Preserving Personal Narratives: How Remento is Transforming Family Storytelling

What if you could preserve the voices and stories of your loved ones for generations, just like hiring a top-notch biographer? Join us as we speak with Charlie Greene, the visionary co-founder and CEO of Remento, a startup revolutionizing how we capture and treasure personal narratives. Greene shares his deeply personal journey, sparked by a childhood of cherished home videos and profound family experiences, which led him to create a platform that makes documenting life stories accessible and heartfelt for everyone. Through Remento, families can now turn simple voice recordings into beautifully crafted memoirs, preserving the emotional resonance of a loved one's voice in a tangible way. 

Explore the innovative process that Remento employs, from AI-driven storytelling prompts to polished narratives, all culminating in a stunning hardcover book. This episode reveals how technology, once a barrier, now facilitates intimate and meaningful family interactions, even tackling difficult histories that were previously avoided. Greene draws powerful parallels between Remento’s mission and documentary filmmaking, underscoring the profound impact of capturing personal stories for posterity. Discover how everyday technology can become a bridge to the past, strengthening family connections and ensuring that the voices of our loved ones continue to tell their stories for years to come.

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Chapters

• 0:02 Capturing Life Stories With Remento
• 6:10 Preserving Life Stories Through Remento
• 16:06 Preserving Family Stories Through AI

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by MediaClip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your , G ary Pageau, and today we're joined by Charlie Greene, who's the co-founder and CEO of Remento, and he's based in Los Angeles, California. Hi, Charlie, how are you today?

Charlie Greene: 0:33

Yeah, I'm great, Gary. Thank you so much for having me.

Gary Pageau: 0:36

So Remento's been around for about four years. But first, who are you and how did you get involved in doing this startup?

Charlie Greene: 0:44

I have always personally been deeply excited and passionate about storytelling, which in a large respect, stems from the fact that I grew up in a home with parents who were I joke like freakishly obsessed with the home video camcorder, and they inspired a deep appreciation for the value of documenting the moments that shape our lives, which very much connects into what we're building with Remento, which is a product that is designed to make it as easy as possible to document the stories of an aging relative without them having to write a single word. For many years, if you wanted to have a memoir written, you would either have to write it yourself or hire someone to write it for you, and what we've built is a piece of technology that will guide either you or a loved one in documenting a life's worth of stories in a physical hardcover book, again without having to write a single word.

Gary Pageau: 1:38

So let's talk a little bit about how you decided that needed to become a product. Was there a personal story there where you realized X relative had a great life story? Maybe they were getting on in years and you needed to capture that. Was there a personal story that triggered this?

Charlie Greene: 1:59

Yeah, there was for me and I would say there probably is. I know there is for many of the members of our team who are very connected to the mission of why this actually matters. In my case, I mentioned that in my family there was always a video camcorder rolling, and all of the content from the first decade of my life took on a totally different meaning after my dad passed away just a couple days after my 10th birthday and I grew up spending so much time wishing I could ask him questions about pieces of his life that I never had a chance to learn about and would find myself drawn to the video from my childhood as a way to stay connected with him. So I grew up really cherishing all of that video and then flash forward a little over 15 years later.

Charlie Greene: 2:42

My mom is diagnosed with stage three lung cancer and it becomes really clear in that moment that it is very likely that my future kids will never have a chance to meet either of their grandparents. And I was reflecting, as my mom was getting ready for her chemotherapy treatment, what I had of her in terms of documentation. I had hundreds had of her in terms of documentation. I had hundreds, maybe thousands of photos and definitely hundreds of videos, but I didn't have anything that was longer than eight seconds long in terms of video, and I just remember thinking my mom's lived through the digital age and I actually have just as good of documentation of my parents from the 90s as I do from you know, in which I carried an iPhone around.

Charlie Greene: 3:24

So her and I sat down and we recorded what has historically and academically been called an oral history interview, which was effectively me just printing out a bunch of listicles about what to ask your parents before they die questions like mine and pulling out some scrapbooks, and we just sat down and we recorded her answers and I I figured I would hear the stories that you know, we, as children, when we hear, roll our eyes cause we've heard them so many times from our parents.

Charlie Greene: 3:49

But she spent that entire time telling me things about her life that I never knew, and it left me wondering why was it that it took a cancer diagnosis for me to a? You know, learn all of this from her and then be you know, capture it in a capacity where it could be carried into the future, and so that's what we set out to do was to find a way to take what is the great opportunity to get to know the people we love better and to document their stories for the future, and again, try to make that process as easy and simple and technology enabled as possible.

Gary Pageau: 4:22

So roll that back a little bit to you and your background. Did you have a technology background getting into this one? Where'd you go to school? What did you do? Or is this something like I see the need, I'm going to find the pieces? Or did you have a technology background?

Charlie Greene: 4:38

Well, I didn't have a technology background myself.

Charlie Greene: 4:40

I wasn't ever coding, but I had always been drawn to different ways of being able to create media, so I spent a lot of time making documentary films.

Charlie Greene: 4:48

I started my career in journalism, then I moved into speech writing. I was a speech writer in the Obama administration for several years before moving into big media 21st Century Fox and then, ultimately, the Walt Disney Company and then I had an opportunity to go to business school and I found myself contemplating either going to work in big media or trying to start something of my own. As I started contemplating what that would look like, I couldn't help but think back to this experience that I had with my mom and just felt so excited about the idea of trying to bring an experience that brought so much value and joy into our family's experience hopefully into others. And I'll say honestly, when we set out to build a company, we had no idea if we were going to do that, but we knew that if we could find a way to encourage people to document their stories before it was too late, it would be of incredible value.

Gary Pageau: 5:38

And so how big is your team and who's involved?

Charlie Greene: 5:41

Yeah, so it's a product-led team, so the company is a product. So we have engineers who work with us, we have product leaders who work with us, we have designers who work for us, and then we have people on the marketing side as well, and then, finally, people who support our customers. So there are about 10 of us in total. That number has ebbed and flowed over time, but it's people who are really committed to the mission and are always focused on building product that is able to, you know, help people create these amazing stories.

Gary Pageau: 6:10

So walk us through the process, because you've mentioned, you know, a printed book, which, of course, as someone who is deeply involved in the output space, I'm very excited by that. But also you know you've got all these other assets to. You know, video clips and all that. So just walk through the process of are those used as prompts or what's the process to get to the story? Because, as I have found through my journey through the photo industry, most people don't know how to tell a story right. They don't understand the basics of beginning, middle and end theme or whatever, and they need some sort of guidance for that. So what is the Remento process?

Charlie Greene: 6:53

So what we tried to do, basically, was recreate what it would feel like if you or your family had hired a professional biographer to write your biography for you.

Charlie Greene: 7:05

And if you hired a biographer, the first thing they would do is would sit down with you for many hours and interview you about your life, and many biographers that we spoke with when we were building this product shared that they would speak with members of your family to be able to understand the moments that your family feels like were relevant to your life as well.

Charlie Greene: 7:24

So if you're buying Remento for, let's say, an aging parent, the first thing that you'll be prompted to do is add into Remento the themes that you're interested in learning about, and we can do that for you if you want. But if you want to customize the experience, you can't. So you say I really want to learn about this person's childhood, and they had a specific, very interesting experience, perhaps with the military early in their career. I want to learn about that. And then what Rementa will do is we'll send your loved one, the storyteller, a new storytelling prompt every week for a year, or more frequently if you change the setting. They receive an SMS text message and or an email prompting them to click a big green button that turns into a big red recording button that, when they press, invites them to start talking about that memory.

Charlie Greene: 8:10

And what Remento will do is it will interview them asynchronously about that experience, hearing what is being said, and asking follow-up questions in real time. Importantly, that person doesn't need to download any apps. There are no logins, there are no downloads. Many of our storytellers are over the age of 90 and have no problems using our technology because we explicitly built it for them. Okay, and then, once they've recorded their story, we have built what we call speech to story technology, which will take the recording, it'll turn it into a transcript and then it will present that transcript in one of three formats either a cleaned transcript, which is removing the ums, the ahs and the extraneous language that's not relevant to the story. That's perfect for the family member that can speak in paragraphs. We all know that person who you would actually want to read what they said. Most don't speak that way.

Charlie Greene: 9:01

So what we'll do is offer you the ability to use the technology to turn it into something, a story that's written in either the first or the third person, which feels a lot more like you had hired that biographer to take the input and turn it into a polished final version, and then we'll take all of that content and then we'll print it into a hardcover, beautifully color printed physical book that people can hold in their hands.

Charlie Greene: 9:26

And our special touches that we add QR codes to the inside that, when you scan, we'll link back to the recording that was used to write each story. So what we hear from our customers, who are our storytellers, is this is my memoir and it wrote itself. Could not have been easier. I did it in a couple minutes each week. It was easier than having a FaceTime call Right and from their families. What they share is I love having this physical book in my hand of these stories, but what's just as important is knowing that I will always have my loved one's voice at my fingertips, and that's something that, for any of us who have lost someone in our lives, is something that sure you know anything to have.

Gary Pageau: 10:03

So when you're talking about like the content to get it started, you know, let's say, for example, you were to um a gift to the box, for example for the holiday season, for an aged parent, right, so does the person who's buying it or starting it, or, you know, buying the service. Do they have to pre-load it with prompts and things to to of? Is there a questionnaire they have to fill out? Because I know you can like they'll show the on the website. It says you know they show you a picture and they say what's happening on this photo? So that has to come from somewhere.

Charlie Greene: 10:36

So I remember when I did this with my mom and myself like the hack together version I was so overwhelmed with figuring out what to ask her. When do I ask her about her childhood?

Charlie Greene: 10:49

Do I just bring this photo that I have of her that I'm trying to get into the conversation. How do I do that? So we, very early in our journey, built a scientific advisory board. Part of these folks are people with deep expertise in memory and recall and reminiscing, including for people who have cognitive impairments, and the other group are people who have conducted tens of thousands of life story interviews and together these folks helped us develop a bank of questions which are written in a way that is specifically designed to inspire really interesting and compelling stories. So you use our Remento question bank to pick questions from Again. You can pick them yourself or we can just pick them for you question bank to pick questions from Again. You can pick them yourself or we can just pick them for you. And other people will actually upload photographs to be used as prompts, just as you mentioned, send their loved one a photo saying what was happening in this photo, and then the story becomes about the photo.

Gary Pageau: 11:39

I mean, that's quite an emotional experience, Like when you hear these audio clips of people talking about some of those photos because they're in their 80s or 90s and it was from their you know service in World War Two or Korea or you know going to Woodstock or you know, who knows what was going on I mentioned. Just having that audio available as part of the QR code is also just wonderful.

Charlie Greene: 12:06

It works in both directions right. People who have a visual stimulus tell better stories, great stories, you said. People don't know how to tell great stories. The best stories have specifics in them what did it feel like? Who was around? What happened before? What happened after? Speaking in generalities is not the way to tell a great story, and photographs can help anchor people in the specifics. And then, of course, being able to, as the person who's watching or listening to a story, being able to see the photograph right there makes the storytelling all the more compelling.

Gary Pageau: 12:40

And then the deliverable is kind of a hybrid product, right, Because you've got the printed book and I mean, how many pages do they generally run the hardbound?

Charlie Greene: 12:48

printed book. So they can be printed up to 380 pages right now.

Gary Pageau: 12:55

And can pictures be put in there, or is that?

Charlie Greene: 12:58

Yeah, pictures are all put in there and they're color printed, really beautiful high premium paper.

Gary Pageau: 13:04

It's designed to be a keepsake, but you also have the hybrid component of you know the digital assets. They can pull down from wherever you're doing your storage, I imagine, and is there any kind of guarantee or something that those assets will always be there?

Charlie Greene: 13:21

Well, it's a question that people ask us all the time, and I'm not in the business of predicting the future, right so for me to sit here and say I will store your assets indefinitely forever, unless we're operating on the blockchain, which even then opens questions as to the durability of that medium. So what we do is we let our customers download any of the content that's recorded on Memento at any time, for free. That, as long as we're able to host your content, we will, and we'll make sure that the QR codes link to it, because it's the most compelling way to engage with the content rather than being forgotten about in a Google Drive. That was one of the things I did with my mom. I edited all the content, I put it together and then I got forgotten about because there wasn't a physical thing for us to hold on to. With Fermento, you have the physical product and the digital, and we make it really easy to be able to back up everything either locally to your device or to a cloud account like a Google Drive or a Dropbox.

Gary Pageau: 14:12

So one of the things that I think is interesting is how you know you've got this AI-powered questioning, storyboarding, life inquisition system that creates a physical, printed product at the end. It almost goes counter to what people are doing with a lot of the ai stuff. Right, it's got to stay in digital, it's got to be digital. It's got this all this wonderful stuff. Was that always the plan from the beginning, when you were pitching this to supporters and investors and whatnot? That, hey, we're going to be printing stuff?

Charlie Greene: 14:47

I would say the thing that we were really focused on at the beginning was getting people to record life stories right, okay, and what we realized was there were two problems, right. The first problem was that it takes a lot of work right and the second is a lot of video content that doesn't actually so.

Charlie Greene: 15:12

What we did was we came to the realization that if we can make the final product a physical product, it creates a really clear destination for a family to work towards creating what we refer to in the product space as value legibility, and if we can find a way to use any technology available to be able to make the process of getting there easy, we could overcome the hurdle of people actually adopting so, and there are so many exciting uses of ai right now right and of course, feels like a lot of them are solving problems that may or may not actually exist in the world, exactly kind of like nfts right and that's kind of yeah who needs an nft.

Charlie Greene: 15:53

I mean like they're great, right, but I don't think anyone woke up today and realized that an NFT was solving their problem. Perhaps, I'm doing things that they'd rather not be regulated, which leads to a whole different set of questions than looking for AI. Rather than looking for a problem for AI to solve, we've used AI to solve what has always been a very clear problem for us to address.

Gary Pageau: 16:24

Yeah, you know it's interesting. You said because you know you and I met at the Visual First Conference in October and that was kind of the theme of the thing was, ai is just a tool to aid in your business. It's not a thing in and of itself. So I think that's a pretty valuable way of looking at it. It's helping you get to where you want to go because, honestly, you know, 10 years ago the technology existed to do what you're doing now. It was just would have been far more labor intensive.

Charlie Greene: 16:54

Yeah, you know it couldn't have been automated. You know you couldn't conduct an interview in real time without a human being that was listening and asking contextually relevant follow-up questions and then processing a transcript into a story Like these are large language models at work and for many of our customers it's the first time they're actually seeing these things manifest in a way that feels valuable to them, separate from typing an interesting prompt into chat GPT like write a poem for my spouse, right? You know, even three years ago, what we are doing now was not possible in the way that it is currently instrumented today.

Gary Pageau: 17:33

Have you had any experience with customers who have struggled with difficult stories? Right, you know, because not everything's happy, right, not everything is positive and sometimes people aren't comfortable talking about that, but that still may be an important piece to their story. What has been your experience, just in a broad spectrum, with your customers who have had to deal with some serious issues with their in their stories?

Charlie Greene: 18:00

yeah, of course. I mean, not not everyone's story is happy, right? You know a couple things I would share. Um, there's been some really important academic research that has been created about the importance of sharing family stories with your family, specific children, with very clear documentation that telling stories of resilience, of challenge, of hardship within a family can foster emotional resilience within children by hearing that story. I think a lot of us think when we have kids, we wanna shield them from the hardships that our family has.

Charlie Greene: 18:35

That's exactly that's where I was going with that, but actually there's a lot of research that shows that sharing with have kids we want to shield them from the hardships that our family has. Exactly that's where I was going with that. But actually there's a lot of research that shows that sharing with your kids the kinds of things that your family has overcome actually primes them to be able to understand that they come from a lineage that can handle adversity, and the research is bulletproof on that front. You know, when we started this, we went into it knowing that some people will have had experiences in their path they don't want to talk about and, from a product perspective, we have to make sure that if you're asked a question about a topic that you're not interested in talking about, you don't feel like you're being bullied into doing it Right.

Gary Pageau: 19:06

Tell us about that time you were in jail.

Charlie Greene: 19:21

Yeah, exactly, but actually the challenge that we have to solve and we spend more time focused on solving is actually the exact reverse of this problem, which I'll explain through an anecdote. One of the first people who onboarded onto the Remento platform was my wife's grandmother, who had some experiences in her past that my wife's mother had said don't ask Gami about these experiences, she doesn't like to talk about them, and Lily knew full well not to ask these questions. This was a version of Remento that was actually a live conversation.

Gary Pageau: 19:40

Right.

Charlie Greene: 19:41

And I'll never forget. Lily was asking her grandmother about one of these experiences that had nothing to do with the areas to stay away from, and it very naturally segued into the area that Lily was not supposed to ask about.

Gary Pageau: 19:54

Right.

Charlie Greene: 19:55

And the grandma just started talking about this, this thing that she had talked about before wow and at the end we asked gammy. I asked gammy, like gammy, I didn't know that um, why was it that you were comfortable sharing this today? And she said I've always been comfortable. No one in the family has ever asked about it.

Charlie Greene: 20:13

Oh interesting, and that, for us, is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about you know, where are the areas within a family that feel like they're taboo, that they feel like things that we don't talk about because we shouldn't, when in actuality they are just things that we haven't asked questions about? That's something that we see very specifically with members of the military and veterans who spend long portions of their life uncomfortable talking about their service. Sure, they age actually become comfortable talking about things that they haven't in the past. And if our company Remento can serve as a way of facilitating very meaningful and important connection around those topics within a family, we want to be able to be the excuse for that conversation to happen.

Gary Pageau: 21:08

I'm just fascinated kind of with the parallels between your background as a documentary filmmaker, whatever, and this sort of thing. It must be very gratifying to see this not really being democratized, but protestized right when everyone can literally have a documentary or a biography made about them.

Charlie Greene: 21:20

It's something I think about a lot. I remember watching a 60 Minutes episode years ago that highlighted what Steven Spielberg was doing with the Shoah Foundation Right, which is an effort that has collected millions of dollars to document the stories of living Holocaust survivors.

Erin Manning: 21:38

Right.

Charlie Greene: 21:38

And talk about a group of people whose stories deserve to be documented in high fidelity with big 4K cameras. Some people have even been filmed in three-dimensional cages so that we can create avatars and holograms of them, today and in the future.

Gary Pageau: 21:55

Right.

Charlie Greene: 21:56

I just remember thinking to myself as a society, of course, we should document those stories.

Gary Pageau: 22:01

Right.

Charlie Greene: 22:02

In 40 years, for you personally, you will care so much more about the story of your mom or your dad than one of their stories. And why is it the case that in my pocket, where I have on my camera currently four different cameras, I don't feel compelled to ask my mom a question about her childhood in my pocket?

Charlie Greene: 22:22

where I have on my camera currently four different cameras I don't feel compelled to ask my mom a question about her childhood, Right. So the idea of democratizing the capture of family stories and memories has been something that we've been really inspired to try to do. And yeah, to your point, it's deeply humbling to be able to scale that.

Gary Pageau: 22:34

Speaking of scaling it just kind of round numbers how well have you done in the four years? Are you reaching your targets or your goals?

Charlie Greene: 22:41

uh, yeah, I mean again deeply humbling, like what we hear, what we hear from people. Um, when we talk about what we're building is almost always one of two things, which is, either there is someone in my life that this would be perfect for right or I wish it wasn't too late to do this with someone I love right.

Gary Pageau: 23:01

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about, because most both my parents have passed right. So it's it's very much because you know, going through their stuff is like wow, you know, didn't know this, didn't know that this had been good to know. So I I get what you're saying about that the opportunity missed opportunity missed.

Charlie Greene: 23:16

We hear about that exact moment from so many families. Like the process of writing an obituary, sometimes, in the hours after someone has passed away, realize that you have gaps in understanding that person's life. Just hours after it's become too late to ask those questions.

Gary Pageau: 23:33

So yeah, the challenge for us.

Charlie Greene: 23:35

The thing that is most invigorating and also most frustrating is how do I convince you or your son to make the time to do this with you, Because at one point it will become too late and we want to make sure that we don't get to the point where we haven't done this at that point.

Gary Pageau: 23:51

Well, here's a product suggestion. Don't have to take me up on it, but you could have, just like obituary, this as a summary, just, and it creates a you know three paragraph summary for someone, just throwing it out there, just. It's a great idea.

Charlie Greene: 24:04

Look, what we're focused on doing right now is collecting life stories, right, right, for some of our customers, they have hours and hours of video. Sure, that becomes incredibly exciting when it comes to both creating this book, which is the deliverable that people expect when they buy our product. But our company, over time, looks to be much more than a book printing business. We're looking to be the platform where all of those precious memories not the ones that are posted to Facebook that we love, but the ones that actually deserve to be memorialized- in a more meaningful and important way exist Once you have that content.

Charlie Greene: 24:41

Whether it's cranking out an obituary or turning those recordings into a documentary, or recreating your loved one as a hologram, like those are all things that you only have the opportunity to do if you've actually collected the foundational through the process of creating your book. We're putting you on the journey of doing.

Gary Pageau: 24:59

You kind of laid out sort of the future of sort of this thing. But we'll always have the printed book, right?

Charlie Greene: 25:05

That's right. Yeah, exactly, we'll never take that away and we'll print out as many as you want, by the way. So you get one book when you purchase, memento included. And then our great partners at RPI shout out to the team at RPI will happily print as many copies as you'd like for your family.

Gary Pageau: 25:19

They're going to store a copy of it somewhere for you.

Charlie Greene: 25:21

We store the copies and we send it to them whenever you want to order additionals. Have you?

Gary Pageau: 25:26

had to deal much with unhappy people at some point. I'm just curious, because you may get people who are dealing with how you haven't got it right or told the story. I'm just curious how you would even got it right or told the story. I'm just curious how you would even cope with that or deal with that, because I imagine you've gotten one at least right.

Charlie Greene: 25:44

Yeah, I mean, if you're building product and you don't have any unhappy customers, it's probably the case that you don't have any customers, and we spend a lot of time listening to our customers, and the only thing better than hearing customers share really powerful stories about how they've captured the stories of people they love is getting critical product feedback, and we get it all the time because we're doing a lot of different things and we have really bold ambitions about how to support our customers in the future.

Charlie Greene: 26:12

So, yeah, we get tons of feedback. Some of it is it's incredibly frustrated customers who are saying why on earth is Remento not available in German? My storyteller doesn't speak English. We get people who are frustrated that they can't customize every single part of their book and also love the simplicity of the process of building their book, and then we get all sorts of different feedback as questions and requests for the future. I think the biggest surprise for me in terms of feedback has been around what we call grandparent proofing our product. I always assumed that there would be a really strong correlation between age and tech savviness.

Charlie Greene: 26:49

As you age, you become tech savvy, and what's actually proven to be the case is that correlation is much less strong than I thought. We have people who are in their 80s and in their 90s who are logging into Remento. They're recording their stories, they're picking new questions for themselves to answer, they're gifting our product to their friends and family. And then we also have people in their 60s who get a text message from us and say I don't know how to open my texts. For those people, there's only so much we can do, other than suggest someone who you know support them through that exercise Awesome.

Gary Pageau: 27:22

So, Charlie, this has been great. So where can people go for more information to learn about Remento or talk to you about partnerships or fun stuff like that? Where can people go for more information?

Charlie Greene: 27:33

Well, the easiest thing to do is to Google us. The company's name is Remento. It's like the words remember or record, or reflect and memento combined into one. It turns out it's a lot easier to build a company around a word that doesn't exist, if you want to show up when people Google it, than if you try to find a word that does. Yeah, you can Google our company and if you have questions, you can reach out directly through our website. And yeah, we'd love to be in touch.

Gary Pageau: 28:01

Awesome. Thank you so much, Charlie. Great to meet you. Take care, pleasure.

Erin Manning: 28:06

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.