other brands like Comcast that want to build home broadband for any family with a child on national school lunch program, financial services company, major healthcare provider, etc.
Now an example of when they might come into conflict, but this has not happened. What happens when payday lenders want to access our platform? How would our investors feel about this if they want to give us $1M? Ultimately, users will lose trust in platform- we want to recommend things that resonate positively with users, otherwise we have no business. There are also organizations within the government who wouldn’t work with us if we started working with payday lenders.
Given the amount of product recommendations you do, how do you avoid being paternalistic to your users?
I believe it is not viable to not have a voice. We learned from research that our users want to try all sorts of financial products. We take the responsibility to recommend the right product to them very seriously, and we want to show them right one. However, this does lead to tricky situations. For example, it’s OK to advertise a farmer’s market, but what if Pepsi comes to us? Health is tricky- we are not nutritionists. How paternalistic do we want to be? Ultimately, we see our role is about helping them to save money, and plan out their budget. We don’t see ourselves as the person that helps them pick out specific items in the grocery store.
Additionally, for easy user testing, we hired one of our users. She came out of a coding bootcamp, and we hired her as a software engineer. She is awesome, and provides us lots of honest feedback, especially whether something we recommend or do is too paternalistic. But of course, there’s always more we can do to learn about the user.
What’s a common misconception you’ve realized about doing tech for social good?
Lot of people believe that for-profit and not-for-profit sector cannot overlap. Or that companies can’t have a social mission, and those that do can’t make money. These strict forms of the definition of a company are harmful. We want to express a potential to blend all things together and also solve a social challenge.
What was most difficult decision when starting Propel?
We made a decision to abandon our first product and built this one. Originally, we built a mobile-friendly website that allowed people to enroll in food stamps. We decided to evolve the product, because it wasn’t really working. We realized a better problem to solve was once you’ve enrolled in benefits, how can you maximize resources. We can do more with explaining to users how to stretch their benefits. It was a challenging decision to figure out what part of the user journey we wanted to work on, and took us some time to figure out what we wanted to do.
What wakes you up every morning?
Serving people- we currently have 500K users every month. I also wake up to serve my employees who have committed to this mission of having a deep social impact while building a business.
What would you want your 18 year old self to know?
You can learn pretty much anything. 18 year old Jimmy was not sure how technical he was going to be (I was very intimidated because I didn’t have the background). Eventually, I picked it up even though lots of work. It became a big part of me. I also never thought I would be a startup founder. Always saw myself as a joiner, rather than a starter. After Facebook I thought I wanted to join a startup. Ultimately, I found Blue Ridge and started a company and looking back it’s a thing I would have never predicted. To be honest, I decided to start a company because I was passionate about the problem space and less about the form factor. I wanted to solve the problem and saw few organizations doing what we were doing, and not meeting the need. Therefore, to fulfill the need, we decided to start a company, and I learned everything I needed to do on the job. It’s doable if you really really want to figure it out.
What is the last book you read?
Scarcity by Eldar Sharif and Sendhil Mullainathan. I really recommend the book. It has lots of relevance to our day to day work around poverty. It is very quantitative and the vigor is quite awesome.
What are you currently listening to?
Fun music. Honestly, my music tastes have not changed since high school.
How can people get involved with what you’re working on?
- Follow us on Twitter @FreshEBT
- Check us out on Joinpropel.com: We are hiring a data scientist and senior software engineer.
- Follow our blog on Medium.
