Jean & Palmer, co-founders of Flower
Flower is a new iOS app that helps people create and manage support networks for their friends and family -- for someone who's going through a critical hospital treatment for instance, or serving overseas -- with features for offering not just moral support, but practical help with necessary errands and daily chores. Founded by two Linden Lab alum, half the company are also former Lindens. The idea for Flower emerged from tragic events immediately after co-founder and CEO Jean Miller left Linden Lab a few years ago:
“[W]ithin the week of my departure from Linden Lab,” she says, “my father was diagnosed with terminal gastric cancer. It was like the universe opened up my life and said, ‘Time for this!’ I went from working in tech to caregiving and after my father passed, to starting a company to build better tools for caregiving. There was a round of ups and downs since then -- I married my co-founder, also former Linden, we had a kid, my mom went through breast cancer treatment -- and the tools we wanted to build have also evolved to building a better tool for caring; what you now know as Flower.”
Her co-founder Palmer Truelson was a Render Team Manager at Linden, while Jean’s involvement in Second Life first started when she was Virtual Worlds Project Manager at USC Annenberg's Center on Public Diplomacy, which transitioned her nicely into becoming Linden’s International Initiatives Program Manager.
Second Life, she says, “gave us a taste for how technology can fundamentally change how we communicate with each other for the better, and we want to continue building tools that make that happen. In other words, Linden Lab ruined me -- because now I only want jobs where I am changing the world. And with that experience and framework, we developed Flower."
More about Flower in particular:
