Jimmy Chen chose his customers before he chose his company

The people waiting at the Brooklyn benefits office already had smartphones. What they lacked was software that made the waiting unnecessary. For Jimmy Chen, the scene offered an awkward little review of the technology industry: ingenious devices in everybody’s hands, paper forms still enjoying a comfortable career.

In 2014, Chen had left Facebook and entered a fellowship at Blue Ridge Labs, the anti-poverty technology program associated with Robin Hood. He wanted to work with low-income New Yorkers. The precise product, the revenue model and even the choice between a company and a nonprofit were still open questions.

That order matters. Much of the familiar startup story begins with an invention looking for customers. Chen began with people and went looking for something useful to build. It left him free to change his mind about the software while remaining quite stubborn about whom it should serve.

A happy childhood, with the money counted

Chen’s parents immigrated to the United States from China. He has described a happy childhood in which money was persistently tight. A January 2026 account of his upbringing places his arrival in Kansas City at four years old. Even his childhood entrepreneurial impulse had a household purpose: he considered selling his toys to avoid adding to his family’s financial burden.

Stanford became possible largely through a scholarship based on financial need. He studied Symbolic Systems and graduated in 2010. His learning path included human-computer interaction, cognition in interaction design, a software project course with corporate partners and Stanford in Washington. These were useful preparations for a career concerned with the distance between a system’s capabilities and a person’s experience of using it.

He found that he was good at facilitating project work. Product management followed: LinkedIn from 2010 to 2012, then Facebook from 2012 to 2014. At LinkedIn he worked on products including Events, Polls and Today. At Facebook, his work centered on Groups. He learned inside companies where software reached people by the millions.

“I never considered myself an entrepreneur when I was at Stanford.”

Jimmy Chen

Entrepreneurship had sounded risky. By the time he was four years out of college, financial stability gave him room to consider it. He has also acknowledged the luck involved in being able to go without a paycheck when starting Propel. The founder’s leap looks rather different when you remember that someone has to afford the landing.

The first idea was allowed to lose

Blue Ridge Labs gave Chen time to talk with people about their lives and the practical obstacles they faced. The benefits office made one mismatch visible. People could use contemporary mobile technology quite comfortably, yet getting help still required navigating systems that felt several software generations behind.

Propel’s first product, EasyFoodStamps, was a mobile-friendly website intended to simplify applying for food assistance. The team helped several hundred families enroll. But making a better form did not give an outside company control over the government processes that followed. Useful progress could still run into a boundary the team could not code its way around.

Letting that product go was difficult. It also made room for a task that returned much more often: checking the balance on an Electronic Benefits Transfer card. SNAP recipients used these cards to buy groceries. A common way to discover the available amount was to call the telephone number printed on the back.

For people accustomed to opening a banking app, the arrangement required some explaining. Chen could not find a satisfactory reason benefits recipients should have a less convenient experience. In 2015, Propel launched its balance-checking app. The problem was modest enough to describe in a sentence and consequential enough to revisit before a shopping trip.

The significance lies in that repetition. Applying for a benefit and deciding how to use it belong to the same household budget, but they are different moments in a person’s life. Chen’s team shifted its attention to the continuing experience after enrollment. A company found its footing by making one of those moments easier.

Five million reasons to keep listening

The app’s identity evolved from Fresh EBT to Providers and, in August 2024, to Propel. The company had always carried that last name. Bringing the app under it made the relationship simpler to explain. Along the way came benefits information, job listings, savings offers and, in 2021, the Providers Card.

Propel’s current founder biography describes an app used by more than five million low-income households. That figure can make the undertaking sound comfortably established. It also makes each mistaken assumption more expensive. The larger the audience, the more important it becomes to distinguish what a founder remembers from what users are living now.

Chen makes that distinction explicitly. Childhood experience with financial constraint gives him a connection to the work; it does not supply permanent knowledge of everyone else’s circumstances. Running a company and earning a salary take him further from the daily experience he is trying to understand. His response is continuing research and the discipline of listening.

“we just have to continue to be humble, to listen to our users”

Jimmy Chen

The company’s research also travels beyond product decisions. Propel surveys users about their finances and the effects of policy changes, giving policymakers a view into experiences that can otherwise arrive as distant statistics. An app opened for a balance check can become a way to hear what is happening in a household.

A business model with obligations attached

Propel is a private, venture-backed company, and its app is free to users. Its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Kevin Durant and Serena Williams. Their presence brings capital and attention. Chen’s less glamorous responsibility is deciding how the company earns money without damaging the relationship that makes its audience valuable.

Revenue comes through offers from partners seeking to reach EBT cardholders. That puts selection at the center of the business. A useful discount can help a household keep money. A predatory financial offer can do the reverse. Chen has described screening out predatory advertisers and keeping recommendations aligned with users’ interests.

This is where the social mission acquires an operating manual. It requires decisions about which partners to accept, what appears on a screen and what data the company collects. A statement of purpose is pleasingly inexpensive. Turning away the wrong revenue asks something more substantial of the people who signed it.

In an October 2025 privacy statement, Chen described Propel’s approach to collecting minimal information and protecting it. The company says it does not store PINs, full EBT card numbers or Social Security numbers on its servers, and that it never sells user data. It has also built suspicious-transaction alerts and helped users adopt state-supported security tools.

When the connection can carry cash

The relationship with families has supported work beyond the app’s original function. Propel partnered with GiveDirectly on direct cash assistance, including a program distributing $1,000 grants. The approach gives recipients money to allocate themselves. It fits a recurring principle in Chen’s work: the person navigating a difficult month still gets to make decisions.

On October 21, 2026, the two organizations announced a $1 million Thanksgiving SNAP Bridge Fund. The plan provides $100 payments to selected eligible Propel users who received a September SNAP deposit but missed October’s. Its initial funding can reach 10,000 households. The announcement describes an upcoming distribution, with limited funds, rather than a completed result.

For Chen, this immediate assistance sits alongside the longer task of helping eligible families get and keep benefits. Software can explain a requirement or flag an unexpected absence. Cash can help bridge the absence itself. The two forms of support meet at the same place: a household trying to cover what comes next.

The joiner who stayed with the problem

Chen’s connections now run through several institutions. His official biography lists board roles at Share Our Strength and TechNYC. He has testified before Congress about the safety net and advised President Biden’s technology transition committee. These are extensions of a career that repeatedly crosses the borders between business, public administration and philanthropy.

In 2022, Stanford named him an inaugural recipient of its President’s Award for the Advancement of the Common Good. The award recognized work that joined technical ability to public service. For someone whose education depended substantially on financial aid, the return to Stanford carried a particular symmetry: support received had become part of the explanation for support built.

There is a life outside benefits software. Chen plays competitive ultimate frisbee, follows Kansas City sports and has been described as an aspiring word-game enthusiast. He is based in Brooklyn. These details supply a welcome change of scale after the institutional titles. Even a founder working on a national problem can have a thoroughly local sporting allegiance.

He once described himself as a joiner rather than a starter. The description makes his eventual route more interesting. He acquired a craft, found some financial room, met people with a problem and kept revising the work. The company emerged from that sequence. Its continuing test remains close to the beginning: whether opening a phone makes somebody’s difficult day a little easier to manage.