Why we built Deathly

We have been friends since our days at Stanford, but it took fatherhood, exhausting, humbling, and quietly profound, to give us something to build together. We spent more than two decades in wildly different career paths — Harold as a special forces soldier and Raymond as a Silicon Valley engineer — until we looked at our kids and realized we were grappling with similar issues. How do we make this time matter? Are we being intentional enough? And if we died today, what have we left behind to guide our kids through life?

Nothing focuses the mind more than death — and fatherhood has a way of making that impossible to ignore.

Trading combat deployments for a desk job made death feel less imminent — but becoming a father made it more consequential. In the army, I saw that death was indiscriminate. It didn’t matter if you were in a combat zone or driving home from the grocery store, if you were an elite soldier or a spouse. That lesson never left me. However, what impacted me most was the realization that there were kids left without fathers. Some were infants, some were in grade school, some were grown — and all of them had one thing in common: their fathers weren’t around to offer advice, to celebrate their accomplishments, or to simply be there. Now, as I look at my young son, that realization hits harder. If I were to die unexpectedly, my son would be cheated out of a relationship, a protector, and a mentor. As a civilian, I came to understand that death doesn’t have to feel imminent to be motivating. We can make it feel closer simply by paying attention. And as parents, the urgency that creates has an obviously worthwhile outlet; pouring everything we can into our kids and building something that outlasts us. As fathers with a heightened awareness of our mortality, Raymond and I decided to use our awareness as a tool rather than let it sit as a source of dread.

— Harold

Watching my daughter grow from a baby, to a babbling toddler, to a silly kid forced me to reconcile that I was simultaneously growing older and that there are some things in her life I might not live to see. Even more alarming, I can see some things that she’s already too old to have done, and there is no rewinding time. It’s also become more evident that Silicon Valley tech, something which used to give me optimism about our future, now feels stuck in an adversarial relationship with parents. Instead of enriching the human experience, I’ve seen tech outcompete parents for their kids’ attention while punishing those same parents with unrealistic expectations. Working on Deathly has rekindled some of my original optimism about technology — not because those problems will go away, but because Harold and I aim to leverage technology for a different goal.

— Raymond

That’s what Deathly is. It’s not an attempt to solve parenting or death — these are quintessential human experiences. It’s an attempt to help us parent and handle mortality better. To help us channel the urgency created by our limited time on earth into intentional action — for our kids, ourselves, and the legacy we leave behind. We have set out to build the types of tools we want as dads — tools that cut through the busyness of life so we can focus on parenting the way we want to. The way our kids need us to.

Harold & Raymond
Co-Founders, Deathly