The Build Years & Questions
Why Living Legacy exists — and the answers founders ask before they begin.
Built for the build years
If you are a founder, creator, or builder in your most documentable decade, the version of you that exists today is irreplaceable. Decisions you are making this week, the lessons that hurt to learn, the small moments that signal what you stand for — these will shape how your grandchildren know you. They are also exactly the things that disappear into Slack archives, ephemeral threads, and notebooks no one finds.
Living Legacy is the place to put them on the record. Weekly retrospectives. Decisions and the rationale behind them. Photos of the room where the company started. Lessons after a hard quarter. The version of yourself you want your future-grandchildren to actually meet.
- Text entries with one photo per entry today. Audio, video, and gallery support in later phases.
- Weekly nudge emails (optional, off by default) arrive in Phase 2.
- A simple chronological timeline of your archive — your build years, on the record.
- Editorial principles — all eight — apply to every entry.
Anticipated questions
How is this different from Day One, Substack, or Apple Journal?
Most journaling platforms claim user ownership but reserve broad licenses to use your content (Substack’s “worldwide non-exclusive royalty-free license,” Day One’s cloud routing through Automattic, social platforms’ promotional sublicenses). We narrow our license to hosting only, forbid AI training in Guiding Principle 6, and use IPFS pinning so you can verify your content lives independently of us. Most platforms tell you that you own your content. We let you verify it.
What if I cancel?
Your content remains yours. Every entry's IPFS CID continues resolving on the public gateway network. You lose access to the timeline interface, the weekly nudges, and the family-choice infrastructure, but the raw entries are yours to keep, retrieve, and re-host if you want. Cancellation is one click in your account.
What if Honored Ancestors as a company goes away?
That is the situation Guiding Principle 8 is built to address. We are actively recruiting an advisory circle so the archive's continuity does not rest on a single steward. Beyond that, IPFS pinning means even a complete platform shutdown does not erase your content — the CIDs live on the open network. You'd lose the editorial layer; the words survive.
Do you use my entries to train AI?
No. Never. Guiding Principle 6 separates AI assistance from authorship: AI tools may help us with editorial work (drafting suggestions, transcription, de-duplication), but submitted memorials are not used as training data for any AI system, internal or external. We do not sell or share your content with third parties for that purpose.
What types of content can I post?
Text entries with one photo per entry today. Audio entries (voice notes), video, gallery uploads, and AI-assisted prompts (per Guiding Principle 6) are on the roadmap for later phases. Living Legacy is designed for thoughtful long-form — the kind of writing your grandchildren will actually want to read — not real-time microblogging.
When does this launch?
Living Legacy is open now. Paid subscriptions, the self-publish dashboard at /legacy/me/, IPFS-pinned permanence, and the public timeline view at /legacy/<slug>/ are all live. What we are still building, on the 90-day Phase 2 schedule: executor designation, family-choice succession tools, weekly nudge emails, and user-selectable custom slugs.
Ready to begin? See the two paths → · Questions? Write us — we read every message ourselves.