Meet Heritable's Founders

Amie Anderson

Cofounder, Heritable

LCSW, Ms.Ed

My mom was a true artist when it came to “kinkeeping” — the often invisible work of holding families and communities together through stories, traditions, and the creation of magical moments. She made people feel seen. She remembered what others forgot.

When she died in 2002, I slowly stepped into that role myself: becoming the one who reaches out first, hosts holidays, takes pictures, and tries to write each chapter of our family’s life in the way that feels most meaningful. That instinct shaped my career too. First as a pre-k teacher, then as a family therapist, I spent years helping families center connection, identity, and belonging through life’s biggest transitions.

When I became a mom in 2024, every moment with my son started to feel magical. I wanted to share photos and videos of him with my people, but we also felt uneasy about putting his face on social media in the age of AI.

Around the same time, my mom’s siblings – now in their 80s – started cleaning out garages and attics. Envelopes of old photographs, handwritten recipes, letters, and home videos started arriving at my house, joining the boxes I had already inherited from my parents. Looking at the growing piles of fragile family history, I felt three things at once: reverence, guilt, and fear.

I didn’t just want to preserve the objects. I wanted my son to know the people behind them: the laughter, the games, the messy stories, the way our family showed up for one another in hard times. But I couldn’t bring myself to open a single box. Trying to organize decades of memories alone felt completely overwhelming.

So, I gathered my relatives on a video call to pitch the idea of a shared family archive that we could all add to together. It turned out we all had hard drives and forgotten folders across a dozen different platforms, but none of them could do what we needed. I came to my husband, Patrick, desperate for a solution. “It feels like something better should exist, but I just can’t find it.”

A few months later, Patrick surprised me with the first version of Heritable. In between diapers and dishes, he had built my dream platform: a way for families and communities to share the story of who they are – past, present, and future. An active, collaborative archive, with social elements, real security, and beautiful, intuitive design. We’ve been building it together ever since – creating a digital home base, from our family to yours.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the process: Kinkeeping was never meant to be carried by just one person. Witnessing, remembering, and honoring a lifetime — that’s work that belongs to all of us.

My cousins are now filling in details I never knew about my own family. Our family photos and videos are no longer collecting dust – they’re part of our living history. I’ve loved being able to share home movies of my mom with my son, and it’s amazing to know that he’ll grow up hearing everyone’s stories about her, not just mine.

Jeremy Shaki

Cofounder, Heritable

I’m an entrepreneur, builder, and lifelong believer in the power of stories.

I grew up in Montreal in an entrepreneurial family. My mother is a photographer and my father ran a chain of discount clothing stores, so creativity, business, and making things from scratch were part of everyday life. My first job was at 10, working in my mother’s darkroom, and I spent my teenage years working everywhere from St-Viateur Bagel to selling spa packages on the street. I even set up my own camp for my cousin... very creatively named: Camp Jeremy.

After seven years working in a marketing agency in my 20s, I co-founded Lighthouse Labs with some friends. What started as a small experiment grew into one of Canada’s leading technology education companies, eventually employing more than 200 people, and helping more than 40,000 people learn to code and launch new careers.

But building companies has always been only part of what motivates me. I’ve always been fascinated by how we decide to tell our own story that we spend our whole lives building, and how stories are passed down from generation to generation.

That became particularly personal as I started raising a family of my own. Like many parents, I found myself accumulating thousands of photos, videos, and stories while realizing that the things that mattered most were scattered across phones, hard drives, and forgotten folders. I didn’t just want to capture the life of my kids, but I wanted them to know the lives of those people who weren’t around anymore but who paved the way for all of us.

Heritable felt like a natural next chapter.

I bring more than a decade of experience building teams, companies, and products, but I joined Heritable for a simpler reason: I believe the stories and memories that make a family a family deserve a home of their own.