Episode 4: Hot Pot & Product Sprints with Jane Chen, Founder & CEO at Letterly

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What if staying connected to home means filling your entire trunk with Chinese food and driving it three hours north?

In this episode of Founders Fridge, host Heidi Knoblauch sits down with Jane Chen, founder and CEO of Letterly, to talk about what happens when you can't just eat any food. You need the food from your childhood to keep going.

Jane grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, five minutes from Flushing, now the largest Chinatown in the USA. As a scholarship kid and elite competitive swimmer, she was crushing 3,000-4,000 calories a day at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. Food was fuel, plain and simple. That relationship carried her through Wall Street, where she lived on Seamless budgets during M&A heydays, and later to Germany, where she finally learned that maybe you can't sustain yourself on pizza and beer alone.

Today, as Jane scales Letterly (an AI-enabled writing platform that grew from 30 students in a Saratoga classroom to 4,000 students nationwide, including Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant), she still makes regular runs to Flushing. Her trunk comes back loaded. Her freezer holds carp heads and frozen fish balls. And her cooking style? "Boiling things in flavorful broth."

But there's one thing Jane protects fiercely: dinner. Not as fuel, but as connection. It's where she reconnects with friends and family after days that start with European dev team calls before coffee and end with evening walks with her dog pack.

This conversation is about food as identity, fuel as strategy, and why some meals matter more than others when you're building something from the ground up.

Listen to hear:

• How Letterly went from brick-and-mortar writing school to venture-backed platform
• Why Jane can't just eat "food generally." It has to be authentic Chinese food from Flushing
• What a former investment banker who never learned to cook actually eats while building a startup
• The one routine Jane refuses to compromise (hint: it involves dogs and hiking)
• What's really in a busy founder's fridge and freezer

Subscribe to Founders Fridge for more conversations about the meals that feed founders and the habits that hold everything together.

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