I am David Li, a Caltech student, and I built Porchlight after my grandpa passed away. He always talked about wanting to write his memoir. Between his day-to-day life and me being buried in schoolwork, we never actually sat down and did it.
After he was gone, I kept thinking about everything I never got to ask him. What his childhood was like. How he met my grandmother. The small details that only come up if someone actually asks.
Porchlight is the tool I wish had existed then. It calls someone every week, on their own phone, and just asks. Nobody has to remember to schedule an interview or find the time to write it all down.
I built it so other families do not lose the chance I lost.
What we will and will not do
The stories are theirs, not ours
We do not sell personal information, and nothing anyone says on a call is used to train anyone else’s models. If a family asks for everything to be deleted, it gets deleted.
Nothing gets invented
The writing sticks to what was actually said, in their own words wherever possible. It will not add a sunset, a feeling, or a detail that was not in the conversation, because a memoir with invented parts is worth less than a short honest one.
We say it is a computer
The interviewer is an AI voice and we tell people that before the first call rather than hoping it does not come up. Consent is asked for plainly, and the calls stop the day anyone asks.
Easy to leave
No contracts, no retention flow, no phone call required to cancel. If Porchlight is not earning its place in a family month to month, it should be simple to stop.
Where Porchlight is today
It is early, and worth being straight about that. Porchlight is built and working, the calls happen, and the chapters get written. What it does not have yet is years of families behind it, which is exactly why the first ten get a permanently lower price in exchange for telling us what is not working.
The speech and telephony behind it run on the Deepgram and Twilio startup programs, both of which accepted Porchlight in 2026.