Our Story
What if a single conversation could outlast a lifetime?
When my son Rishi was born in January, the first person I wanted to call was my grandfather.
He wasn't there. He'd been gone for years. But in that moment — holding my son for the first time, completely undone — he was the person I reached for.
He raised me. Not in a metaphorical way. Literally. He picked me up from school every day. I slept in his bed through most of my childhood. Every morning he would wake up singing — loud, unselfconscious, the way only old men who've stopped caring what people think can sing. He'd put me on the back of his Royal Enfield and take me to the barber shop, to get ice cream, to the temple, to the community meetings where he seemed to know everyone and everyone seemed to know him.
I knew his stories. But I never asked him the real questions — what scared him, what he'd do differently, what he'd say to me about becoming a father.
I don't have a single recording of his voice.
My wife Jess and I are question people. At our wedding, we put strangers from different parts of our lives at the same table with a set of questions designed to get them really talking. It worked better than anything else we did that day. Friends still call us when they're planning a gathering and want it to mean something.
We've learned that questions are a superpower. The right one, at the right moment, unlocks something in a person that they didn't know was waiting to come out. The problem isn't that people don't want to go deep. It's that most of us don't know where to start.
"Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question."
— E.E. Cummings
FamilyLoom is my answer to that question. You sit down together. The right questions appear. You focus on the person in front of you.
I want Rishi to have recordings of the people who shaped him. I want him to have what I don't.
— Dharan, Founder