About Us
OurPurpose and Vision
To reimagine memorialization as a personalized, accessible, and essential process that empowers the individual and celebrates life.
Who are we?
Xiaoteng "X" Huang
Founder
Xiaoteng “X” Huang has always been an entrepreneur at heart. He accumulated valuable corporate experience at companies such as McKinsey, Target, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and IBM. But at the end of the day, he always dreamed about carving out his own path.
In 2014, he quit his corporate career to pursue his entrepreneurial dream and started his own restaurant: PinKU Japanese Street food in Minneapolis, MN. Today, PinKU is the highest rated Japanese restaurant in Minnesota on Yelp and Google.
X is now leveraging everything he has learned from his first business to create a second start-up. He received his M.B.A. from Yale University and his B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University.
Our Origins
When X’s grandfather passed away in China in 2018, X was still working 12-hour days at the restaurant he started. Having the responsibility of running a business meant that he could not just leave his job to contribute to the planning of or attend his grandfather’s memorial half a globe away. He wished deeply that he could participate in the communal remembrance of his grandfather’s life. This experience made him feel sad and powerless.
Two years later, X returned to school to get his MBA at Yale. He reflected on this experience in an entrepreneurship class and decided to do something to help others who felt disconnected from the memorialization of their loved ones. He discussed the idea of personalized memorial planning with his childhood friend, who has years of experience as a funeral director. From there, X turned his idea into action, and PlanMemorial.com was born.
Our Mission
Our mission is to create a platform that is navigable and beautiful, provides empathetic and informed guidance, and offers unique and affordable options for memorial planning.
We seek to respond to a growing market of people who are searching for agency and personalization in memorializing the lives of their loved ones and themselves.
We strive to shape an experience that is sustaining and healing for the client as we journey alongside them through a critical moment.
Our Values
To offer compassion and understanding of the broad emotional experience of memorialization.
To create a product that is sleek, intuitive, and easy-to-use for clients with minimal technological experience.
To enact a company culture of treating colleagues and community partners with respect and tenderness.