I’m working on a project called Biographer. I started on it last year as a gift to my parents. I wanted to build them something that would help capture their life stories, that they’d actually enjoy using, and that would be a meaningful experience for all of us. 

My dad passed away earlier this year and I took a break from it. But now I’ve come back to it. I think it can be an important product.

At its core, I want to make it easy, fun, and rewarding for people to talk about their lives, starting with our parents. There are a lot of products out there where you gift a family member a subscription to a service where they respond to a weekly prompt and over time their answers are compiled into a book. 

That is not Biographer. 

Here is our plan:

• Use AI to craft experiences that make it fun and easy to talk about your life 

• Turn your conversations with Biographer into something rewarding, starting with written chapters

• Make the experience social and interactive with your family and close friends

• Over time add more things that your stories can become: interactive photo albums, documentaries, music, podcasts, etc.

If we do this right, the conversation is the product. A book is just one thing your conversations can become.

Right now all we care about is whether we can do those first two steps well and create an engaging and delightful experience. So we are going to give away the product for free because we want to learn from you and your family members what you like, what you don’t, and what we should build next.

And while we believe that people’s lives are much bigger than a book, we are going to give the first 500 people who complete thirty conversations with Biographer a free hardcover book of their stories. 

So if you’ve been itching to capture some of your life stories, or if you’re like me and want to provide your parents or grandparents an experience they’ll genuinely enjoy while bringing your family closer together, head over to Biographer.

Social media in its purest form - sharing and connecting with real friends - is incredibly fun. It’s a great example of how technology can bring people closer together. It’s what I grew up with on the internet. 

Unfortunately, outside of our group chats, there are very few platforms that focus on connecting with people we actually know and care about. Maybe there’s no market for it anymore and we are in a post-social media world. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think there will always be a desire to share and connect with other human beings. 

In the middle of April, along with some colleagues I’ve worked with for over a decade, we started testing a new application called Postcards with some friends and family. It’s fun, simple, and social, and we really like using it. 

Postcards are what happens when you mash together photos, voice notes, and some text, and use a little bit of AI and some filters to turn it into a nice little piece of stylized media. We create postcards about our days, personal musings, vacations, things our kids did, places we went, and more. From the mundane to the important, it’s how we are beginning to share the things that happen in our lives with our friends and families. 

Back in the day there were social networks that were built around your real friend graph. Those morphed into broadcast media - places to get famous and places to consume entertaining content, almost entirely from people you don’t know in real life. Then came the proliferation of group chats as an antidote - a place to be yourself and not be judged by the world. 

I know there is a space that exists somewhere between those two worlds - the best of your group chats, but only people you know and like in real life. Postcards is designed to play in that void. It’s an easy way to stay connected to the people you care about, and it is not a place for mind-numbingly consuming content. 

If you want to create some postcards and send them to friends and family, try it out here. I’d love your feedback on it, and I hope there are lots of builders out there trying to figure out how to make social media fun and feel good again. 

Last year i built an ai biographer for my parents. I wanted to capture their life stories and learn about ai voice. With my friend Avi, we built an agent that would talk to my mom and dad on the phone and it was trained to ask them personalized questions about their life. After each “chapter” was completed a separate agent would write it up Walter Isaacson style for everyone to read so people could follow along as the stories were told. 

Since then we have been experimenting with new ways to capture and represent stories, exploring the space between a photo/video and a written journal entry or essay. What can voice on top of a photo(s) unlock? What’s the best way to make it easy, fun, and rewarding for people to capture the moments that matter to them and their friends and family? What does storytelling as a social experience look and feel like in the digital world? These are some of the things we are trying to learn.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been using the product for a variety of reasons: to capture special moments about my kids and family, to document the fun adventures and events I’ve experienced with friends, and to talk about milestones in my life. It’s the thing I am using when a simple photo won’t do the moment justice and I don’t want to write a whole thing about it. 

If you are interested in trying it out shoot me an email and I will add you to our TestFlight (iOS only right now). The only thing I ask is that you provide me some occasional feedback about what’s working or not working for you.