About us | Petal
About us
Our vision is to drive engagement, collaboration, and promote the visibility of academic research with the general public
Our Story
I'm Hunter, founder of Petal, and this is our story.
- 2013I started grad school. Government shutdown led to funding issues. I had to switch into a new lab in an adjacent field.
- 2014I took new classes to catch up and received many recommended readings from my advisor. I felt overwhelmed and wished there were better tools to help me stay ahead.
- 2015I talked to my labmate Chi, who would later become my cofounder, about pain points in regards to reference management and academic collaboration. I successfully graduated later this year.
- 2016Chi and I continued our explorations in knowledge and information management. We started testing some ideas on our own. I went into strategy consulting learn about the business side of things.
- 2017Implemented functional demos and started pitching around. Introduced many state-of-the-art NLP algorithms in the early iterations of Petal Reference Manager (then KaleidoGlobe).
- 2018
Officially created Petal, a feature-rich, cloud native, and free ecosystem of productivity software to better serve academia.
- 2013I started grad school. Government shutdown led to funding issues. I had to switch into a new lab in an adjacent field.
- 2014I took new classes to catch up and received many recommended readings from my advisor. I felt overwhelmed and wished there were better tools to help me stay ahead.
- 2015I talked to my labmate Chi, who would later become my cofounder, about pain points in regards to reference management and academic collaboration. I successfully graduated later this year.
- 2016Chi and I continued our explorations in knowledge and information management. We started testing some ideas on our own. I went into strategy consulting learn about the business side of things.
- 2017Implemented functional demos and started pitching around. Introduced many state-of-the-art NLP algorithms in the early iterations of Petal Reference Manager (then KaleidoGlobe).
- 2018Officially created Petal, a feature-rich, cloud native, and free ecosystem of productivity software to better serve academia.
Business Team
Hunter
B.S., Caltech; M.S., MIT
Hunter
B.S., Caltech; M.S., MIT
Hunter sets the business strategy and makes product design decisions for our team. He has professional experience in management consulting, engineering, and education. He is passionate about technology and wants to bring applicable state-of-the-art academic research into the business world.
Engineering Team
Chi
B.S., Caltech; Ph.D., MIT
Chi
B.S., Caltech; Ph.D., MIT
Chi designs the technology strategy and facilitates their successful implementation at Petal. His Ph.D. in computational science and engineering is centered on efficient algorithms for Bayesian inference. Outside of academics, Chi has worked as a full-stack developer and event photographer. He is also an avid classical pianist and also enjoys cooking.