When he walked into Sony Studios last September to pitch his startup Remento, on the hit ABC reality series Shark Tank, Charlie Greene had collected three decades’ worth of lessons about the importance of documenting family history.
A few days after his tenth birthday, he lost his father, Donald Freeman Greene, during the September 11 terrorist attacks on America. His dad was traveling on hijacked United Flight 93 when it crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, its forty passengers and crew immortalized for their heroic efforts to retake the plane.
Two decades later, his widow, Claudette Greene, who went on to raise Charlie and his younger sister, Jody, in Greenwich on her own, was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer.
Since Claudette’s advanced cancer came with what is so often a grim prognosis, Greene and his sister confronted the heartbreaking prospect of losing another parent too soon.
“And having done it before, when we were so young, we understood perhaps more profoundly than most what would be lost if she didn’t survive,” says Greene. “And one of those things was her stories, her memories. So, facing her mortality, we had this incredible need to document these things. And I just began asking her questions about her life and recording her answers.”
From Charlie’s experiences interviewing and recording Claudette’s life stories, came the idea for Remento, the four-year-old digital family storytelling platform he pitched last September to five high-rolling Shark Tank investors.
The 34-year-old Greenwich High School grad conceived of the startup and then launched it with the help of co-founder and CTO Alex Massonneau, a friend he had met through a Harvard Business School connection. It is a digital space that allows even the most tech-phobic Baby Boomer to affordably document important life stories—with the option of transforming them into beautiful hardcover books—using a few clicks on their smartphones and the power of artificial intelligence.
While the emotional urgency triggered by Claudette’s diagnosis had inspired Remento, as Greene stood before the Sharks—for this episode, a panel that included tech billionaire Mark Cuban, venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran, QVC queen Lori Grenier and Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky—he instinctively knew that his family’s more public personal tragedy would need to punctuate his narrative.
Billionaire Mark Cuban would eventually bite.
Although the Greenes have long been involved in supporting United Flight 93 memorials, Charlie shared their reluctance to discuss their family tragedy in ways that might be perceived as self-serving.
“For anyone who lost a parent that day, I think there’s always been this fine line you walk between navigating your own experience when it was also part of a “capital T” tragedy that everyone experienced in some way,” he explains. “For me, figuring out how to do that has always been a journey.”
Yet, he also knew from his experiences, which included recording an oral history of his 9/11 recollections for the United 93 Flight Memorial in Shanksville, that his tragic loss might help persuade the Sharks as to why this passion project devoted to preserving family stories mattered.
“Having been able to record memories with one parent, I also knew how much I had wished I could do it with another,” he says. “For me, it was never a sales pitch. I knew the importance, because it was part of my lived experience.”
ONE PROMPT AT A TIME
The Remento platform, with its speech-to-story technology was created with older adults uncomfortable with the complexities of technology in mind. Customers who signup for a $99 one-year subscription (the price at press time), receive a weekly prompt via email or text message. The prompt can be a question or photo from their past, which can be submitted by family members. The prompt recipient can then click a button to record or type an answer.
Their recollections are then stored, along with personal photos the user or family members upload, and ultimately transformed into a bound book written with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The platform allows users to edit and refine the content, but Remento creates the first draft and ultimately delivers the finished product.
CONVERSATION STARTERS
Even though he would love you to invest in a Remento subscription, Charlie Greene encourages everyone to spend more time asking loved ones detailed questions about their life experiences. He suggests going for specificity to elicit richer, more detailed anecdotes.
SOME OF HIS FAVORITE QUESTIONS TO ASK
What was your favorite room in your house growing up?
How did you get to elementary school as a child?
What’s one smell you associate with your childhood?
What was your favorite toy growing up?
If you were giving a tour of your hometown, what would be the first stop?
What’s the most scared you remember being as a kid?
Tell me about a time you felt really proud of yourself.
DIVING IN
Greene says the moving nine-minute segment viewers saw when Shark Tank’s March 7 episode featuring Remento first aired is a remarkably accurate portrayal of his Tank time, even though his vetting actually took several intense hours. “I was being grilled nonstop,” he recalls. “But it was also a very, very emotional day. What you saw, despite everything you’ve heard about reality television, was about as genuine and real as it gets.”
Fans of the long-running ABC series know that the Sharks can deliver some vicious soundbites while vetting an entrepreneur’s pitch. They’ll groan at dismal sales figures, roll their eyes at inflated business valuations, and unsparingly tell a hopeful contestant—even the ones they seem to like—that their startups are doomed. This brutal due diligence often ends with the Sharks declaring, one by one, “I’m out.”
In Greene’s case, the rapt panel leaned more in than out. Lubetsky eventually stopped him mid-sentence to marvel at his polished presentation, pressing for details about his background. Greene, who went to Brown after Greenwich High, told them about his Harvard MBA, his work as a speechwriter in the Obama White House (while still in his twenties) and eventually how he lost his dad in 2001.
He explained how the challenges his family faced—collecting pieces of his father’s personal history for 9/11 memorials and museums, along with his mom’s devastating diagnosis— infused his passion for Remento’s success.
As the entrepreneur spoke, Grenier’s eyes welled, Corcoran wiped aways tears, and Lubetsky broke into sobs as he told Greene, “He [your father] would be so proud of you, just to see you stand here with such strength and beauty and presence.” Even the notoriously cutthroat O’Leary—who dubs himself “Mr. Wonderful” in self-mockery—seemed genuinely moved, simply saying, “Wow.”
“I felt incredibly grateful to be able to do that, as hard as it was, with a smile on my face and in that moment be incredibly grateful for what my family had overcome,” Greene says.
Not that he won the room on emotion. There were tough questions about an infusion of venture capital investments during Remento’s infancy—$4 million total—that made some of the Sharks skittish.
Ultimately, it was Cuban—the Shark Greene most wanted to snare—who saw past those concerns and wanted in, investing $300,000 in return for a 10 percent stake in the company.
LIFE AFTER THE TANK
Two months after the episode aired, Greene sits down for coffee not far from Remento’s headquarters in Culver City, California, reflecting on what’s happened since he and Cuban sealed their televised deal with a hug.
The entrepreneur and his wife, Lily, an environmental lawyer he met at Brown, now live nearby in an L.A. beachside neighborhood with their one-year-old daughter, Sloane. This sunny base positions Remento closer to some of the world’s best tech talent. “Outside of the Silicon Valley, L.A. is really the place to be for the kind of people we need to grow the company,” he explains.
Which brings the CEO exciting post-Shark Tank news. The month after the episode aired was the best in the company’s relatively short history. Remento has now collected more than 350,000 digitized stories, with projections to hit the 500,000 mark this month. There’s also a new partnership with Legacybox, which Greene says will make it easier for Remento’s users to digitize physical photos and record the stories behind them.
Cuban is not only an investor, he’s a valued and regular consultant, also sharing the expertise of his gifted technology team with Remento’s ten employees. “Mark has this gift for just cutting through the noise and understanding what we need to do and how to do it,” says Greene. “His brilliance, his masterful understanding of technology and his belief in the importance of what we are trying to do is exactly what we wanted and needed. It has already been an incredible collaboration.”
Even better is some personal news. Claudette Greene, who watched her son’s Shark Tank episode with friends in Portland, Maine, is in remission and says she’s “feeling great.”
As Remento’s most prolific beta tester, Claudette knew about the Cuban deal before March. So, she had fun filling her living room with friends not in on the closely guarded secret. “They were sitting on the edge of their chairs waiting to see what happened. And everyone was just screaming when he made that deal with Mark,” she says. “And of course, I absolutely loved it.”
THE ROAD TO SUCCESS
Not that her son’s success as a pitchman surprised Claudette. “As a little kid, he was always playing ringmaster or holding a microphone pretending he was an anchor on CNN,” she says with a laugh. “I would say he was kind of ready for that moment.”
At Greenwich High, where Charlie Greene says “even my friends would have called me a nerd,” he skied varsity and explored a burgeoning interest in filmmaking. Senior year, he and classmate Eliza McNitt (who graced this magazine’s cover for her work in 2018) won a C-SPAN student contest for their eight-minute documentary Requiem for a Honeybee, which examined the environmental impact of collapsing bee colonies. “That prize included a big moment when the C-SPAN bus showed up at Greenwich High. As cool as it was, it sealed my nerd reputation,” Charlie says.
After Brown, Charlie considered a career in broadcast journalism, working for the NBC Evening News with Brian Williams before moving on to roles in strategic communications and that dream of a White House
speechwriting gig.
When that job unceremoniously concluded with President Donald Trump’s election, he headed to Harvard for his MBA. While that might seem like a curious pivot, Greene says that work at 21st Century Fox and streaming giant Hulu crystalized his interest in digital media and new modes of storytelling, ultimately leading him to Remento.
Greene is clearly excited about the exposure Shark Tank has brought his young company, because it could yield as many dividends for his growing team and customers as it could for investors. “I didn’t do this [Shark Tank] for a nine-minute commercial for Remento,” he says. “I did it because one of my goals is to recruit A-level talent. And because I’m just that passionate about imparting this idea that telling our stories is important.”
He pauses to share a personal anecdote about the emotional gifts that can come from discovering even the most nuanced things about loved ones past or present.
“My parents had a video camera, and they went through a phase early in our lives where they recorded everything we did,” he says. That treasure trove of footage includes a video of an awestruck Donald Greene holding Charlie moments after his birth. As precious as that archived moment is, it’s not that video that means the most to Charlie. That would be the video of his dad chomping on a bagel at the kitchen table while simultaneously fretting to his mother about whether he’s installed infant Charlie’s car seat correctly.
Now that Charlie is a dad, too, that car seat video hits home; especially after navigating the joyful yet bleary-eyed, first year of parenthood with Sloane. “As a new father, seeing my dad’s vulnerability like that, it somehow feels like a shared experience,” he says. “It’s a little thing in a way, but something I relate to so much.”
These are the kinds of moments he hopes that Remento’s customers can capture and hold onto for generations.
“Every day, people go to plan funerals, and they don’t know the most basic things about their loved ones,” he says. “What was their first job? What was their wedding like? What do you remember about the day I was born?” This is the kind of thing we need to be asking, but we don’t until it’s too late.”
“That’s what drives me,” he says. “I believe with all my heart that every single person who uses this platform will come to believe that it’s one of the most important things they’ve ever done. And I know the people who love them are going to believe that, too.” remento.co