Frank Chen

Frank Chen is co-founder and CTO of Balto Energy, a climate tech startup using AI to transform home energy. He develops products and leads engineering teams with a background in behavior design, engineering leadership, systems reliability, and resiliency research.

Before Balto, Frank led special projects in developer infrastructure at Slack, where he focused on making engineers' lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. At Palantir, he worked with customers in healthcare, finance, government, energy, and consumer packaged goods to solve their hardest problems by transforming how they use data. At Amazon, he led a front-end and infrastructure team to launch AWS WorkDocs, the first secure multi-platform enterprise document service of its kind. At Sandia National Labs, he researched resiliency and complexity analysis tooling with the Grid Resiliency group.

He's been keeping his brain in markdown + git for almost 20 years—journals, data integrations, everything in plaintext. He built a personal AI agent called Frankly that connected Slack, Linear, Obsidian, and his personal vault with hybrid search. Then he brought the same architecture to his company, where an AI agent now reads the entire knowledge base and onboards new team members from the living state of the company's thinking. He writes about what happens when you give AI access to all of it.

Frank received an M.S. in Computer Science focused in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford. His thesis studied how the design and psychology of exergaming interventions might produce efficacious health outcomes. With the Stanford Prevention Research Center, he developed health interventions rooted in behavioral theory to create new behaviors through mobile phones. He prototyped early builds of Tiny Habits with BJ Fogg and worked in the Persuasive Technology Lab. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA, where he researched networked systems and image processing with the Center for Embedded Networked Systems. With the Rand Corporation, he built research systems to support group decision-making.