Why Silo Exists

In 1910, my great-grandmother began writing letters to a man she had recently met. Over the next three years, they documented their courtship, their hopes, their ordinary days.

When my grandfather went to war, he and my grandmother continued the tradition. Letters crossed the Atlantic, carrying the texture of their lives across an ocean and through a conflict that threatened to erase everything.

My father has written a letter to his mother every week for as long as I can remember. Without intending to, he documented my childhood. The small moments. The things I've forgotten.

I have held these letters in my hands. Paper from 1910. Paper from a warship. Paper from the kitchen table where my father sat on Sunday afternoons.

In 2001, I helped my grandparents move to assisted living. While they took one last drive through the places that had shaped their lives, my mother and I stayed behind to sort through decades of accumulated memory.

In the closets and boxes, I found tin types from the 1870s. Film reels. VHS tapes. Letters tied with ribbon. Something shifted in me that day. I became an archivist.

Over the next two decades, I digitized hundreds of VHS tapes. Nearly a hundred film reels. Thousands of photographs spanning five generations. I learned to read my great-grandmother's handwriting. I watched my mother as a girl on a fishing trip at Maple Lane Resort in Minnesota—a lake her grandparents had been coming to for decades—in footage her father shot on an 8mm camera. I have pictures of my great-grandparents fishing that same water, and pictures of my parents there with me as a child.

The work is melancholy and exhilarating in equal measure. Melancholy because I'm reaching toward people I can never touch. Exhilarating because, in their handwriting and their snapshots and their shaky home movies, I find them anyway.

Over the years, I've entrusted my data to services that promised to help me remember. Moves tracked everywhere I went, automatically, beautifully. My Basis watch captured five streams of biometric data. Narrative was a tiny camera that photographed my day, every thirty seconds. Automatic turned my car into a diary of every drive.

Each time, the same ritual. The frantic export. The orphaned data files. The formats no other service can read. The promise that someone would build an importer that never came.

I have years of my life locked in folders I can no longer open. Steps I took. Places I slept. Roads I drove. Heartbeats. Conversations. Gone—not because I didn't value them, but because I trusted companies that didn't outlast their funding.

I am a data refugee, and I am not alone.

Somewhere in the grief of another shutdown, I understood what I actually wanted.

I didn't want another app that tracked my steps or scored my sleep or gamified my habits. I didn't want optimization. I didn't want to be more productive.

I wanted a Pensieve.

In the Harry Potter stories, Dumbledore has a silver basin where he stores memories—not as faded recollections, but as experiences he can return to, wade through, examine from angles he missed the first time. That's what I wanted. Not a dashboard. A Pensieve.

A place to store the who, what, when, where, and why of my days. Not to optimize them—to remember them. To find patterns I couldn't see while living. To leave something behind for the people who might one day wonder who I was.

The quantified self movement got the method right but the purpose wrong. The goal isn't more data. The goal is more understanding. More memory. More meaning.

In 2016, I started building Silo.

Not as a startup. Not to raise money or chase growth. I built it because I needed it to exist. I built it because I was tired of losing my data to companies that disappeared. I built it because I wanted to continue my family's tradition—documenting a life—in the language of my time.

It pulls in data from the services I trust (while they last). It stores my experiences, my places, my people. It synthesizes meaning from the digital exhaust of my life using AI that actually helps me understand patterns I couldn't see myself.

It's not perfect. It's not finished. Software never is.

But it's mine. And it works.