Timelines is Founded (originally called LifeSnapz) 

I have a lousy memory when it comes to things that happened in my life. Sure, I remember all the big events with clarity. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that I’ve done that are meaningful to me but the details are allusive without a bit of digging into the recesses of my brain. Some of my siblings don’t have this problem - my older sister Liz, author extraordinaire, has vivid memories of when she was three, and my brother Pat can tell me who was at a particular little league game when we were 12.

In May 2006 my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, so a couple of months prior I gathered up the old photos from my family and scanned in a few hundred - partly for a movie I was going to create for them and partly for me. Many of the photos I hadn’t seen in a long time, if ever. And as I looked at them, memories emerged from the fog. I emailed some of the photos to my siblings and others to friends, asking for their input into what happened and when. I also looked through the 20,000+ digital photos I had taken over the previous 7 years (I have three elementary school kids, thus all the pics). I am a fairly organized guy, so I had them in folders – a folder for each year with 12 monthly subfolders. I picked through these to find the photos of specific events I wanted.

Going through this process got me thinking about using the web to organize event-based stuff (graduation and wedding photos, birthday video, etc.) in a way that would be useful to me, my family and my friends. I was ready to start something new. At the time I was CEO of ShopLocal, a company I had started in 1999 and sold to Gannett, Tribune and Knight-Ridder in 2004. (ShopLocal is now wholly owned by Gannett). I love the process of creating something from scratch and had the bug to do it again. During a family vacation in August 2006 I decided to leave ShopLocal and on September 1st I was gone.

I emailed Geoff Buesing and Scott McMillin in late September 2006 and we met for...