Daniel with his grandmother, after filming her life story. She has since passed away, but he has four hours of her telling it.
Our story
Why we built Everyone.
My dad always told me that death is inevitable, so focus on the legacy you leave. Eventually I started to care about other people’s legacies as well.
As a teenager, I wandered through an old cemetery in Whroo, an abandoned gold-mining town in country Victoria. One gravestone belonged to a man named John Welch. Carved into it was a poem:
Remember me as you pass by,
for as you are now so once was I.
As I am now so you must be,
prepare yourself to follow me.
I wanted to know who he was, but all that was left was a name, a date and a few lines of verse. I felt frustrated I couldn’t learn more about who he was as a person. That feeling never left me and grew into a passion for history and technology.
In 2020, during Melbourne’s lockdown, I turned a room at home into a studio and started The Archive, filming people’s life stories. I’ve since filmed more than a hundred, from Holocaust survivors to my own grandmother.
Most families will never have that, because professional filming is expensive and hard to arrange. So we built Everyone: a free, simple app that lets anyone film their family’s story at home, on the phone they already own.
Daniel Delaway, founder
Meet the team
