Haleh Shoa, founder and CEO of Picturli, shares about the unique family trauma that led to the start of her company, accidentally uncovering secret families, and using technology to uncover hidden history.Hear Haleh's full interview in Episode 58 of Let's Talk Legacy.
Full Episode
I started Picturely in 2016 for several reasons. One was that during the span of my corporate career as an advertising executive, every time I had some slow moments at work and because we had really great equipment, I would bring in the old family albums and I would start digitizing those and sort of restoring the cracked photos and things like that.
And that was because the importance of that for me was because my parents left Iran during the Iranian revolution in 1979, and they could not take anything with them except the photo albums. And so it was like a couple of suitcases of photo albums I always wondered, like, why are they bringing that? You know, because I was only eight. I didn't have that insight.
So I was so grateful when I found myself sort of really wanting to know my own story and history, knowing that I probably wouldn't be able to go back. And I haven't been so far.
What was that experience like for them? Did they ever share that with you? Have you ever gotten into that a little bit with them?
Yeah, we've talked about it and there's so many families that share our sort of trauma around that and not being able to take anything with you and really being stripped of your identity. My father was a pharmacist. He has his PhD in pharmaceuticals and he had one of the largest pharmacies in Tehran and
There's so many people like my dad who were just stripped of their identity because when he came here, they were not, you know, in the United States, the standards, they didn't understand the standards that my father had studied under at University of Tehran. So it's just so much trauma. It's not just leaving the home that you've built.
It's leaving the business that you built and the person that you had built for, you know, 50 some odd years. And we do talk about that.
You've been doing this for a bit now, and is there a couple success stories or one that comes to the top of your mind of anybody that really touched your heart, that really showed the impact of you preserving these memories?
gosh, so many. One of my earlier clients was an African-American historian and his family was from the North and they had photos and letters dating back to the 1800s, which is super rare for African-Americans. And so he decided like, you know, let's scan these and I'm just going to donate these letters and some of the photos to the Schoenberg Institute in Washington, D.C.
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