Disrupting Deathcare in Canada

Patrick Daly:

Hello, this is Patrick Daly and welcome to Interlinks. Today on the show we’ll be talking to Faisal Abid, the Co-Founder and CTO of Eirene Cremations based in Ontario, in Canada. Faisal is an entrepreneur who’s committed to leveraging technology for groundbreaking solutions, and here he is as Co-Founder of Eirene Cremations disrupting death care in Canada. So Faisal spent some 12 years at Google and his expertise in Google Cloud and his role as a Google developer expert underscore his profound understanding of tech’s transformative power. So this puts him at the forefront of revolutionizing industries that have not yet fully embraced technology, such as the funeral services sector. So welcome Faisal, and thank you very much for being here with us today.

Faisal Abid:

Thank you for having me Patrick.

Patrick Daly:

Could you give us an overview of your life and career to date? How did you get to where you are, a tech guy in the death care business?

Faisal Abid:

Well, it’s very interesting. I’ve done so many random businesses, but I really got started in university, actually even before that I was doing a lot of tech. And so I got into all that, and since then I’ve just been tinkering with a lot of technology and there’s a really famous technology that came out, programming language called Adobe Flex a long time ago, and I got really involved in it. And that was my first real consulting gig, where I was doing a lot of consulting using Adobe Flex. I ended up co-authoring a book.

But then when university came around, I Android [inaudible 00:01:52]. And I was like, “You know, I should just build a business.” And I had no idea how to build a business, I was 18, 19 years old. And so I just kind of paused going to university and started working on this business. The idea was we’re going to build a social app marketplace, and so I could, if Patrick, you and I are friends, I could be like, “I value Patrick’s opinion more than I value what five stars say on the Play Store or app store.” And so, if I see a game and I see that Patrick’s played it, I can press a button, you would get a notification, you could be like, “Yeah, you know Faisal, you would like this game.” Even if it’s a one star, you’d be like, “You know, this is the type of game you would like.”

And so we started building that and I learned a lot of lessons on how not to build a business, spent too much time focusing on technology, way too much time building for a billion users when I didn’t even have two. And then eventually, two years later, the business didn’t work out. And during this whole time I say this, it’s not really a joke. I was staying with my parents, so while I had a house and food and everything, I was paying myself from the business like $200 a month. And so, it was just the story of, okay, well something needs to work, nothing worked, eventually I just learned how to not run a business. And so, I got a job.

And when I got a job, I didn’t go back to school. I started working at a company called Kobo. And Kobo was very interesting, this is my first ever tech job. And I started off as a intermediate engineer, mainly because I had a lot of experience already building technology and Kobo saw that in me. And so, that was great because I got to; A, network with a lot of people. But more importantly, learn how to run a technology team, learn, get mentored by really good managers. And so, that really got me into just the tech world full on of just meeting people, learning how to build businesses.

And then from that time on, I just chose innovative startups to work on rather than work at a big Google. And so, the Google thing is funny because Google had reached out and Google said, “Hey, you’re giving a lot of talks.” And one thing I enjoyed doing was go around gift presentations on the latest technology. And so Google said, “We have a program called Google Developer Experts, would you want to be part of that, we will…” As part of the program, it’s just me evangelizing a lot of Google products. And in turn, any travel expenses are covered for if I’m traveling around and giving talks.

And so, that got me into the Google sphere where I did some consulting with them as well, a lot of interesting apps that they were working on internally that I got jumped into. So, I kind of got the best of both worlds, not really being a full-time Google employee, but also doing a lot of consulting with them, doing a lot of their evangelism. And then as well as just going out and attempting to join very disruptive innovative startups. I joined a health startup right after Kobo, I joined a AI startup, which was in 2016, was doing ChatGPT for enterprise for executive assistants. We attempted to build it. We did a fairly okay job, it was nowhere near the accuracy or scale of ChatGPT. But for the technology that was existed at the time and the algorithms that existed, we did a fairly good job. But then again, I learned a lot about business.

And so eventually I was like, okay, well, I had done a bunch of small businesses while working in my day job. And what happened was, I ended up in Japan for three weeks and I met an old friend there who I had worked with previously, and he was running a cremation, a Buddhist cremation service, an online Buddhist cremation service. So the whole idea was you can go on and it would be like Expedia, where you could say, “I want A, B and C options.” And it would say, “Well, take a look at these five providers.” And I got very inspired because I was like, “Well, this is really cool because this type of technology is actually solving a need, a problem, and it’s really changing people’s lives.”

And so I came back to Toronto in March. I was there for three weeks. So I came back in March, April, and I had this idea in the back of my mind, I’m like, “I need to do something in this space.” Pure coincidence, I got introduced to my now business partner and Co-Founder, Mallory. And I got introduced just like two people that were interested in technology. She was thinking of another idea, I was thinking of a bunch of other ideas. And I’m not going to go around telling people, “Hey, I have an idea for a death startup.” How many people are interested in that, right? And so I had-

Patrick Daly:

A bit morbid. Rather morbid, yeah.

Faisal Abid:

… Morbid, and where’s the business case? And okay, I didn’t understand. I understood how to deal with it from a pure technology aspect, but I didn’t understand the regulation, so I couldn’t even pitch to anybody. So I had this pitch deck deep in my backpack. I went to coffee with Mallory, and we sat there and it was a 30-minute coffee, 25 of those minutes were spent just ideating on random ideas, whether it’s FinTech or B2C consumer apps, whatever.

As nothing happened, we were paying for the coffee and whatever. I said to her, “You know, what is your random big idea? What’s something, if you had all the money in the world, what would you want to build?” And she said, “Well, I’m the daughter of a funeral director and I’ve always thought about doing something in death. And I was like, “Hold on, hold on.” I went in my backpack, pulled out this crumpled up pitch deck and I said, “Look at this. I’ve been thinking about this. I had no idea that you were involved in this.” And so, that’s when her and I just started brainstorming in 2018 about how do we build a very disruptive business in the funeral space?

Patrick Daly:

It was some coincidence, wasn’t it?

Faisal Abid:

Big coincidence. And it was very interesting, because we wanted to launch this in 2019. We officially had left our work and we said, “Okay, after some vacation time, let’s just go build this business.” So, we wanted to launch this 2019, and unfortunately because of the regulations being so archaic, because think about how much innovation is happening in funeral services anyways. And so, because it’s a very, very regulated space, we had some regulatory pushback, which took us all the way to November of 2020 to actually get our license to start operating.

Patrick Daly:

Okay. And right in the middle of COVID, right?

Faisal Abid:

In the middle of COVID. So, COVID hit and that delayed things as well, and that was just like… It’s not that COVID helped or hurt in any way, it was mainly that COVID was a big distraction because obviously funeral services were not trying to get new funeral homes licensed, they were dealing with all the other chaoticness that was happening. So after a lot of regulatory, just talking to people and government officials, we eventually got our license in 2020 November. Now we’re Canada wide. Each province has its own licensing, but because we’ve proven ourselves, we were able to move. So aside from a couple provinces, we’re everywhere in Canada.

Patrick Daly:

And what were the features of the sector that made you realize it was ripe for disruption?

Faisal Abid:

Consumer behavior. I always have this idea that technology could be really cool, and I’ll give you a lot of examples, like VR, crypto. Fantastic tech. I think technology wise are really, really cool. But would a consumer use them daily like they use the iPhone or Android? And I started and I got into crypto, I did a bunch of playing around with VR and stuff, but none of these technologies felt that I could see the average consumer coming home at 5:00 PM after a long day at work, sit down and go, “I’m going to spend time trading crypto or doing something with crypto or doing something with VR.”, or a bunch of other technology.

And so, I was thinking about, well, think about the funeral service space. If someone loses somebody, as it is, it’s just this random event that might happen, or not random, you might see it coming, but it’s such a overwhelming experience. And then what do you have to do? You have to actually go around, drive around, talk to people, and then the funeral homes will sell you on multiple packages. So why can’t there be an all-inclusive concierge experience? And why does there need to be a physical space? Why can’t there be a digital funeral home, an online funeral home just like Uber? Uber doesn’t have any cars, Uber is an online taxi company that’s disrupted the whole space with technology.

And so, that was a thesis we had built this on where the idea was, the idea, I mean the business is currently, is it’s an online funeral home, we interface with all the same cremation crematory partners and industry partners that a normal funeral home would. Right, there’s no difference. The difference is there’s no physical space, so we can operate in any radius in our regulatory environment. We are more than half the cost of the average cremation because there’s no overhead fees. And so, we pass on all those savings of the family.

As well, we’re able to leverage technology on the backend and even a bunch on the front end, but we’ve built this system called Funeral OS. And Funeral OS helps the funeral director, which is responsible for helping the family and make all the arrangements, register with the government, coordinate the entire arrangement. Usually an arrangement might take five to six hours at a typical, normal funeral home, we do it in 10 minutes because we’ve automated that entire pipeline. We’ve automated data collection, analysis, filling out those forms, giving back feedback to the funeral director on where should the deceased, which crematory should the deceased be transferred to. All that is dealt with.

Like for example, if you were to give us a call right now and talk to our funeral director, because of this NLP experience I have, we’ve built this algorithm or rebuilt this system where we can analyze the phone call, extract all the relevant details from the phone call, and then use those details to instantly automate all the forms and everything else needed for the death to be registered. And so, that saves the funeral director like an hour or two right away, where they don’t have to write down all the notes, type in the computer, go to five different websites and do everything, we’ve just automated all that.

So, these are the innovations when we were thinking about, “Well, how do we do this in a more efficient way?” Because then what would be the point if we were just a website? That doesn’t add any value. We would have to build something that can scale and that can scale as we grow, because we’re just not in Ontario, in lower part of Ontario, in one city, like a normal funeral home. We are everywhere in Ontario, everywhere in Nova Scotia. And this helped a lot because of my experience with Google Cloud and AI and MLWare. What I brought to, and Mallory and I thinking, “Well, where our strengths are?” Mallory’s great at operations, understanding the regulation. My strengths are, well, how do we take this very old archaic system and just streamline everything using all these systems I’ve built?

Like one of the companies I consulted for many years ago was Boston Dynamics, and I worked on their SPOT platform. And just understanding how to deal with a lot of just… SPOT is a very powerful robot, but it’s being deployed in very old archaic industries to automate it. That was very interesting as well, where I got to see how they approach that problem solving, where it’s being deployed in the most low tech power plants. There’s no technology, it’s just like all pipes and whatever, but SPOT is being deployed there to able to read dials and detect fires and all sorts of stuff. So, a lot of inspiration and mental models from different places.

Patrick Daly:

What’s the relationship between yourselves and the traditional funeral homes? Is it symbiotic? Is it competitive? Is it a bit of of both?

Faisal Abid:

It’s competitive. So, the way the industry works is, you have the funeral homes and then a lot of funeral homes sometimes do have their own crematorium, but then there’s a lot of trade crematoriums. And trade crematoriums, think of them as just B2B. They work with other funeral homes, they’re like the supplier essentially. If you were like a Starbucks, they’re like the coffee supplier. And so, we work with the crematoriums directly. Sometimes the funeral home does have a crematorium, we would work with the funeral home as well.

We’re not too focused on the competition. What we’re focused on is really how do we give the user the best experience. So, the tools that we built, even after death, what are the tools that we can help the family grieve better, help them memorialize their loved one? So we built a memorial platform that does really well, a lot of families use it. We have a bunch of resources. Funny enough, sometimes we get phone calls from people that have never used Eirene because they found a resource on our site that helped them tremendously. Because we are… And this comes from Mallory and I’s experience and just like, how do we build tech companies? I’ve worked at so many tech companies where it’s like, ICO is super important, writing content and focusing on the consumer. Consumer is like the number one… If we can solve the consumer’s problem, the rest of this stuff is those details. We can build the technology and we can figure out operation, the consumer’s problem has to be solved first.

Patrick Daly:

How does the physical logistics work between the home or the morgue and the crematorium?

Faisal Abid:

Yeah. So, if say someone passes away at a hospital, then you would call us, we would run our whatever. Like you’re talking to the human funeral director, all the systems are automated in the background. So, the funeral director would just approve that, “Yes, this person, John is at this hospital.” A transfer service would be dispatched, and a transfer service would go pick up your loved one, take him to a holding facility. You would fill out a couple more documents, the cremation would happen. And then you would get the remains hand delivered to you within five to seven business days. And so, it’s a very streamlined experience. You technically-

Patrick Daly:

Does it allow for a family ceremony of any sort?

Faisal Abid:

… A lot of families, what we’re finding think it’s more meaningful to have a celebration of life in their own time, in a space that they feel meant a lot to their loved one. So, whether it’s a cottage or maybe it’s just their condo and they just had good memories there with their loved one, and so they invite all their friends. So a lot of families prefer that. Because we’re able to have the remains delivered within five to seven days, they get an urn, they can decide, “Maybe we’ll do it next week or maybe we’ll do it in the summer. We’ll go to a beach in the summer, we’ll have a nice time.” So more families prefer that, we’re finding. Eirene isn’t for everyone. It’s not like Eirene is going to totally disrupt the burial space and those massive events. There’s people obviously that still want that, but Eirene is for everyone else that don’t typically resonate with that type of celebration of life and they want a celebration of life that’s meaningful to them.

Patrick Daly:

And do you have plans to expand to US or internationally, elsewhere?

Faisal Abid:

Yeah, we’re always looking to expand. There’s a bunch of stuff in the background going on right now, so expect something in the very, very short future.

Patrick Daly:

Might we see something this either pond?

Faisal Abid:

We’ve thought about it. Actually we’ve thought about it. Maybe, probably in next year or the year after. Right now we’re really focused on North America, but it’s very likely.

Patrick Daly:

Okay. And your role then as CTO of a company in death care or funeral services, how is that the same or different to being, say, A CTO in a company in another sector such as food or [inaudible 00:19:07] or whatever?

Faisal Abid:

Well, I was CTO at Zoom.ai, the ChatGPT, early version of it. In a lot of ways it’s similar, because you’re still dealing with problems that people have, whether it’s technology problems or human problems that we’re using technology to solve. There’s still problems that we need to predict, we need to understand. So for example, if you look at an AI startup that’s just building like ChatGPT or something, a user comes on, there’s a bug in the process, the bot didn’t behave the way it needed to, we have to fix it. We have to predict where the industry is headed in the next two years and start to kind of build that foundation now. The same thing for funeral services. Where’s the industry headed? What are the issues users are facing in the flow? How can we optimize the flow to make it better for the user?

In fact, I would say it’s a bit more tricky in funeral services because if you’re dealing with a regular tech company, the user’s mental state is very different. They might be curious. They might be like, “Oh, this might solve a problem for me.” When you’re dealing with funeral services, they’re in a very vulnerable state. You cannot put them through multiple loops of filling out 10 forms or, “Oh, you got to press this button, can you please refresh? The browser’s not working.” You can’t have all that. They’re already grieving, you’re not going to have them update your browser or all sorts of crazy stuff. And so, there’s a lot of thought that needs to be put around a lot of workflow mapping, but ultimately the same type of skills apply, I would say, as long as you’re focused on the user, it’s no different than running any other business.

Patrick Daly:

What’s your view in relation to the present and future of AI? So, we have a lot of hype and hysteria around the topic at the moment and confusion between the LLMs and artificial general intelligence and so on.

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Patrick Daly:

So, where are we at and where are we headed with AI?

Faisal Abid:

There’s so much confusion between LLMs and AGI, that I think in a way it’s sort of hurting the space of AI because there’s a lot of people thinking that we’ve suddenly created this tool that can solve all our problems. When the LLMs are not solving any problem, the LLMS are just statistical machines regurgitating the information they fed in and predicting what the next word should be. They’re absolutely fantastic, I use them almost every day to either help with coding or help with data analysis, but there needs to be this sense of business logic that a lot of people aren’t really thinking about and they’re considering LLMs as just like, “I’m going to just ask it and whatever it gives back to me is the right answer.”

So in my opinion, what we will see is this height, kind of reach a saturation point where then there’s some disillusionment of like, “Well, it didn’t really solve much problems.” And then we’re going to see very innovative applications come out. Today I would say the true, the real use case of using LLMs specifically around taking, like supercharging your existing business. I don’t think if you’re building a business which is just like, “Here’s a new LLM.”, not copy it, but Google can innovate on it, OpenAI can innovate on it. There’s no moat, there’s no defensible moat there. If you’re saying, “I’m going to build and a business that is…”, hook them to the open, the ChatGPT API, where all they have to do is, it’s a prompt. Right? All you’ve innovated on is a prompt, there’s no moat there. The moat goes back to what the moat has always been, which is the data you collect.

Like Eirene for example, we’ve been able to, even before the LLM stuff, we were able to build this phone call analysis tool. That’s because we had almost two years of phone calls, phone call data that I could train on. We get three, 400 phone calls a month. So that’s a lot of transcripts that I had, MP3s that I had that I could train the model on to understand what are people saying, and how the conversations are going. But if all I did was just hook up to an open API wrapper, then what’s stopping anyone else doing it? And on top of that, it won’t even work properly because they’re not trained onto listen to funeral services phone calls.

Patrick Daly:

What way are you using it within your business, as much as you can [inaudible 00:24:39]?

Faisal Abid:

Yeah, so there’s a lot of behind the scenes LLMs that we use. I don’t know if I can totally get into it, because a lot of it is just our secret sauce. But I would say one good example that we use externally, is we have an obituary generator and a memorial generator, where a lot of families kind of get stuck because writing is hard. How you sit there and write someone’s entire life in three paragraphs. And so, we’ve built an open, like a obituary generator where someone can come on, enter in a lot of details about their loved one, and you get a template to start working with. That’s not a business on its own. That’s not necessarily innovative in the sense that we didn’t have to train it on anything, but that is something that I can speak to, but a lot of families still find very useful.

But if it was just on any random website, families wouldn’t use that, because why would they? They’re not going to start Googling obituary writer. Because it’s part of the entire service for Eirene, families go through the service and then they go, “Well, I’m creating a memorial right now. Oh, you have a memorial generator. Great, I’ll use it.” So it’s almost like a tiny feature that; A, I can speak about, but families use it a lot.

Patrick Daly:

This is one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve had about the application of technology. But as we come into the last few minutes, maybe I’ll just ask you a little bit about your own journey as a professional and as an entrepreneur.

Faisal Abid:

Iterating very fast. Like I talked about, the first business that I did, I could have launched it within two months, even a month, but I launched it almost a year and a half later, because I kept thinking about, “Well, what about this cool feature? What about that cool feature?”

Patrick Daly:

Yeah. And then to wrap then, are you reading or listening to anything lately that is inspiring that you’d recommend to listeners?

Faisal Abid:

Not inspiring, but I have a great book. I mean, unless you’re inspired to be a match fixer. So this is a very cool book called The Fix. I recently was at a conference where the author presented, his name is Declan Hill. And the presentation was great, I haven’t started reading the book yet, but I sat through this hour long presentation where I was able to get the book. Fantastic book that I think is very interesting to learn about how match fixing works in the world of sports and how people are just behaving there.

But aside from that, the other book that I really like that is actually helping in the business context, I have it right here. It’s called Scaling People. And so as Eirene grows… It’s called Scaling People by Claire Johnson. As Eirene grows, we’ve grown from a team of two people to almost 20 people now. Scaling People has been a great read. It’s almost like you don’t have to read it start to bottom, you can just jump to a chapter and look at it. It’s great to see how to manage people, because the hardest part about running a business, aside from getting the customers right, customers problem solved, is solving your team’s problems and people problems are super hard.

Patrick Daly:

Excellent. So that’s the Fix by Declan Hill and Scaling People by Claire Johnson.

Faisal Abid:

Yeah.

Patrick Daly:

So, many thanks Faisal for being here with us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure and fascinating to chat with you today.

Faisal Abid:

Thank you.

Patrick Daly:

Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in again. And be aware that if you enjoyed this episode, you can find a full series of over 130 episodes of Interlinks on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Acast, and other major podcast platforms. So until next time, keep well and stay safe.