Jun Son
I build products and do research to break concentration: in education, in energy, in opportunity.
I run LaunchWith, a 501(c)(3) platform for student founders, and I study distributed energy systems. These started as two separate threads: a student-startup nonprofit, and graduate research on entropy. They connected in an unexpected place. Working with LaunchWith collaborators in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, who kept losing reliable power mid-call, I stopped treating electricity as invisible infrastructure. That's what turned my research toward DER coordination and FERC Order 2222. I'm preparing PhD applications in energy systems for Fall 2028.
Based in Salt Lake City. Reach me at lovejsson@gmail.com.
building
2024. I pivoted LaunchWith from a C-corp to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It's a free platform where student founders find teammates and run projects with milestone planning, Kanban boards, and team chat. Partners include the Great Zambezi Initiative, Nyamuk Africa, ElevateTrust, acf, and LettuceBuild. Funded by Scout memberships, tax-deductible donations, and merchandise.
Around the same time I cofounded EcoBlox with Chris, a semiconductor engineer in the Bay Area. EcoBlox is an edtech suite combining Roblox-style game mechanics with environmental STEM curriculum: a landing site, a full-stack course platform, and RE-bot, a gamified Discord companion with an XP system.
2022. I started LaunchWith as a C-corp. Along the way I built legalwith, a legal-services platform for LLC formations, trademark filings, and eSignature; esignbuilder, a DocuSign-style PDF template editor; and the LettuceBuild parent portal (Next.js + NestJS + Firebase).
Personal tools. Kaset is a native macOS YouTube Music client I wrote in Swift/SwiftUI. It's on Homebrew: brew install --cask kaset. diversification is a personal-finance iOS app using Plaid and the Claude API to classify spending and surface concentration in portfolios.
research
2026. I'm building PDES (Peer DER Exchange System), an open-source simulator for multi-device coordination of distributed energy resources under FERC Order 2222. It centers two ideas that rarely get studied together: uncertainty in small-DER forecasts, and hardware-in-the-loop physical nodes (Raspberry Pi Pico with INA219 current sensors and AM2302 temperature/humidity sensors).
Paper 1 for Grid Edge 2027 (Salt Lake City) measures the coordination gap left open by Navidi et al.'s 2023 Joule paper. The paper is scoped deliberately narrowly: measure the gap, don't solve it. Forthcoming.
MS thesis. My master's research in kinesiology used entropy and information-theoretic methods to measure variability in motor control. The framework transfers cleanly to distributed energy: same question, different signal.
Reading path. Navidi → Buechler → Ji → Martin → Goldin → Degleris. Preparing for PhD applications in energy systems research, Fall 2028. Particularly interested in the Rajagopal group at Stanford.
other projects
- conceptualize, a knowledge-management tool with web and desktop versions.
- Planviser, a native macOS menu-bar productivity app combining email, calendar, hourly planning, and AI daily summaries. In PRD.
- myTeamChat, a team-communication app used internally at LettuceBuild.
- survey_marketing, a survey and marketing turbo-monorepo inside the LettuceBuild stack.
- skillsBuilder, a web-based skills tracker for students.
- mythicHunter, a Roblox game built with Rojo and Lua.
- discordAutomation, activity automation for the Roblox Education Discord server.
- huupooBot, a Discord marketplace bot for Roblox developers.
writing
Nothing published yet. Expect notes on PDES methodology, Paper 1, and the road to PhD apps.
contact
- lovejsson@gmail.com
- Salt Lake City, Utah
- GitHub