Meet the millennials trying to help others preserve legacy of loved ones

It wasn’t until he became a father that Nicholas Worley rekindled the idea of preserving memories of his loved ones and their legacies.

That idea first germinated when Worley was just 16. He lost his paternal grandfather to prostate cancer and his maternal grandmother to Alzheimer’s that same year — both deaths had a deep impact on him.

“After granddad passed away, I didn’t have anything tangible to remember him by, or to know how he was like as a younger man or a kid,” said the 41-year-old British Colombian, who is father of three active toddlers.

The death of family members, a failed business partnership and the Covid-19 pandemic played a part in helping three millennials plunge into new businesses that help others memorialize relationships and preserve their family legacy.

Worley is the founder of Inalife, a digital platform that helps families build a digital family tree for a monthly fee. The company provides digital storage for photographs, video and audio clips of family members so the family can view them now or in the future.

Born and largely raised in Hong Kong where he’s currently based, Worley said he only jumped into action after the Covid pandemic and the death of his mother-in-law in 2022. At that time, he decided to take a break from his 15-year public relations career.

In July last year, he finally launched Inalife, hoping to break even in about two years.

“When my kids were born and my mother-in-law passed away, I realized my kids would only know me as their dad, and I wanted them to know what I was like when I was younger. I wanted me, my sons and all our family members [to] be remembered in some way,” Worley added.

Users may also prerecord messages for their loved ones that will only be released at a predetermined time or milestone in the future.

Subscribers have the option to upgrade the service if they want to add more users or increase the storage space for their memories.

For long-time Singaporean friends and business partners Haresh Tilani and Terence Chia, it was the disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic that drove them to start their personalized interviewing business.

Folklory provides an interviewing service between one of its experienced interviewers and the client’s friends or loved ones which can eventually be turned into a studio-quality podcast.

The business idea came almost accidentally.

“I just finished recording a podcast episode, and I just randomly thought it would be fun to ask my mom questions I would never ask her — like what it’s like to be 70,'” Tilani said. “And she said things I never ever heard her say.”

Through that conversation, he found out that his parents used to to take him and his brother to an empty apartment when they were young just to let the family enjoy their own space. It turns out they had bought their own apartment but could not live in it as they wanted to take care of his father’s parents.

Those visits to the empty apartment were moments of temporary respite from the pressures of care giving.

“It was only then that I knew that about my father,” said the 40-year-old. “My dad passed away in 2013, but I have nothing that captures his personality.”

That unplanned conversation with his mother in late 2020 not only unearthed a precious tidbit for Tilani about his father, it also turned out to be a life line for their content business after their plans were upended by the pandemic and the bankruptcy of a business collaborator.

Tilani and Chia met when they were undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Their business plunged into debt after the video-on-demand streaming platform that they made a TV series for went into liquidation in March 2020 — right when the pandemic first hit.

It made them realize they needed to diversify their business and led them to pivot into audio content.

“We found an Asian family loophole: we don’t talk to each other. But we will tell a third party we love our mom,” said Chia, who turns 42 later this year.

“It’s easier to tell someone else I love my mom, than to tell my mom ‘I love you,'” Tilani chimed in. “It’s been surprising how willing people are to open up to people they have never met, as long as you set the proper context.”

Their Folklory business has since expanded to include corporate clients who want to facilitate greater diversity and inclusionary practices in their hybrid workplaces.

Their experience has also led the duo to embark on a community oral history project in Singapore which aims to interview 60 senior Singaporeans in time for the Southeast Asian city-state’s 60th founding anniversary in 2025.

For Tilani, a part of Folklory will always remain personal.

“As millennials get into their 30s and 40s, your parents get older and maybe you lose a loved one and then you realize, people are not going to be around forever,” Tilani said. “I felt this when I got married two years ago, my wife never got to meet my dad.”

“All I could do is to show her pictures and short videos, and I fully believe if there were one 30-minute conversation with my dad, she would get a full idea of who he is.”