Episode notes
In this episode of the Minority Report podcast, host Kerel Cooper sits down with Haleh Shoa, CEO and founder of Picturli, a company dedicated to preserving and organizing family memories. Haleh shares her powerful journey from Iran during the revolution, where her family fled with only a few precious belongings, including family photo albums. This experience deeply influenced her passion for helping families document and cherish their personal histories. With 27 years of experience in advertising, Haleh transitioned to creating Picturli, a service that helps people digitize, organize, and creatively showcase their analog and digital photos and videos. Through her work, she has discovered the profound emotional power of photographs in connecting families, healing relationships, and preserving legacies across generations.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 06:34
We want to welcome everyone to another episode of Minority Report podcast with Eric and Kerel. This is Kerel Cooper, unfortunately, Eric was not able to join us this evening, but I am excited to speak to Haleh Shoa, who is the CEO and founder at Picturli. Haleh, how are you doing today?
Haleh Shoa 06:56
I'm great. Kerel, thank you so much for having me.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 06:59
Yeah, thanks for joining me, and I'm super excited to really talk to you a bit more about your company and your career journey. But first and foremost, as we like to do on this podcast, have to ask, Where were you born? Where are you from? Where are you living now?
Haleh Shoa 07:20
Well, I was born in Iran, and so I'm from Iran, because I was born there, and I live in Los Angeles now the second Iranian, it's the largest diaspora of Iranians outside of Iran.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 07:34
Really, I did not know that. Wow, wow. Tell us a little bit about the journey from being born in Iran to how you got to LA,
Haleh Shoa 07:46
well, my parents found themselves sort of scrambling what to do during the Iranian Revolution. Do we stay? Do we go? What happens if we stay? What happens if we go and they decided to, I mean, they didn't really actually have a choice. They had to flee the country, and we had to leave in phases. My brother was already here. My older sister was sent with another group. Within three days, she had to pack a small bag and leave, and it was me and my little sister and my mom who were the fourth phase, essentially, or the third, and my mom decided to pack all the family albums to bring with her, and there wasn't much room. I mean, we all had a small suitcase to bring. And luckily enough, for me and for us, we were able to replace whatever we couldn't bring with us, and had the things that were irreplaceable, the family photos and the heirlooms that my mom had the foresight to bring with her,
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 08:48
wow. And if you, if you don't mind, talk like, what age were you at that point in time, and did you understand, sort of, the magnitude of what was going on.
Haleh Shoa 09:01
I was nine, and I did. I have what they call a trauma brain, and I've forgotten a lot of things, even though I know I was there. For example, I was there when the American hostages were taken. Even though I was little, I couldn't see much. There was just a sea of people, lots of loud noises that ended up being things being blown up. And I know I saw a lot of people getting killed in the streets, and I don't really remember any of that, even though I know it's in there somewhere. So with that, unfortunately, I don't have much memory of my own childhood, which is actually one of the reasons why this business is so important to me and what I've created, because our stories are really the gateway to our history, to our past, to our ancestors and to our journey. So for me, it's so important to be able to look at those childhood photos, even though there's not a lot of them, but to be able to learn about the stories of what I can't visually remember, and to at least have that memory from others now.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 10:14
And is that the motivation behind Picturli
Haleh Shoa 10:21
sort of Yeah. I mean, that was one of the what I didn't realize that was a motivation. I mean, I, as I mentioned to you before we started recording it, I worked in advertising for 27 years, and I was lucky enough to have access to incredible scanners. And when you know, in advertising, everything ebbs and flows you're working on on a campaign, and everyone's working 24 hours a day, and then it stops, and we're all like waiting for the next campaign to come through. And during those ebbs, I would take the family photos, and I would scan them and retouch them in Photoshop and restore them. And so I learned, sort of the importance of making sure everything scanned and retouch correctly. So that was one of the impetus of the founding picture Lee, but really, another impetus was that I just loved making photo books and gallery wall arts and calendars for my friends and family. And I thought, you know, I'm sure someone out there doesn't have the time to do this. So maybe I'll start, you know, a little side gig to do photo albums for people. And my very first client out the gate probably had 150,000 analog photos, just a ginormous collection of over 100 years, and super unorganized, and she wanted to make photo albums. So she heard that there's a girl out there that wants to make photo albums for families. However, everything was analog, and so that was a five year journey into learning analog, digital,
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 12:03
wow, yeah, but, but that, you know what? What's so fascinating I think about that in that one particular case, and maybe it is for, you know, all your clients. I mean, there's, there's a, there's a story that's told in everyone's photos, photo albums, so on and so forth, right? And you have the privilege of, maybe, you know, seeing someone else's journey and story, right? What's What's that like?
Haleh Shoa 12:33
It's such an honor to be able to be part of someone's family. A lot of times, I get to know them in a way better than they know themselves. You know, am objective, and, you know, I am a phenomenal curator, and so is my team. And so when we get into people's photos, whether it's digital or analog, we do both. We collect digital and, you know, take out the duplicates and do all that stuff. But I just kind of peer through their their journey, and you could be part of their celebrations, part of their sadness when they lose someone, and it's just you're part of their milestones and, you know, and all the things that they do. So I just, I really, feel really honored, and what's amazing is that I've learned so much about how people can enjoy their photos and videos that I can I'm able to give them suggestions as to how best to be able to watch videos, family videos on their TV, for example. Like a lot of people don't know how to do that and easily set that up so or be able to share a huge collection with their family at large. Like I come from a huge family, so it was important to me when I documented and archived my family photos, to be able to share that with my cousins that are on four continents. So I use my own family as an example of learning so many different ways of being able to share family photos and stories with everyone else. So it's a really, an incredible honor,
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 14:06
yeah, and I would have to think too, in many ways, it's you mentioned sharing photos with families on different continents. It's a way to kind of reconnect people, too, right? In many ways, right through, through photos?
Haleh Shoa 14:22
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have seen people really have, you know, find forgiveness in their hearts for their dad mom through the photos. Like it really is very healing, you know? I mean, it can be tragic. I had a client who lost her son at 21 and there's nothing worse in the world than losing your child. So she had not looked at any of this stuff for 20 years, and everything was in a room, and we just, you know, we spent, like, maybe an hour with her, and we just took all the stuff and curated it, archived it for her, and she was just so happy, and to be able to look through those and of course, there was many tears involved. No matter what, there's a lot of tears involved, because when we deliver a project, there's always tears of joy, but there's also tears of healing, you know, involved in being able to look at our pictures and and be able to reconnect with our story and our past
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 15:26
when you when you first started the business, did you? Did you understand and realize that emotional connection again, whether it's tears of joy or tears of sadness or regret, or was that something that was a surprise moment for you after you started the business?
Haleh Shoa 15:48
No, I knew it, because every time I made a calendar or photo book, it was just like I so I didn't have my own kids. And you know, of course, 30 comes around, and all my friends started to have kids, so and I always had a really good camera with me, and I was sort of the unofficial photographer of my friends kids. And every year I would make either a photo book or a calendar for them, and they didn't know what was going to be in there. And every time they couldn't wait for January, like 15th ish, to come around so they can get their their goodie from that year prior, and it was just so much joy, and you know, tears of laughter, and you had no idea some of the photos that I'd taken. And so I did know, and and I knew from my own experience of looking through my own photos, how much joy that brought me to be able to reconnect with my own past. So I think that you know, there are really only four things in in this lifetime that we can't replace. It's our family, our pets, our time and our photos and memories. We can't replace that. So it's, it's the most precious thing,
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 17:04
right? Right now, I want to, I want to go back for a second, because you mentioned you spent a number of years in the advertising industry, right? And would love to hear a little bit more about your career journey and path. And then what was it like making that leap from working for a company to then going out and branching on your own and starting your own business as well?
Haleh Shoa 17:32
Scary, scary and exciting. So I started my career in the early 90s. I worked at Epson, and I had a really great boss at Epson who was in the head of the marketing department, and she said, You know what, you should look into advertising. You really like the creative process, and you seem to get super excited to work with the creatives. I think you should look into advertising. So I ended up working in what was called traffic back then, which is really project management, and then I jumped to production. And from there, I jumped to doing operations. Because really it's like, I love the left brain, but I also really like the right brain. So operations, it was sort of left brain, right brain. I could get to work with the creatives, but I can also set up structure for the entire company and or for the clients company. So, so it was great. I my last full time job was the head of the I was the director of operations for Jaguar Land Rovers ad agency globally. And it was great. I got my very first client that I mentioned to you that had a lot of photos and that job at the same time. So I was like, Okay, I don't know what's happening in the universe, but the abundance faucet just poured over my head so hard that I'm like, Okay, I gotta figure out how to do this. Luckily, my husband had a lot of experience also in advertising. He was the head of studio, and I was like, Hey, you got to go work with this client while I go to the UK and learn what's up over over with my new job. So we were managing, growing the business. He was helping me at the time, but, but, yeah, it was exhilarating. It was it was good times.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 19:24
Yeah, and what's been again, making that transition from advertising to running your own business, give it. Give me a couple of like, lessons learned for you.
Haleh Shoa 19:38
Um, I thought it would be really easy to do a business, because I only thought, again, I have, like, very operational brain, and I only thought about sort of the process of, okay, well, I can just get clients assets, and, you know, I can do this with it, and then I can deliver it over here, right? Well, then there is setting up a website. They're setting up all the different platforms that you need to set up to run a business. There is potentially getting an office. I mean, in 2020 everybody was leaving their offices. I had to get an office because I was getting so busy in my house is so small that I wasn't able to fit everyone's boxes. In fact, in the last in the first four years of first three years of the pandemic, from 2020 to 2323 we moved four times because I was like, Okay, this is this office is going to be big enough. And now this
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 20:35
sounds like a really, really good problem to have, though.
Haleh Shoa 20:38
Yeah, business is hard.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 20:42
Oh, I know. Listen, I'm living my wife and I and my kids. I've been in this house now for 18 years, and I don't want to move because of just what you said, moving is very hard.
Haleh Shoa 20:56
Moving is so hard, but, and, you know, because I really, I mean, I own an IT agency. It's like, you know, I Yes, of course, we work with memories and things like that. But you know, we have to make sure that my server is in good health, that all the computers are in good health, that everything's backed up properly, and, you know, and everything's connected wired, because we don't work off of the, you know, wireless or Wi Fi, because we does, we do such heavy moving of files and, you know, things like that that, getting that infrastructure set up every time we move. And I'm like, oh my god, I gotta get new cables now. But hey, it is a good problem to have. Okay, I'm not complaining.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 21:44
Well, well, you bring up a good point, right? With with your business, there's a lot of tech involved, right? I'm sure there are, there's privacy, there's privacy involved, and I'm sure there's AI involved, right? So I'm here. I'm curious to know, as you think about the technology landscape and where we're going, from an AI perspective, like any, any any thoughts on that landscape, whether it be concerns or excitement, just from a pure technology perspective in terms of where the world is heading, especially as it impacts your business.
Haleh Shoa 22:25
Yeah. I mean, I love AI personally. I think it's great in terms of learning different workflows, different operational stuff, but in terms of people's personal assets. Listen, we've been using AI since a long, long time ago. You know, it wasn't called AI, but there's been facial recognition since. We've all had a little bit after the iPhone came out, like maybe five years after, you know, in 2013 or so, they started to roll out some things to do with recognizing what's in the photos. And now it's completely blown out. You know, no matter if you have Amazon photos, you know, Apple or Google Photos, they all have really, really robust AI and and we love that part. We love the facial recognition that you can go in and name all your friends and family and cousins and whatnot, and be able to find their videos and photos really easily and make a quick thing for their birthdays and upload it to Facebook or to them. So that's been around for a long time, and that is, we don't use any of those platforms. We do everything locally. Through Lightroom. It's an Adobe product, and even through Lightroom, it's, you know, we use the facial recognition through that program to be able to tag the our clients photos if they choose to do that. So we have, we use what comes with the programs, but we don't use AI at large, like chat or Claude or any of those other things for the contents, the contents that we receive from our clients. I don't know, because I don't know how private. I mean, it's totally fine for me to say, Hey, I'm this, like, this is my current workflow. Can I make it more efficient? And if it gives me sure this is a more efficient workflow for you, I'm fine with that, and I'm fine with that not being secure if someone else wants to figure out what my workflow is, or if it's teaching someone else, that's fine with me, but for me to actually upload my clients assets to it and have that cut up the video, for example, like we get a lot of VHS tapes or little digital videos from like 25 years ago that may have like 10 different events on there, right? And so we want to be able to clip that up for our clients, so we can rename and re date each clip for the date that it was taken and and you know, you could easily do that in AI, but I don't feel comfortable doing that, because I don't know what's going to happen to those videos, you know, outside of the boundaries of this studio, right,
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 25:11
right, gotcha. And so if anyone is listening and they want to reach out to you, what, what does, what does onboarding a new client look like, how does someone sign up for the service? Walk take me through that process a little
Haleh Shoa 25:26
bit. I mean, we have a website, Picturli.com, yeah, weird, but yeah. And, you know, I offer a complimentary consult to everyone. There's so many offerings that we have. You know, it's everything, all types of analog to digital. So I really highly encourage everyone to just book a consult with me. And you know, we have clients globally, so it doesn't matter where you live, particularly with digital, it really doesn't matter where you where you live. We can access your your stuff locally and be able to help you download everything and organize it all. But there's three things that we do really well. There's the digital consolidation and organization. There's the analog to digital, and that includes, of course, photos, slides, negatives, anything on tape, film, any any kind of memories that you can imagine. And then, of course, the creative stuff, the photo books, the gallery walls, the video montages and things like that.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 26:28
Awesome, awesome. What? Um, what does a good day look like for you?
Haleh Shoa 26:35
Um, a good day is when I get a bunch of external hard drives, and I pop that in and it works. That's a really good day. And I download the assets, and they all have the right metadata. That's a really, really good day. Often, the metadata gets stripped over. We don't know why, and especially with video, a lot of times, the metadata is just not there. And so there's a lot involved in the digital sphere that. Because in you know, we started taking digital photos approximately in the mid 90s, and we didn't know how to back that up, and our computers were not robust enough. And so there's a lot of change over with our assets, from one external hard drive to another, maybe from Mac to PC or PC to Mac, and, you know, different types of external hard drives and things like that. So a lot could have happened to those files. So a good day is when the digital files show us exactly what they are, and we don't have to begin for it.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 27:42
Gotcha. Gotcha. I don't like asking the work life balance question anymore, because I don't know if I believe in work life balance, but what I do like to ask is, how much time do you spend in your job versus in the world?
Haleh Shoa 27:59
That's a really good question. This in this studio, everybody works part time, including me, which is amazing. I have five employees and all but get to pick their own hours. I have I have guys coming through at 3p they're still on their circadian rhythm is still on. The teenage years. They wake up, I don't know what time, but they stroll through at 3pm and they do a great job, and they work until 10, I don't care, but we're all part time, and I have really, I mean, honestly, my goal was to be able to not only survive in this business, but also be able to provide an incredible service, and be able to Do what I want to do. And for the most part, for the most part, that's happened now, my brain never turns off the business. I'm always sort of like, Wait, what was that? You know, I'm extremely curious. So in that regard, I'm always working on the business and not in the business, you know, gotcha.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 29:03
But
Haleh Shoa 29:04
it's something I love, and it doesn't matter, you know. So if I, if I'm reading an article at 10pm at night about an archive, you know, an interesting archive that's been found, I enjoy that, you know. So it's not really work, you know, it's like, more like learning all the time. So I'm blessed. I'm really blessed to be able to have a great work life balance and a great team.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 29:31
Love it. Love it. Um, what? What are there things within your daily routine that you do, that do help you stay focused and successful when you think about business or the things you do day to day, that's part of your routine,
Haleh Shoa 29:50
making sure that everything that all the touch points for all of our projects are at the highest level of quality. There's a lot of times that I see like what we scanned, and I don't like it, and I send it back, so they have to rescan everything, because I just don't like the way they look. And, you know, so I grew up at shy, at day and and that's an agency. I'm sure your ad people will know where that is or what that is, but our motto was, good enough is not enough. And that's just become part of my DNA, because I grew up there and so that that is really what drives me to it's not about perfection. It's about making sure that the quality is there with everything. Because, you know, Perfection is the enemy of progress and the enemy of profit. So I it's not about that. It's just making sure that what I'm delivering I can stand by that.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 30:49
Gotcha Well again, I love what you just said about sort of perfection. But what is? What is something that you wish you were better at?
Haleh Shoa 31:02
I uh, like, a lot of the financial stuff. Even though I'm a, I'm a really good math girl. I learned algebra in second grade. I I don't know how to navigate some of the financial stuff, you know, you know, the business has grown, which is great, but, you know, like knowing certain sectors that are doing better than others and within the business, and yes, I can pull reports and things like that, but it's not something that I'm really, really good at, like other things, for example. So
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 31:37
gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, one of the things that I love to do on this podcast, is ask our current guest to give us a question you want us to ask our next podcast guest?
Haleh Shoa 31:54
Hmm, I love that. Have you asked me the question that the last person asked?
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 31:59
No, but I can ask you that question now, if you want that, the question is, what does December 31 2028, look like for you? Oh, so you, you pick which, which question you want to answer first,
Haleh Shoa 32:19
there's, different parts of me that want to answer that. The part of me that is a little bit unclear and maybe a little bit unsure about what's going on in this country and maybe even the world, wants to say that I want to be in a really, really remote place with nothing around and a big garden for food growing. I don't know where, maybe Canada. I have no idea.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 32:47
There's nothing wrong with that answer. I love that part of me wants to say that,
Haleh Shoa 32:55
and another part of me wants to say that I'm chugging along, still where we are, and I love our studio. I designed it personally. And you know, all the walls, all the furniture, all everything is my taste and and I hope that we're still here, and the business is still growing, and it's still abundant, and we are still providing this invaluable service to as many families around the world as possible.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 33:20
Love it. Love it. All right. Now, what question,
Haleh Shoa 33:27
why? Why did you, I mean, I guess you would ask that anyway, right? Why did you start your business? We
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 33:34
would ask that one, yeah, yeah, okay.
Haleh Shoa 33:38
Looking back at your childhood, what do you think are the qualities that you had that you wish that you were still connected to?
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 33:49
Wow, I love that. I love that question. All right, I will make sure that the next guest answers that question, and I'll let you know what they say as well too.
Haleh Shoa 33:59
Yes, that would be great.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 34:01
Yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, there's been a really, really, really great conversation a lot of times. Our listeners love to reach out. Keep the conversation going. What's the best way for someone to get in contact with you? Please
Haleh Shoa 34:16
visit our website and just contact me through the you know the connect the contact button and and reach out? Yeah, I would love to hear about your story and see how I can help in any way.
Kerel Cooper (Zoom) 34:29
Awesome. Well. Haleh, thank you for joining us. This has been a really great and insightful conversation. And for those of you listening, thank you again for tuning to another episode, and we will talk to you guys soon. Take care, everyone. All right, see, not, not too painful of a conversation. I thought that was good, yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, I love what you're doing, especially in this day and age with technology and everything, just bringing it back to, you know, the essence of what, really what people care about, which is pictures. I mean, everyone loves that. And I never even thought about it the way that your business is doing it, until I started doing research on you, and again, the emotional connection and all those things, it's wonderful to see. So congratulations on your business.
Haleh Shoa 35:29
Oh, thank you so much. Thank you.