George Quraishi

George Quraishi co-founded Artifact, which sends a professional interviewer to record your family's stories while the people in them are still here.

Quraishi was the first guest on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast, and the episode was recorded on Artifact's own platform on purpose, so listeners could hear what the product actually sounds like. Brad Banyas opened by calling the company the best storytellers in the business and Quraishi turned the compliment down inside a sentence. Brad had a new granddaughter in the house that week, with his son and daughter-in-law staying a couple of months. Quraishi said an arrangement like that has become rare.

The company works a bit like booking a ride. A network of journalists, comedians, educators and people who are simply good at talking take sessions in 30 minute blocks, 20 for the ones about young children, because parents of young children are busy. You tell them what you want asked, they interview, edit and hand it back in an account where you set who can hear it. Life stories are the most popular, cut into three chapters: childhood, coming of age, and family and career. Families regularly add a fourth once they hear something they never knew, which is how Quraishi knows it is working. They work in English, Spanish and French. One customer set his grandmother's recording to public after she died, so that searching her name returns her own voice instead of the funeral home's generic obituary.

His own prized possession is a photograph of his father in his twenties, running shoulder to shoulder with Pele on the infield clay at Yankee Stadium. His father was born in Pakistan, grew up outside London in Slough, played for four or five teams at a time, came over for college and went first in the 1975 NASL draft to the Tampa Bay Rowdies, which is why Quraishi grew up in Tampa. He asked his father what happened on that play. His father said he got there, slid, and put the ball out for a corner.