Leaving an Organized, Meaningful Legacy: Ian Dibb #120

Highlights

• Ian’s early life (2:13)
• The crucible for losing his sister and his Mom so close together (3:59)
• The lessons he learned from his  Mom and and sister in the midst of their struggles  (6:33)
• How Ian made it through the tragedies (8:09)
• The inspiration for keylu (17:49)
• The value — financial and emotional — of keylu (22:00)
• How keylu essentially redeems mobile devices as legacy creators (28:39)
• The best ways to use keylu (33:13)
• Ian’s message of hope to listeners (47:30)

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.

Ian Dibb:

I could have easily just sat back and let the grief swallow me. There was points when I’d wake up in the morning and think, “Well, what’s this all about?” The sadness and emptiness I felt for a while was too much at times to really bear and I actually thought to myself, “Why?” I was 28 at the time. I’m 46 now. The choice I made was to I’ve had to go through this. So the toughest steel is made in the hottest fires. We are given experiences to help others and my experience of losing my sister and mum has given me this energy to do whatever it takes to help people.

Gary Schneeberger:

Have you been through, are you going through right now some of your life’s hottest fires? This week’s guest, Ian Dibb, has some words of comfort for you if you are. From the ashes of your crucibles are born the strength and wisdom to not only survive, but to live life dedicated to serving others. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. Dibb’s hottest fires were the deaths of his sister and his mom within months of each other, life-rattling tragedies that birthed his calling. He turned his pain into purpose after struggling to settle the estates left behind by his loved ones, an experience that led him to launch Keylu, an online portal that helps users organize their assets for those they’ll, one day, leave behind. But as he tells me and Warwick in our interview, his efforts are about more than just keeping important documents in order. They’re also about preserving important memories that give your legacy its greatest meaning.

Warwick Fairfax:

Before we get a bit into your crucible story, just give us a bit of the background of Ian Dibb and some of the threads that make you who you are and maybe have led to what you do now, but tell us a bit of the backstory of you and your family.

Ian Dibb:

Yeah. I was born in Liverpool. We lived there. Mum was a GP. My dad worked for the British Medical Association. I had an older sister, Jane. I’ve got two younger sisters, Amy and Beth. We moved down to Cornwall when we were five, beautiful place. It’s a great place for me as a dad now. This was my mum’s reasoning from moving to Cornwall. It’s a safe place. There’s not much going on. It’s quite sleepy. We’re a four-hour flight from London, which is incredible. But at the same point, for me, it’s been an absolute blessing. We had moved out to Cornwall when we were five. Attended school, did the normal stuff, part of a family of six. It’s just been a journey. I’m one of these guys who never really looks at the end destination. I enjoy the day to day, believe we’re very much on a journey, which none of us knows what’s going to happen, but I just embrace it and it’s something I’ve always said to my family about.

Ian Dibb:

I don’t care what they become, but as long as they’re better people and they leave this world a better place they came into it. So that might be they become the next prime minister or it might be they just become somebody who cares for people who makes a difference to their lives. My background, I went to university in Worcester, not too far from actually Warwick in the UK. After I left university, I decided I want to see the world, so I left and went through Thailand, Malaysia. Ended up in New Zealand, living there for a while and it was while I was in New Zealand actually my crucible story really took effect.

Warwick Fairfax:

Okay. Wow. Well, yeah, talk about that. That’s a great lead in. So in New Zealand, so talk about what happened next.

Ian Dibb:

Yeah. So I was living in New Zealand. It was amazing, such a beautiful place and the place I would’ve dearly liked to stay. While I was traveling, my mum, Anne, was a GP and she was complaining about back pain for the best part of 12 months, but just put it down to some kind of pulled muscle. I spoke to mum daily. I would still love to speak to mum daily. But while I was there, I received a phone call from mum and the message was, “Ian, your sister’s gone missing.” To most people, it wouldn’t be that much of a big deal, but my sister Jane had been suffering from bipolar for the best part of 18 years. Numerous suicide attempts in her life. Every single one of them had failed, fortunately, but this was a different occasion.

Ian Dibb:

A week later, I got another phone call from mum about half past 1:00 in the morning and that could only mean one thing. I got the call from mum and it said, “Ian, we found your sister and she’d taken her own life.” It was devastating, absolutely devastating. As much as you know one of your loved ones has bipolar, there is a high chance you might lose them, you never really think it’s going to happen. So I flew back from New Zealand back to the UK. I think it was the following day and started the preparations for my sister’s funeral. I was 26 at the time. Jane was 28. I’m back in the UK for two weeks, dealing with the funeral and also my sister just bought a house, so having to deal with that as well. Eventually, we went into hospital late one evening and she was diagnosed with stage four terminal cancer. So that back pain actually turned out to be a grapefruit-sized tumor underneath her lung.

Ian Dibb:

As a doctor, mum knew exactly what that diagnosis meant. So it went from a family of six within a two-year period to losing two of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met. It was a point in your life where you either just let this wash over you and have let grief take hold of you and destroy you or you actually say, “Well, if this has happened to me, how many other millions of people is this going to happen to? Why does it need to happen in the way it happened to me? What could be done to make a difference in these people’s lives?” So yeah, it was a dreadful time in my life, but off the back of that, it’s given me a absolute mission to help other people who will eventually go through the same situation.

Warwick Fairfax:

You mentioned your mum and sister were an inspiration. Just talk about who they were as people and why they had such a massive influence in your life.

Ian Dibb:

My mum, as I mentioned, was a GP, but she was just one of the funniest, most caring people I’ve ever known. Just super kind, super caring. For me, I looked to mum. It’s 5:30 and I’d be looking at the door, waiting for her to come in. I would spend hours listening to her, just being with her. Mum and dad didn’t have the best relationship, so I always made sure mum was okay. From the day I left the university till the day she passed away, I probably either spoke to her or saw her every day. My sister Jane didn’t have it easy. For 18 years, she suffered from bipolar. She was a teacher. She was an incredible teacher and she would often put herself into really difficult situations or places to challenge herself and she didn’t have an easy time, but she kept positive though. They never lost their faith right to the end.

Ian Dibb:

As a nonbeliever at the time or somebody who had taken a step off the track, to see them go through what they did and maintain their faith and love was unbelievable. I’ve been blessed. We haven’t had the easiest of life, but even to have, I think the best part of 28 years with mum and 26 years with Jane, it’s not about how long you have, it’s about the time you have with that person. They are still the people that when things go well in my life or things go bad, I want to pick up the phone and speak to them. I can’t anymore, but yeah, I was blessed for those years I did have them.

Warwick Fairfax:

You mentioned your mum had a very strong faith. Just talk about that and the impact it had in your life, because in some ways, she sounds almost like a role model of a mother and a human being that just… A lot of people have difficult parents, but it sounds like you had about as good a mother as it’s humanly possible to have. So just talk about her and her faith and the impact it had on your life.

Ian Dibb:

Faith is one of the most interesting things that I couldn’t understand why when mum had been dealt with some of the toughest cards you can be, a daughter with bipolar, I said failed marriage, your own terminal diagnosis, but yet to still smile and shine, it just shows you actually that there’s got to be something behind this. We had this kind of jokey relationship. My mum says, “Look, Ian. I’m not concerned. He’s going to get you. You will become a believer.” And I was like, “No, mum. That’s never going to happen. It’s not going to happen.” Then one day, it was probably five, six years ago that I attended an Alpha course, walked into the Alpha course and instantly felt this peace flood over me like I haven’t felt for the best part of 10 years. It was incredible this peace I felt. I instantly felt a small section of what mum had been blessed with as a Christian her entire life.

Ian Dibb:

One of the things mum had written in her Bible was, my children will find faith through their spouses. My wife found God two years before me and my wife was the one who got me onto the Alpha course. All of a sudden, all these things which I used to put down to coincidence actually started making sense. Even when mum was on her final day, she said, “Ian, you don’t need to worry about me. I’m going to a better place,” and she was completely at peace, completely at peace of where she was going. I just remember on her final day, she was in the hospice. It’s quite late at night and I spent the evening with her. She turned around and looked over her shoulder and she said to me, “Ian, I love you,” and that was the last thing I’ve ever heard from mum. It’s something that sticks in my heart, that somebody who had been through so many difficulties had the strength to inspire even at the very last minute.

Warwick Fairfax:

How did you get beyond that? Because listeners are probably going to be thinking, they had obviously faith, your sister, Jane, and your mum, and you go through that, a lot of people would be pretty angry. Maybe some people “deserve” to die sooner, sometimes the humanly thinks so, but mum? No way. Not her. She’s a saint. That makes no sense. I needed a few more decades with her. How did you deal with, for most people, would be anger, frustration? How did you get beyond that? I’m assuming you felt that.

Ian Dibb:

Yeah, horrifically. Losing Jane was tough because Jane was 28 and she was at the start of her life. She’d just bought a brand new house the week before she took her own life. The pressure of that was too much. Unfortunately, in the way my sister took her life, there was no way back. Most of the time, she would find a way back from it. So there was a part of me saying if I was in the UK at the time, could I have helped? Would I have been there? So you’ve got that survivor guilt to a certain level. With mum, I would’ve given my own life for my mum in a heartbeat in the same way as I would my daughter. You don’t even need to ask me that question. I would be there. I’d put myself and switch instantly. So for a lot of time, there was an immediate anger, especially with God to say, “How can you let this happen? This is one of your best disciples. Somebody who’s loved you and worshiped you since the day they were born.”

Ian Dibb:

But then there was a kind of off switch, which was a kind of numbness which just takes over. So the grief goes. You go for a period of just existing. You don’t have the super highs. You don’t have the super lows. You continue to progress. From the outside, everything looked rosy. My friends would’ve said, his life is all a party, but inside, I was just feeling almost empty. Then it really only changed when my daughter was born and she came into the world. I go, “Okay, I can’t do this anymore. Now I’m a dad. My job now is to give my daughter the safest, most loving environment I can, to know that I will do anything for her,” and it changed everything, but there was still that underlying sadness, which probably lasted between six and 10 years. It really only fully disappeared when I walked into the church on the Alpha course that evening. It was like being jet washed with love. It wasn’t just from the past, it was just this peace I felt. It’s what, probably now six years I’ve been a Christian.

Ian Dibb:

Don’t get me wrong. It hasn’t given me the easiest times in the world. I still have my challenges. I still have tough days. I had amazing days, but off the back of the Alpha course and my growing faith and my family’s faith as well, I have a peace. My sisters, unfortunately, aren’t in the same place as me. They still take antidepressants quite a lot to get through this. I’m trying to get them to come on the Alpha course with me because I know it’d be incredible for them, but unfortunately in the female side of our family, we have got this depressive gene. My mum’s mum had it. My mum had it to a certain level. Obviously, my sister, Jane, took her own life, and my younger sisters had the same kind of gene, which runs through the family. But I know I was the kind of guy who will try and bring lightness. I say that I’d like to be the lighthouse on the cliff providing safety and somewhere these people can go to. I’m always there for them in the same way as my mum always was.

Warwick Fairfax:

You mentioned earlier just about choice and one of the things we say on Beyond the Crucible all the time is you go through a horrific tragedy like you did in the space of, what was it? Like 18 months losing a sister and a mum, beloved sister and mum. You could have been angry and bitter against God, against yourself. Gosh, if I’d only been in the UK and not New Zealand, maybe I could have saved my sister, which is unknowable. But the unknowable things are often the ones that taunt you the most. You can’t prove that it’s wrong, that there’s nothing you could have done. That’s not like, “Oh, I’m convinced I couldn’t have…” You can’t prove that case. So because it’s unknowable, that’s the kind of thing that can haunt you.

Warwick Fairfax:

You had a choice in which one side would be for the rest of your life, the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years to be angry at God and angry at yourself and gone to, I don’t know, drugs, alcohol, or there’s all sorts of manner of destructive behaviors, but you made a choice not to go there. Part of it was your faith. Because there are some folks that are listening today. Maybe they have lost loved ones and they’re angry at themselves and God. What would you say to folks like that? What does it mean to make that choice? Talk about that choice and what that meant for you.

Ian Dibb:

Yeah. There’s a quote I love by Winston Churchill, which is, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Why would you stay in a place which is painful? Luckily, through my experience, I’m connected to some incredible people who’ve lost far more than I ever will. These people have lost children and they’ve lost so much and yet, these are the people who say, “Well, I’m going to make a difference because I don’t want anyone else to go through this.” So I could have easily just sat back and let the grief swallow me. There was points when I’d wake up in the morning and think, “Well, what’s this all about?” The sadness and emptiness I felt for a while was too much at times to really bear and I actually thought to myself, “Why?” I was 28 at the time. I’m 46 now. The choice I made was I’ve had to go through this. The toughest steel is made in the hottest fires. We are given experiences to help others and my experience of losing my sister and mum has given me this energy to do whatever it takes to help people.

Ian Dibb:

It was quite late one night we received an email into the platform of somebody whose son had joined our website and had sadly passed away. We took his mum through the process of dealing with the estate and he’d left her a message. That one message was if that’s all we ever achieved at Keylu was enough because it gave her peace of mind that she had done all she could for her son and how much she loved her. For the entire team at Keylu, it just blew our minds that we’ve made a difference. So many people go through life without really making a difference. They exist and they have a lovely time and go on their holidays, but they don’t make a difference. I want to save people from the pain I’ve been through. If it was 10 people, 100 people, a million people, that’s my mission. To get people thinking ahead and actually to make you think, “Well, if this is going to happen to me, what can I do to make this easier for my loved ones?” I guess in life, that’s something we all do.

Ian Dibb:

We keep our children safe. We do all we can to make sure we provide a safe environment. That’s what I wanted to create. I wanted to give people a place where they can do something to help their loved ones.

Warwick Fairfax:

Let’s talk about Keylu. How did that happen? It’s a magnificent concept as we’ll hear, but what were you doing at the time professionally? What was life like and what were those strands that led to Keylu happening?

Ian Dibb:

After mum passed away, I was working for a print company running their digital studio. It was a simple job. It didn’t take too much mind power, which is what I needed after losing mum. I remember sitting around my sister’s house one evening and it just came into my head actually. Why don’t people plan for this? I sat around with the family and said, “Look, guys. If I build this, would you use it?” and it was 100% yeah, absolutely. This would’ve made our life so much easier with mum and with Jane. So then I asked a few more people and a few more people and said, “Look, if I build this platform, would you use it?” Back then, it wasn’t Keylu. We were called Once I’ve Gone. What happens once I’ve gone? What happens to your information once I’ve gone?

Ian Dibb:

So Once I’ve Gone came from a simple conversation, and then I just checked it with dozens and dozens of people saying, “If I build this platform, would you use it?” So we built a very early stage platform way before people were using technology as they are today. It was too early, so we parked it for a few years. Then technology has since caught up and as a result of that, we rebranded as Keylu. We wanted to not really just focus on end of life planning. No matter, even though we know we’re all mortal and there will be a time we’re not here, actually, we should be managing our lives on a day to day basis. So really, Keylu moved into the place where it’s not focused on planning for death, it’s managing your life. Then if something happens, it’s easier for your loved ones. So very much, it’s been a journey from initial sat around a table with the family to where we are today, Warwick.

Warwick Fairfax:

I think from what you said before, there’s a need for this, but it’s personal because talk a bit about how it’s not a judgment. Everything wasn’t tied up in this nice, neat bow with papers and memories and photo albums and videos. There wasn’t a Keylu back when your mum and Jane died, but talk about how this is personal, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but to a degree you don’t want other people to go through what you went through. Just help the listener understand why this isn’t just a business, it’s very personal for you.

Ian Dibb:

Oh, hugely. As I said, Jane was 28 when she passed away. She was a teacher. She had documents here, there, and everywhere. Mum, 57, GP, two or three filing cabinets full of data. Some of it was live. Some of it wasn’t. It really was a traumatic 16 months in my life trying to organize the estate administration and probate. Very difficult, especially when you’re not prepared for it. But then the emotional side comes in that you no longer got any opportunity to speak to that person and I deeply miss hearing my mum’s voice. It’s been 16 years with Jane, 18 years with mum. What would I give for one sound bite from each of those people for me? That would be far more valuable than all the different assets they own. Off the back of that, you start to realize that we spend a huge amount of time on our phones. We capture photos and videos, but how often do we turn the camera around and capture a moment with somebody?

Ian Dibb:

One of the things we love to do is I taught my daughter Alice to ride a bike. She rode off across the field. I turned the camera around on myself and said, “Alice, it’s your dad. You just learned to ride your bike. You have no idea how proud I am of you and how much I love you.” I store that in Keylu because that is a unique moment in my child’s life. That is what I wanted from my mum and my sister, that type of knowledge that there might be a point they weren’t in my life, but they planned for that, the emotional side that when somebody passes away.

Ian Dibb:

There’s a lovely saying that when an old person dies, a library burns to the ground, because all that knowledge that person contained is gone. What we want to do with Keylu is actually help you to curate your own legacy, so recording messages, moments, favorite times, songs you and your family love together. So if something was to happen, it’s all passed on to them and you’ve basically done all you can to make sure that person’s still got this unique link to somebody they loved.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. I just want to mention, something just occurred to me, obviously, Keylu didn’t exist when my dad died in early ’87 or beyond, but because my family was pretty prominent and most families are not in terms of wealth and status, a fair amount is known about them. My great-great-grandfather came out from England to Australia in the late 1830s, founded the whole John Fairfax Limited media empire. Because he was prominent back in the early ’40s, when there were still folks that maybe had some memory of him when they were small, they wrote this loving portrait of him for the family. He died in the 1870s. I have that book. I can’t tell you how many times I read it, how much that means to me. Now, most families don’t have a book about their great-great-grandfather.

Warwick Fairfax:

We’re talking five generations ago, like zero. Maybe if you’re, I don’t know what, the Duke of Marlborough or some prominent English aristocrat, maybe you do, but for average person, they don’t. But he was a person of very strong faith and elder at his church. So reading that, it means everything to me. When I came to faith in Christ, at St. Aldates in Oxford, I felt like this is part of our heritage. It means everything to have that. There are some letters that my grandfather wrote and a couple letters that my dad wrote me. Those are precious treasures, but most people don’t have that. How long ago did you start Keylu?

Ian Dibb:

We originally started Keylu, the concept was 2009, but as we mentioned, it was just too early. In 2019, we relaunched and we put a bigger team behind it. We actually said, “Okay, this is the time.” We are now all using mobiles every single day. They’ve become a huge part of our life. Everything is now digital, so when you buy life insurance, car insurance, house insurance, you don’t get them sent to you anymore. They’re actually either emailed to you or you are given access to an online portal, but how many portals do you have to manage? The average person has about 80 to 100 passwords they need to manage just to manage their lives. One of the big downsides to this amazing digital changes that all of a sudden, if you are not there to actually link into those portals, that information is lost or extremely hard to find.

Ian Dibb:

There’s a statistic in the UK that 25% of cohabitant couples are completely in the dark over their partner’s financial situation. In the UK, there was around 200 billion in unclaimed assets, so bank accounts, savings accounts, pension portfolios, and it’s only going to get worse. So it’s really is that when we first came up with the idea, people, you still get your bank account details or your monthly letters sent out to you. That doesn’t happen anymore. So all of a sudden, we are going to build this knowledge gap that when somebody passes away, how are they supposed to find that information? You spent a fortune on your pension, but if your family don’t know where that is, it’s going to go unclaimed.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. So with Keylu, talk about how that’s different than maybe other financial institutions, estate planning folks. How is this different than what some people do?

Ian Dibb:

There are people out there that say, “Well, I’ve got a spreadsheet on my computer” or “I’ve got some stuff in the Dropbox account,” but what Keylu is, it’s a very guided process. So from signing up to making sure all of your documents are in one place. Everything is kept up to date. You’ve got the latest bank account. You’ve got the latest will. You’ve got your life insurance. It actually gives you a process from being one, completely unorganized to two, knowing that everything is completely organized and up to date, so if something was to happen to you, it’s really easy for your family to manage the probate, giving them time to grieve and also saving them a huge amount of money that they would be spending on specialists in this area. But also, whereas you look at Dropbox as an opportunity to store documents, Keylu actually gives the opportunity to curate your own legacy, leaving behind an incredible messages, memories, photos, videos, family recipes. It’s all about you creating a gift for somebody else. I think that’s what this is. It’s the last most precious gift you can ever pass on.

Warwick Fairfax:

Wow. Just talk about the peace of mind that having all those records and memories in one place gives, because it sounds like you went through, was it 16 months what you said of probate. Talk about how just that legacy that you can give to your loved ones by having all this organized.

Ian Dibb:

Yeah. If you were to sit down with your family and say, “Look, okay. Where are my documents?” most people wouldn’t have the clue where to start, and that’s basically what you’re doing by not planning. The peace of mind is that with a click of a button, trusted contacts in your Keylu account can instantly download every single document they need to deal with the probate process. That is with a touch of a button, they can then pass it on to a professional and says, “Here’s everything my dad had from his pensions, to his savings, to his investments, to his share certificates. It’s all here.” That, all of a sudden, you can then pass on and the process of probate will be far quicker, far less painless.

Ian Dibb:

My mother-in-law is going through this at the moment here in the UK. I think they’re 16, 18 months in on a simple one-bedroom flat in London with a savings account. It doesn’t need to be this complicated. The reason it is this complicated, it takes months and months and months to find missing or lost assets. So by planning ahead and making sure everything is kept up to date, it just makes that processes far easier for your loved ones and at the same point, they can just get on dealing with the grief, which will come, but this will make it easier.

Gary Schneeberger:

One of the things I love about what you’ve been saying, Ian, is that you’ve referred a couple times to how these devices, these mobile devices, everybody has them. I think we all feel sometimes, even though we’re all really using them and into them, I’ll raise my hand, I’m into them myself, but what you’ve done in a very real way is redeem them a bit from the perception that they’re time wasters, from the perception that they’re distractors from… We’ve all seen in restaurants, when you sit down and you look over at the table next to you and people aren’t talking, they’re looking at their phones. You’ve redeemed that idea of taking that phone to create a document, to create memories, to create a legacy for your family. You said earlier that there’s a saying that when an older person dies, it’s like a library burns to the ground.

Gary Schneeberger:

What I love about what you’re doing with Keylu is that the legacy you’re leaving is you’re using technology to when someone dies, their loved ones inherit a library. They get a library full of both that financial legacy, which is so important, but as you indicated, even more important, more emotional, more meaningful is that emotional legacy that is able to be passed along. That’s a great one-two punch and it’s really important here at Beyond the Crucible, because Warwick talks all the time about the reason you live a life on purpose dedicated to serving others is that it helps you leave a legacy to be proud of and that’s one of the things that Keylu allows folks to do. Before I let Warwick ask the next question though, I don’t think that you’ve defined for everyone who’s not Cornish what Keylu means and why you named it that.

Ian Dibb:

Yes. We wanted a name which embraces family and protection. The Cornish name for family is Teylu, T-E-Y-L-U. The K comes from keep or your key information. So we combine the two words. Basically, it’s where you keep all the information for your family. Miraculously, all the domain names were available as well, so it’s absolute blessing.

Gary Schneeberger:

Indeed.

Warwick Fairfax:

Oh, that’s great. I love this concept of obviously keeping all the documents at one place, but just keeping memories, it’s so important. I think of your story and as you share about your mum and Jane. You founded this company in 2019. 100 years from then, let’s say it’s 2119, without this, how would your great-great-great-grandkids, how would they know anything about your beloved sister and mother? They probably wouldn’t unless there was a book written about them or whatever. Their memory would pass, but I’m sure you’ve probably recorded a bunch of videos and writings and other material, I’m guessing, about your mum and sister and certainly about yourself and your wife and kids, daughter. Those memories will be preserved. I know obviously, it’s early days in one sense, but imagine in 100 years, the legacy that your ancestors will have that you don’t probably have from your ancestors 100 years ago.

Warwick Fairfax:

Did that make sense? You are giving a legacy and a gift that your mother’s memory will not be lost. Your ancestors, hopefully for hundreds of years, will remember the incredible person she was and your sister. That’s a legacy worth preserving.

Ian Dibb:

Well, one of the things that still hurts is I remember I sat there with mum in the hospital on the night she was diagnosed with cancer and she turned to me and she said, “I’m never going to see your kids grow up.” That still hurts. It’s as fresh as it was all those years ago, but what we could have done if we had Keylu back then, she could have recorded some messages about who she was and we could then play them for the future generations. My mum had a wicked personality. She really did. There’s some stories that when I retell them, it brings her back to life. There’s some key things she did, which to most people would mean anything, but to me mean the world. I think what we’re trying to do with Keylu is you might not record every single moment, but just capture some key memories because we’ve all got our own unique personalities.

Ian Dibb:

I like to be quite sarcastic with my daughter and as a result, my daughter is super sharp. Some of the things she writes down, I will actually just put down on a piece of paper and say, “Alice, tonight, you said this.” It might not mean anything to her now, but in the future, it will mean the world to her. I’ve just had a clear up in the office actually. I’ve got probably 100 hand-drawn pictures from when Alice was one right through till now. We can’t keep everything because otherwise, your fridge will just collapse under the weight of hand-drawn paintings and the magnets won’t allow the fridge to work anymore. But what you can do is actually grab a photo of that, put it into Keylu and put the time and date next to it and say, “Alice, this was when you were one.” Then you’ve got a video of the kids on their first day at school, their graduation, their wedding.

Ian Dibb:

You could start capturing key moments in a person’s life; otherwise, those key moments just disappear and all of a sudden, 10 years has blurred into 20 years, blurred into thirty. You realize that actually, you haven’t captured a lot of stuff. You’ve got all these photos on your phone, but you won’t be in any of them because you are taking the photos or the person on the other side of it is taking the photos of you, but there aren’t any moments of you as a whole. So what I do quite often is I’ll turn a camera around, grab a moment with me and my daughter because it’s so important you capture that one moment in time. To me, that’s one of the things I do. I don’t know many other people that do actually, instead of take a photo, grab a moment, capture it, capture that key moment in time, record it, add it to Keylu so you can enjoy it now with your family, but in the future, that gift will be the most precious thing you can leave behind.

Warwick Fairfax:

Do you talk about this to folks that are thinking of using Keylu how do you use Keylu, how do you create a legacy, what are the kinds of things you should capture?

Ian Dibb:

Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of stuff we are going to continue to add to the platform. Here’s a user guide. Here’s how to add a video. Here’s how to add a message. Here’s what people are adding to their bucket list. Most people want to see the Northern Lights or see the Grand Canyon, for instance. We can provide you with some prompts and some best uses of the platform, but loads of people go to it and just explore in different ways really, but it’s all about with the mobile app makes it even easier. You’re walking along. You’ve captured an amazing picture and you go, “Now that was a moment I want to record and store forever.” So it’s all about actually just, it’s a really easy to use platform, but how can we make it even better, which is what the team continues to do.

Gary Schneeberger:

One of the interesting things about it that you mentioned to me, Ian, is that yes, there are direct to consumer transactions where people will get this for themselves to leave a legacy to their family, but you also work with some professionals like estate planners and lawyers who have leveraged this to offer their clients, right? There’s a B2B kind of application as well, isn’t there?

Ian Dibb:

Yeah. We work with financial advisors, solicitors, estate planners, mortgage brokers. We work with charities. We offer Keylu completely free of charge to anyone who’s been diagnosed with a terminal illness. We work with organizations to provide that. That’s something we’ve always been a key part of who we are. We want to make sure we’re constantly giving back. But yeah, so we work with all these different organizations to provide a benefit, not only to them, but also to their clients, helping their clients to understand the importance of estate planning, getting their affairs in order. I think one of the key things is it’s a great way to keep up to date on all your financial situation, so make sure everything’s kept up to date because it’s quite easy to have your will written and forget about it for the next 20 years realizing you/ve had another kid and bought another property.

Ian Dibb:

I think what Keylu does, it provides regularly notifications and updates to say, “Hey, Gary. It’s been six months since you added your will. Has anything changed?” or “It’s been 12 months since you added your insurance policy. Is this the latest one?” So it’s actually keeping you up to date on everything in your life. It’s like a life management, life planning tool as much as it is that legacy creation tool.

Warwick Fairfax:

That’s incredible. Talk about some of the feedback you’ve received from Keylu users because I’m sure you’ve received a lot of feedback. What are people saying and how are they using it? What impact has it had on their lives?

Ian Dibb:

Unfortunately, a lot of people who come to us say, “I wish I have seen this six months ago or 12 months ago because I’ve just gone through this with mum or dad. I’ve not got a clue where to start.” It’s that kind of situation. You have to normally have a trigger point go off in your life, which makes you understand you’re mortal and that might be, you’ve just lost somebody you love. You’ve just been given a terminal diagnosis. You’ve just potentially bought a house. So there’s lots of triggers in your life that make you understand the importance of getting your affairs in order. But the overwhelming response we get from a Keylu user is I’ve got peace of mind knowing I’ve done all I can for my loved ones. Of course, all the information on our platform is completely encrypted. No one within the Keylu team has access to it.

Ian Dibb:

The only person that will ever see that information is you as the account holder and those trusted contacts you’ve added to access it after you’ve gone. I think the key thing is actually, this is brilliant because I can deal with my affairs now knowing that I’ve done something incredible for my loved ones. It’s just the ability actually to know those people receive that message in the future. I’m just going to have a look behind me now and see where I’d put it. I’ve got a cassette tape here which my mum left for me. Let me just see if I can pick it up.

Gary Schneeberger:

For your younger listeners, a cassette tape is the way that we used to record things before our phones did it all for us.

Ian Dibb:

But here we go. This came before CD players and MP3 players. This is a cassette tape. On this cassette tape it says, Anne Radio Cornwall. Then my daughter came into the room and she said, “Dad, what’s this?” Luckily, she didn’t break it, but on it is the only recording I’ve got of my mum’s voice. It’s unbelievable because my mum hadn’t planned this. My daughter found it in my memory box. That’s the most valuable thing I now own, above anything else, my mum’s voice on that cassette. So what we’ve done is taken that forward because you don’t need to use a cassette tape. Keylu allows you to store all of this information. You could be walking along and something amazing happens. You open up the Keylu app. You record that message to somebody you love. Click save. Click who it’s going to go to knowing that you have the peace of mind the recipient is going to get that heartfelt message at some point in the future where that’ve been the most valuable item they ever received from you.

Warwick Fairfax:

I want listeners to really understand how important that is. Again, I just go back to my great-great-grandfather, John Fairfax. Your daughter, in the coming decade, she’s going to remember you well. Yes, you’ve got the videos, but she will have memories. But let’s assume that she gets married one day and has kids and they have kids. There’s going to come a generation that never met Ian Dibb. You will have died before they were born, maybe decades before they were born. They’re going to say, “Mum, dad, I’ve heard of my grandfather or great-great-grandfather, Ian. What was he like?” It’s like, “You know, I don’t really know. I was four when he died. I don’t really remember him. I’m sorry.” Well, they won’t need to say I’m sorry. They’ll be able to say, “Well, he is a pretty amazing guy. Here he is. Here he is with your grandmother, Alice. Your great-grandfather is helping your grandmother learn how to ride a bike.” Now, how cool is that? It’s hard for people to imagine, but that will happen.

Warwick Fairfax:

This is a gift that generations of your family and generations of other families will have. Help people understand, I know maybe it’s obvious, but why that’s important and why for most of us, we just do not have that in any way, shape, or form.

Ian Dibb:

I think you only realize the importance of it when you can’t access it anymore. For me, I knew where my mum grew up in Bristol, so I did a little tour on Google Maps a few weeks ago and I found the street my mum grew up in and I zoomed in with a little orange man and instantly, looking at that house brought back hundreds of memories and moments that you know they’re somewhere, but you need some trigger to kick them off. Unfortunately, I can’t access any further because that line of my family’s life is gone. So I want to make sure that there’s photos. Every now and then, I walk around the house and I do a full video of the house knowing that Alice, when she’s older, can go back into her house, follow that video and see the rooms I’ve set up at Christmas because I want to make sure that information is passed on.

Ian Dibb:

So as you said, that when I’m 96 and Alice has got kids and I’ve got grandkids and all that type of stuff, they can actually see that I wasn’t always this 96-year-old. I traveled the world and I was just like they are, because I think that if you look at it now, when we’re looking at our grandparents, the photos are in black and white and there’s no videos of them. Actually, it’s very hard to associate yourself with something that looks so far away from you, but actually, if you look at people doing what they’ve just done with the World War II, they’ve recolored it. It makes it actually far more real now that is in color. We can provide something incredible for our loved ones by providing dozens and dozens of videos. You can upload as many as you want to the platform, knowing that these are actually key moments that at the moment, might seem quite silly.

Ian Dibb:

I’ve got a video of myself and my daughter play fighting. I turn the camera around because she loves to play fight, my little girl, and it’s just a really special thing that when she looks back and she’s 60, she can go, “This is your granddad and me having a play fight,” and that would just be so special that we’re just trying to say, actually, just capture everything. It’s not just when we used to have film cameras and the camera would come out at a special occasion. We now have these unique tools in our pockets that can capture videos whenever we want it. But what we do with those, how are we using those to curate a legacy at the moment? They go into the iCloud account and that’s where they remain locked behind passwords and unavailable to anyone else, clearly gives you the unique opportunity to curate that into a story for your loved ones for now, for them forever, really.

Gary Schneeberger:

I want to do a couple things here, listener, before Warwick asks what I’m sure is going to be a very good question. First of all, I want to say that sound you heard is the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign, which indicates we’ve begun our descent of this episode, but we’re not there yet, so you still got time to enjoy the flight. I wanted to add a personal story that emphasizes exactly what you’re talking about here, Ian, because I got a cassette tape too after my mum passed away. My mum passed away more than 30 years ago. Late in her life when she was married to my stepfather, my mum always liked to sing and she never got to do it when she was married to my dad. Well, my stepfather was an organist who played all around the region where we live, where I have moved back to in the last six years. So my mum would go out and sing with him at these places.

Gary Schneeberger:

In the garage, I remember, and it was embarrassing when I was like 17 because my mum would be in the garage with my stepdad and his organ and they would be playing and singing and my friends would be like, “What is that?” But they recorded cassettes that they sold and when she passed away, one of them found its way to me. I digitally burned it. I have it on my phone, but where that has paid off, where that paid off, when I got remarried in 2017, my mum obviously could not be at my wedding, but she was because I did a daddy daughter dance with my stepdaughter to a song of my mum singing from that album.

Ian Dibb:

Wow.

Gary Schneeberger:

I can’t hardly talk about that moment now without getting emotional about it, and that’s the power of what you’re talking about, those memories that move from memory to reality that you can then bring into life as you move forward. That’s a precious gift that you can pass along to your loved ones, for sure. Warwick, sorry I interrupted you there a little while.

Warwick Fairfax:

No. No, that was such a great, great point. So just as we close, gosh, a couple of different thoughts. One thought I have, I guess before I ask a question is, because my family, the Fairfax family in Sydney were very prominent, we have more memories than most families. Prominent families seem to want to capture themselves for whatever reason. So as I said, we’ve had a book written about my great-great-grandfather. There were letters. When we sold the house I grew up in, which my dad was born in and died in back in the day when you actually were born at home, not in a hospital, there were all of these photographs going back to maybe the 1850s. There were some from the early 1900s, 1920s. Obviously, I knew some of them. I recognized my dad and others. He was in his late 50s when I was born, but there was a host of people around him and I’m thinking, I have no idea who these people are, because we’re talking about 1890s, 1910 or something and I felt this sadness.

Warwick Fairfax:

Some of them were family, some of them were friends. Who were they? What were their stories? Even in my family where we have more photographs and memories than most, there was this sadness. So what you’re doing with Keylu is preventing that kind of sadness. Who were the family and close friends? So really, as we close, obviously, you’ve moved on at least as best as you can from the grief of losing your beloved sister and mother, talk about what you do with Keylu and your life. I’m assuming there’s some redemptive quality about what you do. Obviously, your business is successful. It’s well thought out, but just talk about maybe the sense if that’s true of redemption, hope to what you do now brings to you.

Ian Dibb:

It’s everything. The saying that if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. It couldn’t be truer. We work with some amazing people, some amazing companies, not only in the UK, but the opportunity to work with people around the world that you actually see different people at different stages in their journey as well. Now, if you look at where you are on a journey and you compare yourself to somebody who’s never experienced it, you’re obviously dealing with grief still. But then you look at people at the start of it who don’t even know how to get out of bed because they’ve just lost someone they love and they’ve no idea what to do. From everything I do with Keylu, I believe that we should be the light in somebody’s life and we should look back and lift people up and bring people with us. Everything we’re doing at Keylu, we’re doing that, but we do it on a world stage as well to say it doesn’t have to be this bad. It can be easier, and actually, by just making little steps each and every day.

Ian Dibb:

Keylu doesn’t have to be completed in one day. It’s a journey. You can get to it over time. But for me, the experience of losing mum and Jane was the catalyst in my life to say, “Okay, now step up and make a difference. Be the person who’s going to change people’s lives. Don’t expect it to be done for you.” That’s something I absolutely love at Keylu is I have an opportunity and the team all share my passion and vision. We want to make a difference. We want to help people. If people are struggling, actually look towards us because we’ve been there. We’re used to saying quite a lot, “We care. We’ve been there,” and that echoes through everything we do at Keylu. We’ve been to where you’ve been and we’ve been through it and we are continuing to grow. I always think that don’t always look ahead of you. Look where you’ve actually been and sometimes, look around and you might think actually, I’m judging myself against people who are out there partying and drinking and look super happy.

Ian Dibb:

But look on the other way sometimes and there’s people who are worse off than you that actually you can step out and help them to get to where you are. For me, it’s very much a journey we are on and I’m just really blessed to have had 28 years with mum and Jane. That’s far longer than some people have had. But from that to be given a life mission to help others, I think it’s actually been a blessing.

Gary Schneeberger:

I have been in the communications business long enough and you’ve heard me say this before, listener, pretty much on every episode that I know when the last word has been spoken on a subject. Normally, I would say our guest has spoken it; however, I’m also in the communication business long enough to know when I’ve messed up because I was so emotional in my last comment that I did not give our guest, Ian Dibb, the chance to let you know how you can find out about Keylu online. Ian, how can people, you mentioned that domain names were easy to find, how can they go to one of those domain names and learn more about and even sign up for Keylu?

Ian Dibb:

You can find us directly at keylu.com, which is K-E-Y-L-U.com. You can find us at Facebook.com/Keylulife and you can also find us on LinkedIn as well. But yeah, we are easy to find. Please log onto the platform. Let us know what you love about it, what you don’t like. We’re on a journey.

Gary Schneeberger:

And that is the last word of our episode today, listener. So until the next time that we’re together, do remember that we understand crucible experiences are inordinately difficult. Ian described one here today, two, a couple of here today for himself and then also some crucibles that other people go through that he’s worked with. They’re painful. They knock you off your feet. They change the trajectory of your life, but they do not have to be the end of your story. In fact, if you learn the lessons from those crucibles and you apply them to your life moving forward, they can be the start of a new chapter, a new story in your life, and that story can be the best story of your life. Ian’s just revealed it in what he’s talked about here. Warwick talks about it every week in his own life, because that new story, that new direction leads to a truly worthwhile, hope-filled future, and that is a life of significance.