People to Know — TheirStory and Zack Ellis

Column Editor: Matthew Ismail (Editor in Chief, Charleston Briefings; Founder, Dost Publishing) <matthew.ismail@icloud.com>

I was in Amsterdam, in the Anne Frank house, in the attic — where there was a video playing of Anne’s father, Otto Frank.

He said that he had never really realized the depth and complexity of Anne’s thoughts until after she had died and he read her diary.

He concluded in the video that because he had such a close relationship with Anne, but never really knew who she was, that most parents don’t know, really, their kid(s).

-Zack Ellis, CEO and Founder of TheirStory (https://TheirStory.io/about-us)

When I think about companies and their founders, I’m always curious about some basic questions: Where does this company come from? What were the experiences and questions that led someone to want to found this company? Obviously, one part of the answer is the need to earn a living; but the need to earn a living sends some people in search of an employer, and others to build something new from the ground up.

Zack Ellis was one of those who wanted to start something new. His company, TheirStory, an oral history and story management platform, “started as a way of sharing and preserving memories among family — but it has since transformed into a platform that streamlines the process for any community to collect, preserve, and engage with the audiovisual stories of the individuals that make up their community.”

When I recently asked Zack why he founded TheirStory, rather than, say, decide to sell real estate or go into banking, his answer is the sort of unexpected gem that I tend to find in founder stories:

“I think it was, in a weird way, something that was both core to what I have been curious about my whole life, and also something that evolved from that curiosity through my experiences. And I think the thing that I’ve always been curious about is why am I me? Why am I stuck in my own perspective? And so I’ve always been curious about seeing things from other people’s points of view.”

Zack went from being a collegiate wrestler whose undergraduate work was in bioengineering to a first job in Silicon Valley at the invitation of one of his former college teammates. In Silicon Valley, Zack wound up in an unexpected role as Community Manager for an “API management company” called Apigee — APIs being, for my fellow technophobes, a piece of software that allows two apps to talk to each other. Zack’s role was to talk to customers and to understand how and why these customers bought Apigee’s product and how it helped them. Zack jokes that Apigee, in true Silicon Valley fashion, liked to think of itself just as much as a philosophy company as it did as a technology company. “Its head philosopher, if you will, had recommended I read two books.” These books were Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. The former introduced Zack to the Hero’s Journey — the phases that the hero of every story goes through on their epic quest of trials, triumphs, and transformation.

The Crossing the Chasm introduced Zack to the technology adoption curve — the phases that every new technology or idea goes through along its path to mass adoption, starting with innovators, early adopters, and eventually the mainstream market.

At the time, APIs were a new technology paradigm; whereas today, they are ubiquitous in software development. As Zack interviewed API and Developer Program leaders at the Fortune 2000 companies that used Apigee’s platform — organizations like Walgreens, AT&T, and Pearson — he learned that their most common challenges were not technical, but rather were about: 1) attracting and retaining technical and entrepreneurial talent; 2) educating the business on the value of APIs and developer programs. These API program leaders were change agents having to overcome the internal inertia of these corporate giants. They were the heroes within their own companies who were leading change! But often, they didn’t know about the challenges and successes of their peers at other companies.

Zack began to wonder, “Well, if I know all the stages of the hero’s journey, and if everyone is the hero of their own story, what if I came up with questions that naturally aligned to the stages of the hero’s journey? Could that help our customers tell their stories in a way that they most identified with and in a way that their peers would see themselves as well? And then they’ll learn from the nuggets of wisdom that each of these people have. And that totally works. I was fascinated with interviewing and storytelling and I would interview Uber drivers and Lyft drivers in the framework and just practiced it and loved it.”

This is when Zack began to wish that he had a platform like TheirStory that would allow him to record, archive, and discover those conversations with customers so that the information could be located and shared effectively. He had to go back to his data and manually extract key moments to share with the product team, marketing team, and sales team, and also to share with customers to allow them to build a community, and this was very time-consuming and inefficient.

“And so that was the first inkling of the idea that, okay, what does my future business look like? The idea that it’s a platform business, platform technology. It’s API first, which is all about the ability to share information, share data, share functionality, in service of building communities of practice. I envisioned the idea that there’s so much information exchanged through the spoken word, but also a lot that is lost. And in a time when data is incredibly valuable, how valuable would it be if we could capture stories, analyze them, share insights from them, and that would support any community of practice where it’s really about the exchange of ideas. And so TheirStory at its core was about the propagation and exchange of ideas and how to do that in an age where video is the dominant form of communication and communities are increasingly remotely distributed.”

The work in Silicon Valley was important to Zack in beginning to envision a platform for the recording, storage and discovery of video interviews. But TheirStory is also a personal story. “As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, it was one of my dad’s biggest regrets that he never recorded his father’s stories before he died. And … at the Anne Frank House [in Amsterdam] … there was a clip playing on loop of an oral history where Anne’s father, Otto, concluded that because he had had such a close relationship with Anne but never really knew who she was until after she died and he had read her diary, that he believed most parents don’t really know their children. And so it hit me, well, if most parents don’t know their kids, then how can I know who my parents are? And so I started a project over the next two years, recording my parents telling their life stories from across the country. I was in San Francisco, they were in Rochester, New York, where I grew up.”

Taking an online programming course on Udemy during nights and weekends over a six month span, Zack learned enough web development skills to build the first prototype of TheirStory. As Zack also said, “What was just as valuable as having those recordings for posterity was the value of the process itself of engaging in self reflection, these open dialogues with my parents, and how it deepened our relationships and improved our capacity for better communication. And that, ultimately, was the genesis of TheirStory.”

Zack reminds us of the value of an oral history platform compared to using a platform like Zoom. “What we found is that organizations who are looking to embrace the power of video-based storytelling are looking to take long form audiovisual media, whether it’s through conversations or lectures, webinars, archival footage … or oral histories — organizations are looking to transform that long form audio-visual content into more short form narratives that are easy to consume, or easy to research based on how that’s cataloged. It is a really cumbersome process — most organizations are using three to five different applications to go from asking “How do you plan for what it is you’re going to ask?” Or “What’s the goal of the project?” To capturing those stories and conducting all those interviews and doing all the scheduling. Then all the post production and meaning-making and having to transcribe it to make it searchable? Indexing it so that you’re identifying themes that might not have actually been spoken? So how do you pull that [information] out to make it more accessible to researchers, educators, students, and then figuring out what new knowledge or narrative needs to be synthesized and told and disseminated across a number of different platforms that people can get access to? And then how do you preserve that long term?”

Interesting questions! It seems obvious to me that TheirStory is a tool that would be of tremendous value to organizations such as museums, local history societies, community organizations who want to document their experience, universities and archives, and family history and genealogy organizations. It would make the process of recording and preserving videos and transcripts so much easier and more effective. Zack’s own family and work story is really so much the story of those who use TheirStory. Human memories, self-reflection, and community sharing. It’s a beautiful story!

Sources

“ATGthePodcast 224 – A Conversation with Zack Ellis, Founder & CEO, TheirStory,” 1/7/2024. Available on the Charleston Hub at https://www.charleston-hub.com/podcast/ atgthepodcast-224-a-conversation-with-zack-ellis-founderceo-theirstory/.

Zack Ellis, Matthew Ismail, Interview conducted and preserved on www.TheirStory.io, 1/17/2024.