This article originally appeared on FuneralVision.com here.
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By Thomas A. Parmalee
For Zack Moy, deciding who to start Afterword with was more like picking a wife than hiring an employee.
“Choosing a co-founder is arguably the most important decision you’ll make when starting a company,” he said. “I mean, you’re committing to navigate highs, lows and immense stress together.”
Fortunately, he found a genius who formerly worked at Shopify – Effie Anolik, who’d been researching the intersection of deathcare and technology for some time.
Even though the two had instant chemistry, they went through what Moy called a deliberate co-founder “dating process.”
“First, we did the homework,” he said. “We both filled out a 50-question packet for co-founders, covering everything from personal goals and work styles to how we’d handle disagreements. (If you ever need to embark on a similar discovery process, Moy recommends this guide from First Round Capital.)
“We also did our own due diligence, speaking with each other’s past co-workers to get an account of what it’s like to work with one another,” he said. “Then, we got a first-hand view of what it was like. We spent two months building an exploratory project together to see how we actually collaborated under pressure.”
Only after taking all those steps did the two start building a business together – only to be interrupted by a global pandemic that forced them to make a sharp pivot.
We recently caught up with Moy to glean more of his insights revolving around entrepreneurship, how funeral homes can leverage technology, artificial intelligence and more.
We got connected through a partner at Bain Capital. His only intention was to introduce two like-minded folks who were passionate about funeral planning and making it better for families. We met on Boxing Day 2019 over a Google Hangout — I was in San Francisco, and she was in Toronto. We ended up working together for a year and a half before ever meeting in-person.
Admittedly, I didn’t think about it from a technology standpoint. And frankly, my initial ideas were from an outsider’s perspective. I’d researched the profession for over two years but never once focused on the technology stack. The real education began when we signed our first customer.
We literally packed our bags, moved into an apartment above their funeral home, and shadowed them day and night. That’s when we saw the immense dedication, but also the brittle, repetitive processes they were forced to use. We saw the disconnect between the incredible care they provided families in person and the clunky tools they had behind the scenes. That’s when we knew we could build something better.
Afterword is the operating system for funeral homes — technology for all their needs including case management, online planning, payment processing, documents and eSignatures, whiteboard checklists, chain of custody, AI assistants, and business reporting. At the heart of everything we do is making the family’s experience better. Like nearly all our customers, we’re a privately-owned business, and we support the next-generation funeral homes to meet the needs of today’s funeral planners.
The two differences you’ll notice right away about us are:
Afterword is customizable and personalized to your funeral home and the way you do business. You shouldn’t have to fit into software — software should fit into your workflow. If you zoom out, lots of the software out there looks and feels the same. There’s no denying that. What we offer at Afterword is beyond that. We form a true partnership with your funeral home and its success.
I’ve been entrepreneurial since I can remember, but for me, it was never about just starting a business. It was about building tools to solve problems for a specific community.
In elementary school, that community was my condo association, so I built its first website. In college, it was creating a space for poets, so I started the Spoken Word Club. During the decade I spent in Silicon Valley, it was streamlining the workflows of salespeople. Then it was building developer toolkits for software engineers.
Now, I see my work as an extension of that same drive: building better tools for the community of funeral professionals who serve families during their most difficult times.
I’m incredibly grateful for my time at Google; it’s a world-class company with some of the brightest minds. But I was getting restless. In a place that’s too comfortable, you can feel like you’re losing your edge. I became bored and unfulfilled.
But the actual catalyst was the sudden death of my mentor and manager, Paul. On the very day he died, he asked if I was planning to stay or leave. I told him we’d talk about it at our next one-on-one meeting. A few hours later, he had a heart attack while on a run and was gone. He was 52.
That experience was a profound shock and forced me to confront my own depression for the first time in my life. It made me realize that if I was going to do something that truly mattered to me, I needed to do it. Two months later I put in my two weeks’ notice.
We didn’t intend to sell it so quickly – the opportunity presented itself. We wanted to build a great product and a great company. We thought if we did those two things, we’d have something of value but didn’t plan to sell it so early. We raised $2.5 million from First Round, Uncork, and Felicis and hired five more ex-Googlers. After two years, we received inbound interest for M&A and decided to explore that option in earnest.
We didn’t intend to sell, but the opportunity with Workday was the right one for the team and company. The key lesson for me was that if you focus relentlessly on building a high-quality product that solves a real problem, you create options. That’s the exact philosophy we’re applying to Afterword.
I was an engineering director for a new team at Workday, so it was a perfect transition back into corporate engineering life. On nights and weekends, I was always keeping my eyes and ears open for the next thing. I knew it was going to be something more niche, and I was constantly thinking about Paul.
Years later, I still couldn’t get the image of his funeral out of my head. A crowded, standing-room-only church service, with a tri-fold prayer card that felt like him but not the way I knew him. (I still keep his prayer card in my desk.)
I knew I wanted to serve this space, but I spent a lot of time exploring the best way to do that. I looked at starting a content company around death (“POPSUGAR for Death”), a funeral planning website for consumers, and briefly wanted to redesign the physical spaces for funerals by partnering with theater set designers. I also led a research project with students from my alma mater around conversations about death on social media.
I was looking for the right angle, but what I was really missing was the right partner. It wasn’t until I met Effie that the vision for how to truly help the profession clicked into place. And so, I took the leap (again).
It put us on a small detour. We had to press pause on building software — our bread and butter with our experiences at Google, Workday, and Shopify. Meanwhile, Effie was approached by some families looking to do virtual memorials, so we switched to helping families directly instead.
We did virtual and livestream memorials for nearly two years, partnering with funeral homes and families across North America. We did nearly 500 services and got to work firsthand with the families.
For funeral homes, I think it convinced many of the importance of online planning and their overall digital presence, since the way they’d always operated had to change during the pandemic. It also helped us develop meaningful relationships with funeral homes that taught us more about all the work behind-the-scenes.
For families, it helped us connect with the core problems even more — families are given a series of administrative tasks and decisions when they’ve just experienced the worst emotional day of their lives. Funeral homes do a great job managing the administrative work and creating a space for them to begin processing their emotions. But we saw that behind the scenes, it’s easy to get lost in all the details.
The biggest concern I hear from directors is about using AI to communicate with families and the fear that it’s robotic. I agree with this if the communication is automated.
I think the biggest area for improvement is looking at the time spent in a given day on administrative tasks. We analyzed how people are spending their days for my talk at the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association convention, and I believe that AI can optimize up to 75% of your time as a funeral director. If AI can optimize even 5% of that, that’s hours a week per director. Get to 20% and we’re talking about full days saved. We’re talking about thousands of dollars of savings and then gaining more time to spend with families.
With Grace, our goal is to assist you with “everything but embalming.”
Rapid fire mode!
It starts with a simple statement that we shouldn’t need to make in 2025. Our customers own their data completely. Their data is 100% theirs. So, if they request a full export, a backup, etc., they can do so with no extra hassle or charge.
We believe your data is your funeral home’s most valuable asset, second only to your reputation. You should never be held hostage by a software vendor. Period. At Afterword, we make every report exportable and process all custom data requests as high priority tickets.
If you’re a funeral home, and you receive a contract that states a vendor will charge you thousands of dollars to get access to your own data, find a different vendor. Holding data hostage and making it difficult to migrate is not only hurtful to funeral homes, but also inevitably hurtful to families, including those who’ve preplanned.
