00:00 Introduction

Aliaa, welcome to the show. Very excited, as one of my new friends, new people that I’ve met in the not too distant past. I’m very excited to tell your story. As you know, I have a particular excitement around your business and what you’re doing. I really think it’s amazing and I see such a huge, huge future for it. As you well know, as we talk about very many times, but no one else knows what we’re talking about yet. So let’s first start by you telling us a little bit about, before we get on to you and your sort of journey, just talk about StoryTiling and what it is so we can sort of frame that for the viewers.

00:47 What is StoryTiling?

Yeah, for sure. So look, StoryTiling, we’re an app that helps people capture their life story and share them with family and friends. And essentially what we believe is that everyone has a reason to want to capture their family stories. So it could be to document and preserve your family culture, your traditions, your heritage. It could be because you have a particular family member who has this amazing story that you just want to capture. Like, let’s say maybe you have a grandfather who fought in World War II, right, and that’s the story you just really need to capture. Maybe it’s your own legacy that you’re seeking to document or preserve for your kids. Maybe you’re a parent and you want to capture your own parenting experiences for your children, great grandchildren, great great great grandchildren. Or maybe you just want a more meaningful way to engage with other people in your network that has got a lot more substance in it. And that’s what we’re trying to come in and do. Provide a guided storytelling process to help people to capture, preserve and privately, securely share these really meaningful moments with one another.

02:55 Steve’s first impression: Instagram meets Ancestry.com

Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I love, you know, I love StoryTiling. I think, and you confirmed this when I first heard you pitch this business, which was only a couple of months ago now, it wasn’t long. To me it was just this magical bringing together of an Instagram and an Ancestry.com and having it all visual, right. And that’s what I just think is, to me it’s the first time I’ve heard a really positive pitch of what is a form of social media. Is that a fair way of looking at it?

Yeah, I mean meaningful connection, right? How do we bring meaning back in? And also privacy and security. I think that’s the other part of it as well.

03:50 Aliaa’s origin story: Vancouver to Harvard to 9/11

Okay, now let’s talk about you because your story is fascinating. StoryTiling is very new, so we’re pre-revenue, right? So we haven’t even launched the app yet. That’s happening very soon. We’ll come back to that. But let’s talk about how you’ve ended up being a founder in this business, and we’ll come to where it’s going later, but let’s go back as far as you want because your history is really interesting.

All right, well. Born, raised Vancouver, right, if you want to go all the way back. Let’s fast forward through the first 17 years or so. I was so excited, I get a letter, I got into Harvard for my undergrad, right? That’s a huge, huge accomplishment for an immigrant family. I pack myself up, move to Boston, get into the dorm, and then the night before our first day of classes, 9/11 happens.

Now, I’m an Ismaili Muslim. So Ismailis are a minority interpretation of Islam, Sufi Shia, but a minority within the Shia tradition. Now there are a lot of us in Canada and we have a really strong value placed on education, gender equality, which has enabled us to have an Ismaili mayor and an Ismaili senator and an Ismaili lieutenant governor right in Canada. So Canadians know who Ismaili Muslims are, right? It’s an identity that makes sense. Australians definitely don’t, and Americans don’t either.

So 9/11 happens and I’ve moved into this new campus, making new friends, and all of a sudden I realise I’m not just an Ismaili. I’m a Muslim. I’m a brown Muslim. And I’m a brown Muslim in a country where what it means to be a person of colour, at a time where what it means to be a Muslim, just simply didn’t understand or didn’t align really with my own understandings of myself, of what I thought my religion, my culture, my ethnicity, my identity to be. And it started this really long journey of self-exploration.

06:10 A PhD on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border

So a lot of my time at Harvard, I mean my main degree was in film production, but I ended up doing a lot of Islamic studies on the side because I was trying to figure out from an intellectual level what does it mean to be a Muslim. And then I finished my undergrad and went on, did some travels, and then I went on, did a PhD, a master’s, PhD. And essentially, my PhD is in social anthropology, and actually that’s kind of important because this comes back, right? It gave me these core skills.

But essentially what I did with my PhD, I moved to this village on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan and spent a year living with an Ismaili Muslim community. I actually shot a film about this. But essentially what I was studying was the intersection between politics, economics and religion and the aftermath of the Soviet Union. But this core skill that I gained through all of this is the ability to listen to life stories.

07:20 Ten years collecting life stories around the world

And what happens is that I come out of my PhD, I’m much more, you know, after this entire journey, I have a strong sense of who I am. But all of a sudden I have a PhD and I didn’t really know what to do with that, right? Because academia, it’s so important, but the pace of change is just much slower than the pace of change I was looking for. I wanted to effect change today.

And that’s what led me to start working with the Ismaili community. I spent all these years studying what it meant to be an Ismaili, so I started working with the community. And those skills of listening to life stories enabled me to spend the next 10 years travelling the world collecting people’s life stories. I was that person that the Ismaili community kind of asked to go and study various different topics around that. But I was also helping communities on the ground. I went back to the US, pre-Trump America, helping Ismaili Muslim youth navigate Islamophobia.

And then in 2016 I was sent to Australia. And I was the first CEO of the Aga Khan Council for Australia and New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. And that was sort of my first exposure to what I like to call a bit of a startup experience, right? Because I was setting up institutions, setting up frameworks for the social governance of the Ismaili community.

09:00 Realising the idea needed a tech solution

Essentially what I come back to is that everyone has a really good reason to want to capture their family stories. For some it’s about culture and identity. For others it’s to preserve the stories of their family members or themselves. And the entire process brings people closer together because it helps us to understand similarities, differences, what it really means to be human.

And so I sat down last year in the middle of COVID and was like, how do I do this? How do I help people to capture their life stories? And it’s hard, right? It’s really hard. It’s really labour intensive and time consuming. You need to sit down with someone, you need to talk to them, you need to know what questions to ask. You need to then figure out what to do with the stories that have been captured. And that’s when I realised we needed a tech solution. We needed something that could scale my expertise and then enable families to do this for themselves. So that was like the planting of the seed of the idea of StoryTiling.

10:40 How Antler replaced the need for an MBA

I think it’s great when you get these founders who don’t just come up with an idea, they’ve come up with an idea because of the experiences they’ve had through their life. And I think that’s why that’s what sort of got me so excited about the business when I first heard it. I can hear why you’ve done it. There’s a real why in there. And it’s not just oh, there’s a problem. It’s like this has come from years and years and years of living.

So Antler was sort of the answer to my question of how. I had this amazing idea and sat back and was like, and now how do I bring this to life? And my sister went to Stanford for her MBA and I kind of picked up the phone and called her and was like, so does this mean I need an MBA? Like, if I’m transitioning from the not-for-profit world and I have this idea and I want to bring it to life, I actually have no idea how to do this.

And I think one of the things that I realised was that for a company like ours, where it’s really about reaching as many people as possible to maximise the scale of impact, we need a VC-backed solution. We need scale. We need growth. But I desperately needed skills and people to do this with. And a lot of the, well, the global founder of Antler was in my class at Harvard, and a lot of the founders here as well are not so far away from me in the Harvard underground. So it was a friend of a friend who was like, this is the program that probably answers most of the problems that you’ve articulated.

12:20 Meeting co-founder Ben and their complementary skills

It was this amazing solution that enabled me to not have to spend like a quarter of a million dollars and two full years getting yet another degree. And at this point I’m kind of already overqualified. And instead gain really practical knowledge in a really short amount of time while meeting other people who are equally committed. And we’d all quit our jobs, so we were all full-time doing this. Like, we made radical life choices to say we are ready to start companies of our own. And it was through that program that I was able to meet my co-founders.

The first thing in terms of where we’re at right now is to tell you more about my co-founder Ben, and why this partnership works so well. Ben and I met the night before, a little before the program even started, at one of those events they had where they were bringing founders together. And it was this almost immediate connection because what we both kind of recognised in each other is that we’re really about building a purpose-driven business and there are strong values that we have that tie us together.

Ben’s entire expertise, he’s originally a management consultant, and is that person that then moved into startups where for quite a number of years, across a number of different startups, was that person who was going to say, okay here’s a new product we want to launch, figure out how to do it, build it, product manage it, and grow it. And he would take it from like zero to X number of million in a very short amount of time. So he had that exact complementary skill set that I lacked.

14:10 From formation to app launch in six months

Together what we recognise is that we have this amazing synergy where we really push each other. Why do you think what you think? Why is this the best way forward for the company? And I think it’s that kind of engagement that has enabled us to get to a point where we sort of formed the company in February-ish, we got Antler funding in April, it’s August now and we’ve launched on the App Store.

It’s still private in the sense that we’re trying to start getting our early users onto the app. But we actually have an app. And it’s been so quick. The ability to execute that he’s brought has just been incredible. I’m big and lofty with these ideas and I want to get this done, and he’ll sort of step back and say wait, okay, that sort of build the skateboard to get the bike, and breaking it down and saying okay wait, what here is really what constitutes the skateboard that we need to build first. And our MVP, or our alpha, or whatever we want to call that version that we’re ready to start onboarding early users, is ready.

15:00 The fundraising journey and bias facing female founders

From a business-wise, obviously you’ve got your Antler funding initially and you’re in the midst of doing a capital raise right now, is that right?

We are. Steve, one of the things that you were going to ask was what is one of the most challenging moments, and if I can maybe indulge in a bit of a challenge as I talk about fundraising. Because honestly, fundraising has been so new for me. And for all of the other female founders out there, there is this really interesting TED talk out there that talks about the specific bias that surrounds female founders who are trying to raise, and why it’s actually harder for females to raise money because of the types of questions we get asked. And having to be cognisant of that and then develop a skill set to respond to difficult questions with really positive answers that show the company in the best light has been such a growth process for me.

17:30 Losing a major investor commitment

This fundraising journey, it starts hard, right? Like getting those first cheques. And look, I don’t even think you know this Steve, but actually the second cheque we got, it was a pretty large cheque, and it was the second verbal commitment we got. And we got oh yes okay, we got this verbal commitment, let’s go and get our SAFE documentation together. So we go and we go back and forth with our lawyers, we figure out what’s the best SAFE template to use, and I think it took us two to three weeks to get the documents together. And we go back to this individual and a couple weeks later they pull out.

And this was probably one of the hardest moments that we’ve experienced in our journey because it was more than 50% of our commitments at that time. I mean, it’s gut-wrenching, right? You feel like you’re on this amazing trajectory. You scored a huge cheque. It killed our momentum. It was really, really difficult.

We’ve recovered. We’ve more than recovered. I mean, we’ve got yourself on the table and we’ve got amazing investors at the table. We’ve actually closed a few hundred thousand dollars since, right? So we just have a little bit more to go before we’ll close this round and we’re fine. But at the time it made us really question, are we on the right journey? We even started questioning, is our product roadmap correct? And it took a lot of courage and time to step back and say, okay, this is what we’re trying to do. Let’s refine our messaging. Let’s refine our entire plan. And I think we’re all the more better for it. But it’s to say that it’s not easy. And it’s to have that sort of self-confidence and guts to be able to go through that.

20:00 Starting a business during COVID lockdowns

I’ve got to bring COVID and lockdowns up because we’re right in the heart of it, hence the reason you’re on a screen and not sitting opposite me. How has that impacted you guys starting a business in this mayhem?

Well, superficially it saves us costs, right? So we can count that as a win. But much more seriously, I think the advantage that we have is that the formative months we were face to face. So we got to start by building really strong relationships. Our partners have met each other. We formed strong social bonds that I think are really critical to building trust.

22:30 How lockdown brought the co-founders closer together

I think the hardest part of lockdown has less been about our relationship with each other and more been about our own individual challenges. And I speak for me. Ben’s actually had a baby through lockdown as well. So I think for him, probably becoming a father is a bigger change than lockdown.

I think what we’ve been able to do is leverage the personal challenges that we’ve been facing to strengthen our relationship with each other by being really open and honest about where we are emotionally on an everyday basis. So there are days where I will call Ben up and say, I couldn’t work today because emotionally I was coping with being in one of the 12 LGAs and only suddenly realising I can only go outside for exercise for an hour a day when I’m used to doing two hours of exercise a day. And this is emotionally quite strenuous and I needed today to cope.

And that openness that we have has really brought us closer together. And then the ability to say, all right Ben, it’s the weekend and all of a sudden now I’m all guns blazing and ready to work, can you give me a couple hours? And not having to be constrained by that. So I think it’s definitely not easy but it has brought us closer together in ways that are potentially unexpected.

24:00 The COVID catalyst: losing an uncle and healing through story

The story I told you earlier about my entire life is the real why. But there was a COVID moment that was the catalyst and that final trigger. And that was when my uncle passed away in Florida. He didn’t pass away from COVID, but it was a sudden decline that was unexpected. And because of COVID, none of us could go to his funeral.

I was commissioned to write a book last year on the history of Ismailis from East Africa, which is kind of my own heritage. And as I was writing that book, in order to make that history more readable, I drew on my own ancestors’ history. So it’s sort of like a very manual version of StoryTiling, actually, where I was capturing, interviewing and capturing the stories of my own family members.

And this uncle of mine, who’s an uncle that none of us were very close to growing up because of the distance, we never got to know him. His story was actually one of, you know, he left Uganda from the time of Idi Amin, right? So fascinating stories there. And his story was the beginning of one of those chapters. When he passed away, that 1,000-word story that I captured, I circulated with our family. And our way of healing was to get on the Zoom calls and as we started discussing his story, the first thing that I noticed was just how healing it was to have his story captured, preserved. It gave everyone a sense of, oh, someone actually took the time to get to know him and document stuff we had no idea about.

The other thing that I found really illuminating was that I had cousins who were in their late 30s, early 40s with young children. They started calling me up after that and saying, can you give me a list of questions? I really want to capture my parents’ stories. And I thought, oh my god, really? I’m not just a nerd who likes doing this for fun? People in the business world, people in the medical professions, they want to take the time to do this and they don’t know how.

And what is it about COVID? It’s one, distance and the inability to travel. So we’re separated. And two, the increased valuation on family. And three, the increased anxiety over mortality. Like, we’re all more aware of our mortality.

27:00 What the pandemic changed about hiring and work

From a very practical perspective, the pandemic has made it very expensive to hire tech onshore and has made hiring offshore much more attractive. Because it’s actually like, what’s the difference? Because in both situations you’re virtually operating anyway. And if you can find quality, I think that’s one thing that’s definitely there. But I’m too new to the tech world to say if that’s a recent trend or because I’ve kind of come into the space in the middle of a pandemic and labour shortage here in Australia.

28:00 Finding her life’s work and discovering real grit

I have learned first about myself that right now I am doing my life’s work. I have found that thing that brings everything together. I mean, I’ve made so many pivots in my life. Film production, academia, community, non-profit work. Pivot after pivot. And I found that thing that brings everything together. And when I have that drive, I have real happiness. Fulfilment that no matter what else is going on, I feel a real sense of purpose. And I found it. This is my life’s work and I’m going to crack this.

And then that leads to the other thing, which is that I’ve got real grit. Whatever it is, I can do it. And yeah, I’ll push through.

30:00 Why people should join StoryTiling

Why would someone want to come and work at StoryTiling? Well, you’ve already hit one of them, because people want to make a social impact in the world, right? I think that’s like, we’re a purpose-driven business. The other reasons are potentially our work culture, right? We’re really high energy, high input, every single person’s opinion matters. And what we’re looking for are people who have passion, drive, want to innovate. They want to think outside the box, bring their ideas to the table. And that they have really high standards.

That’s the thing with Ben and I is that we really hold each other to account and we push each other very respectfully. But essentially we’re driven by growth and we’re looking for other people to join the team who want to in turn push us to grow and also want themselves to be pushed to realise their full potential. And that’s really at the core of our company’s culture.

31:40 Diversity in the team and company culture

The other thing that I’d love to say is diversity within our team is so important to us. So we currently have five people on our team and three of them are female, including tech, which is a bit rare. Of the five of us, I’m the only person who grew up speaking English at home. And even my parents didn’t always speak English to us even though I responded in English most of the time.

I have so enjoyed today. Your energy is very infectious. You can see that you are doing your life’s work. You can see that you are completely embedded in this and that it’s what you want to do. And you don’t want to be doing anything else right now and I can very much see that in you and I think it’s awesome. Congratulations on where you’re up to. I’m very very excited to see the app actually come out and be able to use it. And good luck with the ending of the capital raise.

If any early users want to start using StoryTiling, then please also storytiling.com, join our waitlist.