Preserving generations of photo memories with Glen Meakem of Forever.com

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with Glen Meakem, CEO and founder, Forever.com, the permanent cloud photo storage and sharing company. A serial entrepreneur, Meakem founded FreeMarkets Inc. in 1995, which was later sold for $500 million. He also formerly headed up a venture capital fund and was a former radio host based in Pittsburgh, Pa. For the past eight years, he has devoted his energy to Forever.com.

In this podcast, Meakem talks about the value proposition of offering permanent photo storage, the Forever.com offering and business model, and the importance of preserving family history.

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Transcript

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Intro - Erin Manning (2s):
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. The photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau

Gary Pageau (11s):
The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Photo Finale, Mediaclip, Advertek Inc., GotPhoto, EyeQ, Photobook.ai, The IPI Member Network and Mailpix. Hello and good afternoon. Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Today, we're welcoming Glen Meakem, founder and CEO of Forever Inc. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hello, Glen, how are you today?

Glen Meakem (41s):
Hey Gary, how are you? Great to be with you

Gary Pageau (44s):
For those listeners who aren't familiar forever. Can you tell us a little bit about the company?

Glen Meakem (48s):
Yeah, so I, Gary, I founded forever eight years ago, actually. And the reason I did was I'm a family guy I'm married, been married for over 30 years. I've got five kids, most of whom were pretty grown at this point. And, and I've, we've got a lot of photo memories. We've got a lot of other memories and documents and things, and I'm also a successful internet entrepreneur. I started a company called FreeMarkets.com back a number of years ago and took that public and was successful with that. And you mentioned before too, I used to be a radio. I used to have radio show, so I've got a lot of stuff that a lot of photos and videos and documents and even audio files.

Glen Meakem (1m 23s):
And I was looking for a place in the cloud where I can keep all that stuff and keep it longterm. You know, obviously if it's not, if it's sort of everywhere on phones and on computers and random different cloud storage accounts, it's very difficult to manage. So I realized that I need in order for all that material to be organized in one place where I could keep it. And frankly, where I could curate it myself over time, but then leave it to my descendants. If I wanted my children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, I like, you know, I liked genealogy.

Glen Meakem (1m 55s):
I like history. I researched these things. If I wanted to leave all that material there permanently, I needed a single place in the cloud and account where it could be organized and managed and where it could be protected and shared. And it had to be long, you know, it had to be literally permanent, you know, it had to last beyond my lifetime. And so I went looking for a service where I could get that. And, and I started reading terms of service and I started looking at all the different options and it's all the usual suspects. And you know, whether it's Dropbox or whether it's Amazon or whether it's Google and all the various services.

Glen Meakem (2m 30s):
And I realized that all of them were temporary. All of them, I cloud, you know, at black lab, they explicitly tell you that if you, you know, if you stop paying, they're going to delete you. Or, I mean, without getting the detail, it depends on the service, but there are different flavors. There's the, if you stop paying every month, they're going to delete you eventually. There's the, Hey, if you, if you're no longer valuable to advertisers, like you're dead, they're going to delete your account. There's the, Oh, if you're no longer a print with us, then you're not valuable to us. We're going to delete your account. So, but every single one of these business models was explicitly temporary.

Glen Meakem (3m 3s):
And there was nobody who'd thought about longterm. There was nobody out there who thought, well, gee, what if a family wants to keep material in one cloud account for generations? So that's when I realized that there was a huge opportunity that there was a need, I, my, my family and I had and other people would have, and I started Forever. I started the company almost exactly. It's funny. We're talking on May 28th. I started at almost eight years to the day. Okay. That wasn't when it was launched. But when I first gave birth and actually incorporated legally, and I first incorporated under a name, Mika NewCo, cause it was my latest company.

Glen Meakem (3m 38s):
I'm a serial entrepreneur, but I was able to then, acquire the name Forever, shortly after founding and get the URL. You'll get the domain and get the register, the trademark, et cetera. And so we became Forever.com and it is basically, you know, eight years later, we've developed it into this single place in the cloud where you can open an account and you can have all your stuff, you know, your photos, your video, your documents, audio files, save it, organize it, share it.

Glen Meakem (4m 10s):
There's you can share with friends and family, you can share publicly. You can keep things private. You can set succession settings. So that say, after I die, I want this material to be public. That wasn't public before that wasn't shared with friends and family. And then of course, it's also a complete memory keeping service. So we compete with Legacy Box. We have a digitization center. It's in Green Bay, Wisconsin, our media conversion center, where basically people send stuff from all over to us by FedEx and we digitize it and we put it up in their forever account.

Glen Meakem (4m 44s):
So you can digitize with us, all the old stuff, the old photos, the old films you'll videos. And then of course you can organize it and share it. You can use our mobile apps for both iOS and Android and you can sync and upload all your current photos and all your videos, et cetera. And then you can create photo books and we have design software. You can create beautiful designs and calendars and photo books and mugs and wall art, all that kind of stuff. You can add digital art, you can buy digital art from us. And, and then you can stream video with us.

Glen Meakem (5m 15s):
You basically can do, you can send your holiday cards, your print books, your photo books. You basically, we are a one stop shop, complete permanent memory, keeping service for people. And the great news is we're booming. We are just, you know, it took a while to build this all out and get this going and start to build this brand name, but Forever.com. We are just booming. And we're an example through this COVID 19 crisis, this economic crisis, we're an example of a e-commerce cloud stay at home company and we're just booming.

Glen Meakem (5m 52s):
So we're having a great great year and growing like a weed. So explain a little bit the forever

Gary Pageau (5m 59s):
Part of forever in the sense that how on earth can you guarantee? Cause it is a guarantee as I understand it, it's actually a contract that you guarantee it's going to be there. How can you possibly do that in this world of companies coming and going, you know, companies giving away and taking away services that have, that happens all the time, right? People love the service and then Google quits it because the decide in their plan anymore, how are you able to offer forever, forever?

Glen Meakem (6m 31s):
Well, that's a great question, Gary. And I get asked that all the time and it's a simple, it's, it's actually not a simple answer. It's a complicated, it's a complicated question and a complicated answer. But the deal is this is that we adopted a business model for our forever storage, which is similar to on the one hand, the university endowment and on the other hand life insurance company. So what people do is when they buy forever storage, they're paying, they're paying us a lot more money up front, then they would be paying for just that year's, you know, stored.

Glen Meakem (7m 4s):
So, so let me use a simple example, 10 gigabytes, the smallest amount of forever storage you can buy is 10 gigabytes and the list price. Now we frequently do deals because in e-commerce people want to buy on a deal, but the list price is on our $99 for 10 gigabytes. Now the cost of actually doing a, providing your 10 gigabytes of storage for a 12 month period might be like, let's without being exact, let's say $10, right? But we're charging people 199. And what's happening is, is that people pay 199.

Glen Meakem (7m 37s):
We have marketing and sales costs that come out of that. Right? But then most of the money, the majority of the money goes into the forever guarantee fund. And what's happening is, is that, Oh, let me go back up. So a little tiny bit of what they pay goes for this year storage. Another portion of what they pay is going to pay the marketing and sales and the customer acquisition costs. And then the rest is basically going to guarantee fund. And the guarantee fund is like a university endowment or a life insurance reserve fund.

Glen Meakem (8m 7s):
It's a big growing pile of money. That's invested in a diversified portfolio of essentially stocks and bonds, and it's going to grow, you know, and there's volatility, right? Sometimes it's up something, obviously we were down in March and April of this year, but, but basically over time, it will, I, our average target growth is 8% a year. And the distribution policy is 4% a year. So on average, over many years, we'll generate returns of 8% will distribute 4% and the fund will grow on after inflation adjusted basis.

Glen Meakem (8m 45s):
And you know, so we'll have real growth, like an endowment. And basically that is the mechanism we're using to fund people's ongoing forever storage. And, and then of course there's other detail to it because we've thought about this issue of, of, you know, what happens if people ask me, well, Glen, that sounds great, really nice. What happens if you go out of business? And I say, well, listen, number one, I'm absolutely committed to this. I've been a successful entrepreneur. I'm in my fifties, I'm not 25 years old. I'm I'm I love 25 year olds and 30 year olds.

Glen Meakem (9m 16s):
I was one once I have kids that age, but I've decided that this is my professional mission in life. That for the rest of my career, this is what I'm doing. It's a really important mission to help guarantee people's memories to provide the first, the world's first ever service that says, yes, we will be here for generations. We will save your content and we will make it available. As you dictate in, in, in your settings, even after you're gone, even though you're not a client anymore, you'll still, you know, even though you're dead, you'll still be a client.

Glen Meakem (9m 49s):
And basically I'm dedicating my professional career and my grit and my determination to making sure we succeed. That's number one. And number two, we're honest, and we have this thing in our, if you go to forever.com, you can read our terms of service and you can read our investment policy for the guarantee fund. And you can see that we say explicitly, if in the unlikely case that we fail and go out of business, there'll be money left over guarantee fund. We will use that money. We provide a minimum to your guarantee that at an absolute minimum, all the material will be there.

Glen Meakem (10m 22s):
The, the, the, the, the software will be functioning for a minimum of two years so that people can get all their stuff easily out. And that's the minimum guarantee. But, you know, and that's, you know, if, if we were to go out of business, but I'll tell you right now. And I think that this COVID-19 crisis is a key test. You know, I founded the company, had the idea and got the, you know, got incorporated gets started in 2012. This is our first real global crisis. It's our first recession or depression. And we are architecting this company we're built to last, we're going to be there through all future crises.

Glen Meakem (10m 54s):
And we think about that. We think about, you know, what's it going to take to make sure we're here for generations. And that's what we're all about. Final thought on this is that MetLife was founded during the American civil war in 1864. It was the first time anybody had tried to insure lives. And that the founders of the company realized that, Hey, if people had responsibilities, they needed to ensure their life so that their family could be supported if they were gone. And they needed to get, you know, think about that. They needed to bring together not five or 10 or a hundred, but thousands of people just spread the ribs.

Glen Meakem (11m 28s):
And it took about 20 years for, for, for MetLife to really gain hold. It wasn't until the 1880s, 20 years later that they really gained hold. But of course, here they are, whatever, 150 years later they have, I think it's $2 trillion under management and their reserve funds. That's my goal. My goal is to follow that path and create essentially the MetLife for the internet.

Gary Pageau (11m 56s):
How long did it take you from ideation to kind of the fruition? Cause I think one of the challenges you've probably wrestling with is, you know, you have to be very inter-operable right. If you're sharing from all these services, if you're inputting from all these other sources, you've got metadata, you've got tagging, you've got all these kinds of things you have to deal with. That must be that must have really affected how the platform has developed.

Glen Meakem (12m 26s):
What I like talking with you, Gary, and we've got to talk again and I love what you and your partner are doing with your, your, your blog and your, you know, your whole service because you, you, you, you have a sophistication and the questions you're asking, which most people don't have that the bottom line was that it's a big, this was the whole forever idea. As I've described, it is a platform idea. It's not a single vertical service. It's a, it's a platform business. And it's hard to get that started.

Glen Meakem (12m 57s):
And the way I did was, you know, the first year I raised, I articulated this idea, I've been a successful internet entrepreneur. I committed a lot of money myself and I was able to go raise $9 million to get started. And then, you know, we, we, I had the idea in the spring of 2012, I incorporated, I think it was May 31st, 2012 here almost eight years to the day almost. And it took 'em to, you know, get the, get the business plan written, raise the initial funding, start to hire an initial team, do the ideation and get the first version done with the first version out in the market, September 1st of 2013.

Glen Meakem (13m 34s):
So essentially, what is that about 15, 16 months after founding. And then frankly, it wasn't very good. It took, you know, and we had photos only, and it took a long time. And finally, by 16, by 2016, we really started to get momentum. We started to start, we started to get product market fit, but then of course the challenge was, and of course I remember people remember way back when the eBay, the first internet boom, and this has happened to many other companies as our volumes really started to increase.

Glen Meakem (14m 7s):
And we started to have tens of millions of photos uploaded. And we started at visions of video. We realized that the platform we had built back in 2013, wasn't going to support the future. So we basically starting the summer of 2016, rebuilt everything from the ground up and with a much better foundation and, you know, technically, and so it's been, you know, it's not been easy, but we've, we've, we've gotten there. And what's, what's so rewarding about this year of 2020.

Glen Meakem (14m 38s):
Is that not only are we surviving and thriving through this crisis because we're so well aligned with the future being e-commerce being something people do from home, being something that's really important to people, you know, memories are like, this is not some fruit fruit, Oh, I, Oh, am I going to get a little bike to go down the street? You know, a lime colored bike. This is, this is like core to people. So in a time when people are taking things seriously and, and worrying about life and death, it's like, they worry about forever.

Glen Meakem (15m 8s):
So we're not only are we cloud not only are we commerce, not only consumer, but we're, we're stay at home and we're essential. So it's like, we're totally aligned. And on top of all that, because we built everything and gotten the platform to where it is, we're ready, we've been ready for the onslaught of volume. And so it's, you know, it's, it's just great to be in this position now where we have, you know, tens of fat. We don't have millions yet, but we've got, you know, this year it's over 20,000 people who've already paid for and are, you know, forever storage owners.

Glen Meakem (15m 47s):
And we'll have, you know, paying clients, total pain clients of closer between 25 and 30,000 this year, by the end of the year, we'll have over a hundred thousand active users. So it's, you know, again, these are small numbers compared to Google or, you know, well-established companies, but, but we're at a stage where, you know, we have, we have some real scale and we're in our growth is accelerating. So it's, and I can assure people, you know, I look my clients in the ID and in the eye in the eye now.

Glen Meakem (16m 18s):
And it's like, we've got this infrastructure in place. We are being, you know, we've got the financial model working, we are being successful. And in my, in it, you know, and you can hear from me, I've got this passion and energy and commitment to this, but it's not just me. It's my whole team. We've got this incredible team of people. We're absolutely dedicated to this.

Gary Pageau (16m 39s):
What I think has been interesting to watch, because I've been familiar with the company for a few, you know, a few years. And it has been one of the things that's been interesting is how you've kind of layered some services onto the original core offering, right? You haven't been satisfied with just storage. You you've you've you acquired the, the, the desktop creation software, right. Artisan or something. And then you've added recently book printing and some other output choices to kind of become a full feature service.

Gary Pageau (17m 11s):
But I don't think he really wandered away from what the core business offering is. Right?

Glen Meakem (17m 18s):
Yep. No worries. If you read the business plan, I wrote in the summer and fall of 2012 were very consistent with the vision, but we have learned a lot. You know, one of our key values as a company is listening to our clients. I really think that in business, you know, business is hard. It's hard, it's hard to create a successful technology company. And it's hard to create a, you know, VCs are really venture. Capitalists are really reluctant to invest in consumer internet companies because it's so hard to create a new, a new brand, you know, it's easier.

Glen Meakem (17m 49s):
And B to B, that being said, the key is to create something that people need and then to get it out in the market, you know, get that hopefully beyond minimum viable product out, but get, get that product out. That's good enough to survive, but then get all that feedback. And we've been listening and listening and improving and improving. And you know, some of the first things I listened back, you know, being in the market in 2013, late in 2013, we realized real quick, okay, we were, you know, we had the forever storage, we had the permanence, we had the, you know, that whole idea, that guarantee fund in place, but we didn't have printing.

Glen Meakem (18m 28s):
We didn't have design. We realized, Oh, we learned real fast. Guess who the primary clients were. They weren't guys like us. I mean, there's, there, there are plenty of men, especially not, you know, more mature guys, middle aged guys, more mature people like us, you know, who are, you know, 45 plus, there are plenty of men who care about family legacy and care about their family and care about genealogy and family history and those things. And there is a clear market segment of men like you and me who care about this stuff and who are clients, we have those, but they're like 10%, 90% are moms and grandmas and who have that, just absolutely passionate dedication to preserve and family memories.

Glen Meakem (19m 18s):
And that's one thing I learned, frankly, I didn't know that going in because I was part of the 10% and what we realized within that within six months we realized, okay, this is a business that's really focused on mom and grandma on, on women. And so we've, we're not, if you look at all of our marketing materials and stuff, you'll see we catered when we're not, we're not so feminized, we turn off the guys, right. But we're very much focused on our market. And we realized, Oh, all those bombs, they really care about photo books.

Glen Meakem (19m 49s):
And they care about that. If we're going to do a photo book or card or a calendar, it's gotta be beautiful and it's gotta be designed. And we found that some of those women want it to be quick. They want it to be beautiful and great, a quick, simple, easy others wanted to have the freedom to make it a whole hobby and make it their passion create ultimate creativity and delivering stuff. And then, and then we also realized they loved to do it in the community. And you know, and I, I, it's funny, I grew up, I'm a native, I live in Pittsburgh.

Glen Meakem (20m 21s):
I'm a, I'm kind of a Midwest sort guy with family guy, et cetera. I've been married to one woman for a long, long time, but I'm a native new Yorker and I've done some geological research recently. I'm a, at li I'm a fifth or sixth generation native new Yorker. I was born in Manhattan and I grew up just North of the city in Westchester, close to the ground. Zero on the coronavirus is where I go up. I know where Westchester is. Excellent. And there was a thing called in the Revolutionary War. Of course, you know, there was the battle of White Plains, which is just, I grew up just North of White Plains.

Glen Meakem (20m 53s):
And as a school kid, we would go and, you know, George Washington's headquarters was here and the Revolutionary War, we would go to these different historic sites, you know, on class trips. And it was like, Oh, the revolutionary war era, this or that. And I remember one day, and I remember this beautiful, old, old home where in, and I remember a person, an artisan type, you know, docent kind of person showing us things. I was about 10 years old and she showed us a revolutionary war, era quilts. And she talked about quilting bees and how women of that era would get together.

Glen Meakem (21m 25s):
And they would sew together. All these, they would take the old clothes and old stuff, and they would take the old and recycle and create something beautiful and functional and warm with the new, you know, it created new in quilting and they would do this together and they would teach each other and share techniques and share ideas and, and just be together. And what I realized was, and this is one of my strengths intellectually is I connect things. I realized, Oh, the whole idea of doing a crop, which is what people call it. The women called doing a crop or a digital crop where you get together and you create scrapbooks physically.

Glen Meakem (22m 2s):
And now digitally. That is like the modern day quilting bee. It's a way for people in general and particularly women to get together and share expertise and teach and share tricks. And, and, and, and they love it. So we have that too. We we've just encouraged the growth of that. So we have women who are members of our forever community. And, and like I said, I know there's a few, we're like the Marine Corps. We have a few good men. We have a lot of women and these women and a few good men love to get together and love to digitally crop.

Glen Meakem (22m 39s):
They think about cropping, old fashioned cutting photos for a scrapbooker cutting things, cropping for scrapbook. They it's called a digital crop. So they get together and they do digital props. They love to get together. They love to be community. And now even on the COVID-19 crisis, they love to do it on zoom. It's amazing how people love to get together and do this together. So we encourage that. So, and what we've done, and I didn't know any of this. I, I mean, you heard what I wanted to save stuff permanently. I didn't know anything about printing and creating and cropping and this community, but we've learned all that by listening.

Glen Meakem (23m 14s):
And then functionality wise, you talking about our metadata functionality and forever is fabulous. We give complete freedom metadata to say, to basically preserve original metadata alone, where you can add all the tagging and descriptions and stuff you have with forever. You can write that onto the metadata of a photo. You can download that with the new metadata. If you want, you can download it without the committed data. We give people complete freedom and all this kind of detailed functionality is stuff we've learned by having a relationship with and listening to our clients.

Gary Pageau (23m 50s):
So can you talk a little bit about kind of building on that? Cause you kind of have a different business model in the sense you are any commerce company, so people can go online and order, you know, your service, but there's also like a direct sales model. Correct.

Glen Meakem (24m 7s):
Right. So here's what another title

Gary Pageau (24m 9s):
About that in terms of how that was developed, it's kind of goes with your community. Yeah.

Glen Meakem (24m 14s):
Yeah. So what happened was in 2013 and 2014, we put this application out there in the web and a little bit by mobile. We had initial mobile app too, and you know, the whole concept of Oh, forever storage. And this is going to last for generations. And it was, it wasn't something we could communicate in 20 or 30 seconds. It took, we found that if we can sit down with somebody for 15 minutes over coffee and explain it, they would get it, but we couldn't get them to understand it in 20 or 30 seconds.

Glen Meakem (24m 46s):
Right. So there was, and we, and of course, although, you know, owning forever as a brand and owning dub, dub, dub, dub.forever.com is unbelievable and awesome. And it was, there's a whole story around how it was able to get that. It was just fabulous, you know, that we were able to get that brand, but it wasn't enough. And what we found is we needed to find a way at scale for, for when. And of course it was, it was 90% of the audience is women. We needed to find a way to reach women at scale for 15 minutes over coffee.

Glen Meakem (25m 20s):
And the best way to do that was to have affiliate salespeople out there in the world, selling for us and taking each other out to coffee and doing classes at community colleges and doing classes in the evening at high schools and all that kind of stuff. And, and so we decided to develop a, a, you know, an affiliate sales model and we just learned how to do that. And it's not it's yeah, there are, there are some just like Uber, you know, with their gig economy workers, they actually have citywide organizers like T to get Uber, to get Uber drivers organized in a city.

Glen Meakem (25m 56s):
Like you want to move into Minneapolis or San Diego or whatever you got, or for that matter Delhi or wherever you are. You got to have people on the ground in those cities, recruiting and training and listening to problems and leading and solving problems. Right. We found it was the same thing with, with, with forever ambassadors. We call them ambassadors, women, women, and men, women, and a few good men, a lot of women and a few good men who were out there teaching forever and selling forever and having those 15 and 20 minute conversations over coffee at Starbucks.

Glen Meakem (26m 31s):
Well, in order to get those people going and trained, we needed recruiters. We need people. And the way to do that was to have, you know, a few layers of leaders above the newer ambassadors. And so we're not traditional multilevel marketing. There's no inventory, there's no inventory loading. There's none of that as stuff going on, it's, it's completely inventory free, but we do have several layers so that we have leaders out there in the field and it works really, really well.

Glen Meakem (27m 2s):
Hmm.

Gary Pageau (27m 3s):
So how many ambassadors? So let's say, I mean, first of all, can you talk about the regions you service? I mean, are you just in us, we do, have you gone to Canada? Do you have gone to Europe and how many ambassadors do you have in those areas?

Glen Meakem (27m 17s):
We have right now to a total of it's between two thousand four hundred and two thousand five hundred ambassadors. So let's like, let's call it 2,450 at this moment. It goes up every day. And it's interesting. There was a point at which we had a lot more because we had a lot of personal use ambassadors, people who would sign up as an ambassador just to get a discount, but we decided we really want our ambassador for us to be professional.

Glen Meakem (27m 48s):
Right. And we really want to bachelors who are business builders, who really are trying to earn an income. And we do have quite a few people who earn a very good income doing this, but controversy that policy, it was, it was a, it was a big business decision I made. And I, I, that was a decision I made and pushed through that. We decided to start charging ambassadors, an annual fee it's right now it's $99 and it's an annual fee and it's a subscription that they need to pay. And of course they get a tremendous amount of service and technology and stuff, technology tools from us.

Glen Meakem (28m 20s):
So it's a very, very good deal. But the bottom line is that was one thing we did. And we just did. We just, you know, we have a lot of professional training and we didn't have a whole kind of philosophy around the professionalism of our ambassadors. And that has attracted a lot of very professional people who are building real businesses, but we have, so we have about 2004. So, so what I was saying was we used to have more, but we have now 2000, we'd gone down to blow 2000 when we made those changes. And now we've grown all the way back up to, you know, approaching 2,500 again.

Glen Meakem (28m 53s):
And it's people all over the U S I think we have every single state covered all 50 of them. About 80% of our people are in the U S about 15% are in Canada. We're very strong in Canada as well. And in fact, we don't operate the company as an American company. We operate the company as a, as an international company. We, we, we were English language only. We're what we try to say is, you know, eventually will be multiple languages forever.

Glen Meakem (29m 24s):
We'll be to blank right now for a lot of reasons, the pace of development, our market saturation, et cetera, we're English only, but we're, if you go read our website, you'll see, we don't say dollars. We say us dollars. We, we, we try to be global English language

Gary Pageau (29m 42s):
Is the international language, right? I mean, it's the universal language. That's what they say, right. If there's anything that brings us all together, it's, it's that.

Glen Meakem (29m 50s):
Yeah. But we, and we don't write in kind of American English. We try to write in global English, but so it's us in Canada very much the two, then we also have a significant number of ambassadors in Australia. And we have a few in New Zealand and we're actually going to be making announcements. You know, we're, we're, we're actually this later this year, we're going to be starting our campaign to grow to other countries. Great. So we'll, you know, that that's coming, but it's, it's about 80%, U S about 15% Canada.

Glen Meakem (30m 23s):
And those aren't exact, those are rough numbers. Maybe it's an 82 12, you get the idea. And then it's sort of 5% rest of the world right now.

Gary Pageau (30m 32s):
So one of the things that kind of spurs on this digitization business, I think has been, you know, you have as baby boomers age, they've got all this content that they've acquired from their parents. Right. And then they try and either pass on it or their kids and their kids don't want it. So they start digitizing it. And there's a lot of ways you can do that. You know, you can use legacy box or, you know, yes. Video or yourselves, or

Glen Meakem (31m 1s):
Whoever's the best place what's that I said, yes, but forever is the best place, because when you did,

Gary Pageau (31m 8s):
They're, you know, they're, they're, they're, there's a lot of options. You can even do it yourself. You know, there's all kinds of ways to do it. And then, so I think, and then anytime there's like a, a big concern, whether it's a, a, a, a natural disaster, a pandemic or something, I think there's this belief I want to kind of come home and preserve that stuff. Right. I mean, cause they always say people will go back into a burning house for their pictures and maybe their kids, but definitely their pictures.

Gary Pageau (31m 40s):
And so as you're going forward, kind of out of the pandemic, are you going to change your approach at all? Or are you going to just kind of build on the momentum you have or is this sort of, you know, a great time to grow?

Glen Meakem (31m 56s):
It's a great time to grow up because we're built for this. I mean, in our, in our founding documents, my first business plan, I talk about, you know, Hey, small regional nuclear war. Didn't talk about a pandemic, but there are, I mean, I love history and I've studied a lot of history and you know that there are some bad days. And you know, the, the, the day in June of 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea and almost wiped out the entire country in three days was a bad, a bad weekend. You know, that was a bad few days.

Glen Meakem (32m 26s):
And a lot of, you know, a lot, a lot of Koreans died in a lot of American soldiers died in those first few days and, you know, and, and the stock market crashed. And the funny thing about that is I tell that story, cause most people don't even know that happened. Sure. And so what happens is in the, in the sweep of history is these crises come and go. But at the T at the moment, they're very severe and very difficult. They're difficult economically. They can be different, difficult, medically, et cetera. And it can be difficult from a safety standpoint and people are getting hurt and killed.

Glen Meakem (32m 56s):
But if you're going to be an institution that survives for the longterm, you have to anticipate that problems like this will occur and you have to be ready for it. So we are. And so it's interesting when you look at our terms of service and how we think about longterm storage, we, we know we have this thing called a default preservation policy. You can appoint an account manager. If you want, you can appoint one of your children and account manager, give them authority to make changes to your account if you'd like, but the default actually, because let's face it, let's face it.

Glen Meakem (33m 32s):
Even if you appoint a child, you have a child who's interested in your memories, you appoint them. And then they, they do curate things for awhile beyond you. Great. But are they gonna, who are they going to point after that? Now again, if there's a grandchild who's interested. Terrific. They can do that. But our theory is that every single person eventually will have nobody interested right. Until, until that great, great grandchild is interested in genealogy and he, or she, or she had, or she, or he more likely gets interested.

Glen Meakem (34m 3s):
And so what we need to do is know that, okay. Yeah. You know, you may be a person and you have three kids or two kids, and none of them are interested in, in, in the family memories at all. That's okay. That's what forever is built for. You save all your stuff at forever, you organize it. We become the guarantors of that. We explicitly your are, even when you're gone, even if you have Alzheimer's, you know, Hey, you have any of those problems that all these other services, they delete your stuff at forever. We love you. We're committed to you.

Glen Meakem (34m 34s):
You're still our client. I mean, I have plenty of clients right now. We're already gone. I have a client named Jack Snyder who was an World War II, Marine Corps, veteran, veteran of Iwo Jima 26 days in combat. He passed away now about three years ago. And you know, one of my missions in life is to make sure Jack's memories of the war are preserved on forever. And he, and he wanted, that's why he became a member as he wanted. He was one of my first five members. He wanted to make sure that his memories and his story, and I won't go into the detail was preserved.

Glen Meakem (35m 7s):
And so, you know, basically what can happen is none of, even if Jack has four kids, none of adult children, none of them are particularly interested in his stories or his memories, but that's okay. We digitized it all. It's all in forever. It's all there for the historical record. And if he has a great grandchild or a great, great grandchild, who's interested, or if there's a PhD student, who's writing a thesis on Iwo Jima someday. And once firsthand accounts, it's all right there for them to find.

Glen Meakem (35m 37s):
And that's part of the mission of Forever is to be that guarantor of memories over the longterm. And you know, what's cool. And you know what, Gary, one reason what's cool. Sorry, I don't mean to be kind of one reason that I'm so passionate about doing this. And I'm so committed to creating this institution that can come through with the guarantee and live up to this is that it's so incredibly important. It's so important to preserve these memories. And it's a great, great, great. And this is why I tell pub, I say publicly all the time, I've dedicated the rest of my professional life.

Glen Meakem (36m 12s):
And I see Warren Buffet. He's 89 years old and he's still working at it with Berkshire Hathaway. I'm only 56. I'm anticipating being at this for another, you know, 20 years, at least maybe 30, maybe 40 years. Right. And we can, I have plenty of time to build with that kind of time. I have time to build an institution that can fulfill this mission and be the MetLife of the internet. And, and, and it's, and it's, it's a mission that's worth doing. And the other thing I love about it in a world that's divisive, even with internet services and social media sites, it's become very divisive forever.

Glen Meakem (36m 50s):
It's not forever as unifying rivers, like the space program. It's unifying. It's a beautiful thing. We have all different kinds of people everybody's accepted forever for everybody. It brings people together. I love that.

Gary Pageau (37m 3s):
So I got a key, he kind of ran me down a thought trail there when you were talking, you know, genealogy, you know, genealogy is honestly one of the biggest hobbies right now, especially for boomers. A lot of people aren't aware of that. Are you having any talks or conversations with either, you know, my heritage or family search or anyone like that to somehow link that data? Because I mean, there's sort of a similar message. Men mission not, but not the same, right?

Glen Meakem (37m 38s):
Yeah. The answer is we do have, we do have relationships. We have, we have no official, we have, we actually have a kind of a high level partnership with FamilySearch. We, I present every year and we, we are sponsored Rootstech every year.

Gary Pageau (37m 53s):
A great event.

Glen Meakem (37m 56s):
It's really, really everybody should go anybody who's interested in history or family history or genealogy. But so we have a, you know, we have a high level of partnership with family search. We're very good friends with them. We have some other discussions going on with, with them and others about deeper relationships and the one of the really, truly exciting things about forever as a platform businesses, we have years of great ideas ahead of us for product roadmap to continue improving.

Glen Meakem (38m 26s):
And there are many, I think that five years from now when we talk and hopefully we'll talk many times between now and then, but undoubtedly, you'll still be doing this in five years. I hope and so align. But when we talk about this in five years, hopefully we'll have some really cool technical connections already in place where people can cause, cause the thing about that think about forever. That's so great working with genealogy sites and I'm working with a genealogy company right now doing a lot of family research on my own personal family history.

Glen Meakem (38m 58s):
And it's funny because I get all this great information from them and they do have a website that it gets posted to. But you know, it's also like it doesn't have a guarantee and stuff that's out there can be changed by other cousins. You know, it's kind of a shame if you've done a lot of work and then your eighth cousin who isn't as competent as you suddenly makes a bunch of changes to it. I mean, it's great to have that collaboration, but it's also a bummer if you can't preserve your own work.

Glen Meakem (39m 29s):
So that's one thing that's great about forever is forever is the place for you to have your own account where yes, you can enable it to be accessed by contemporary current day and future genealogists and family members and descendants, but it's, it's yours. And actually that's one of the key things too, when you pass away and this could be, this is a setting, but generally like the default is you pass away and nobody can edit your stuff. Your stuff stays the way you left it.

Glen Meakem (39m 60s):
And that's a really great thing for a genealogist to know. So we have w w we're not really, it's a great thing. We're not competitive at all with family.

Gary Pageau (40m 10s):
I don't see it as a competitive thing as an interchange of information.

Glen Meakem (40m 14s):
Yeah. It's a great, we're a great partner. And I, and I think that, you know, in the coming months and years, we're going to develop those partnerships much more closely.

Gary Pageau (40m 21s):
Yeah. I just think it's a, it's a natural fit because of a little genealogy of myself. Like I said, I've been to roots tech and it's a, like you said, it's a great event. And again, like you said, very, very female orientated from the audience. You know, it's probably 80% female, 20% male, probably from what I saw there. And it's just a great community. And it really is. And very, very picture focused. I I'm, I'm really surprised there aren't more photo industry companies who are aware of the potential in that market.

Gary Pageau (40m 56s):
I just, it just surprises me.

Glen Meakem (40m 58s):
Yeah. And we see, we see tremendous partnership opportunity for us in the, in the genealogy field, also

Gary Pageau (41m 5s):
DNA to becoming part of that. I mean, I certainly could see a point maybe in the future where, you know, you're going to use your DNA to claim your forever account from your grandparents. Yes.

Glen Meakem (41m 17s):
Yeah. We, in our terms of service, we actually have a, you can't claim it from, you know, you're two generations from now, Gary, you become a forever, a client and you own forever storage and you have a bunch of memories. You will always be a client and your or great grandchild cannot delete or change your account. But the way the terms of service work is that in our succession policy is unless you explicitly forbid it, which is possible. You can do that.

Glen Meakem (41m 47s):
But as long as you go with the default, then as long as your great grandchild can prove to us that they're your great grandchild, they will have access to all the friends and family layer material. Cool. So it's so it's, you know, we've so, so basically what it is is that, you know, there is no, there's no passing it down. There's only in the digital world because the key concept is you live in the digital world of forever, just because your corporate, you know, your physical body is no longer with us.

Glen Meakem (42m 22s):
Your digital memories live on and our contract with you lives on. And so your grandchild will have access, but will not be able to alter or delete that way. Your great, great, great grandchild. Three generations later will also have access. And of course the grandchild who did all the work, they can have their own account and, and they can take your material and add value to it in their account.

Gary Pageau (42m 51s):
They can edit those horrible Tik Tok videos, right. There you go. So where can people go for more information, if they're interested in either learning more about forever or becoming an ambassador.

Glen Meakem (43m 4s):
So all they need to do is go to forever, forever.com, www.forever.com. And they can get information about being an ambassador. They can get information about our services. It's all there. They can navigate to wherever they want to go. I will say too, we've talked a lot about the, the memory keeping, you know, the, the, the, the forever storage. We've talked about the conversion, of course, you know, people can print with us, you know, once you have your material with us, you can stream video to any device. If you save video, you can print.

Glen Meakem (43m 35s):
And we have very, very high quality printing. And that's another partner of ours is a very high quality printer. And yeah, if they want to get more information, please go to forever.com and love to, to, to have you get that information. You can also contact me at my name is Glenn Meakem. I'm the founder and CEO and online it's one end. Like my parents were, were into economy. So one end Glenn. And, but if you want to reach me, it's gmeakem@forever.com and, and I'm happy to get emails from people.

Gary Pageau (44m 23s):
Great. Great. Well, listen, I appreciate your time today. I wish you the best of luck on your continued success, and hopefully we'll talk again soon. Great, Gary. Thanks. Take care.

Outro - Erin Manning (44m 36s):
Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. For more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.thedeadpixelssociety.com.