Four relatives agreed to help each other build things. It took almost two years to find a shape that stuck.
We talked constantly the whole time — informally, one to one, still building alone. What finally worked was smaller than any of that: an agenda, and a repeating slot on the calendar. We have met almost every week since. This is our family, and we would like to know whether any of it works for a family other than ours.
Somebody probably sent you here. That is the intended way to arrive, and it is why this page is short.
One
What we actually did
We are Scherer-Frailey Ventures: Ed and Julia, who are brother and sister, and Julia's two sons, Derek and Jason. Four self-employed adults, four households, four fields with nothing to do with each other — software and tooling, music teaching, creative media and visual art, and software consulting.
In September 2020 Derek wrote to the rest of us with an idea of Julia's: that we should help each other more deliberately. The message was modest to the point of vague, on purpose.
“The exact form of collaboration is not important — what's important is forming an agreement to be available, so that the solo entrepreneur is less constrained and more enabled to plan.”
Derek, in the founding message — 11 September 2020
We were all in. We all meant it. And for nearly two years it stayed exactly that informal.
- Sept 2020
An agreement, and no schedule. Nothing goes on a calendar.
- May 2022
An agenda and a standing weekly slot. The first thing that repeats.
- Since
Almost every week. In person roughly monthly. Still being revised.
The twenty months are the part worth taking away. Four willing people, a good idea, and a standing offer of help produced a lot of goodwill and almost nothing that repeated. None of us became more committed in May 2022. Somebody wrote down an agenda and put a recurring appointment on the calendar, and that was the whole difference.
“I hate meetings. but I look forward to FV meetings. It's because I'm perfectly comfortable hanging out, saying anything. no stress about how people will judge me.”
Derek, 22 June 2026. FV — Family Ventures — is what we called ourselves then.
Two
What we hope this becomes
The people best positioned to help each other are very often already related — and nothing brings them together on purpose. Kinvergence is a way of doing it on purpose, kept as small as it can be and still work.
We are not trying to grow it, and we are not trying to be the ones who help. If a family runs this and never tells us, that is a success. If a family ignores all of it and simply starts calling each other every week, that is also a success. These are methods, and methods are not the kind of thing anyone owns.
What we need is one family, other than ours, willing to try it.
What it will not become
- Not a course or a program. Anything that can be finished is not this.
- Not a consultancy. The moment running someone else's group is a service we sell, it stops being something a family does for itself.
- Not a movement with a leader. Ed wrote most of it down. That is authorship, not authority.
- Not an app or a platform. A tool would quietly replace the practice, and the practice is the whole thing.
- Not a vocabulary. Somebody proposed inventing terms for all of it. Derek's objection carried: it is a meeting, and a meeting already has a name.
- Not a thing that outgrows its own advice. We tell an adopting family to skip the name, the logo, and the website, because all three feel like starting and are a reliable way of not starting. We have already broken that rule once.
The longer version of this was written as a proposal to the four of us rather than as an announcement, and we have not agreed it yet.
Three
Enough to start
Of the things we do, one is the engine, and it is the one a family can start next week. It costs an hour. It needs two or three relatives who are each building something of their own.
We call it the Heartbeat, because that is what it does — a regular pulse whose absence would be noticed. Same slot every week. Video. Everyone speaks, in turn, every time.
- Every week The Heartbeat, on a call
- Every month Demo Day, in one room
- Continuously Being available to each other
- Who you are and what you are working on, in a sentence. As you would say it to a stranger. It sounds like a warm-up. It is not — it is where you hear your own description out loud and notice it stopped being true months ago.
- What you got done, what is next, what you learned — and what you changed about how you work. That last one is the first thing groups drop and the one most worth keeping.
- What the next in-person gathering is for. Two minutes a week, and a month of separate work acquires a shared shape.
- Open discussion. No agenda. This is where the actual helping gets arranged, which is why it is not optional.
Skip, for now
Skip the name, the logo, the website, the legal entity, and the shared tools. Every one of them feels like starting. Every one of them is a way of not starting.
We are the evidence. We set up nothing purpose-built until after the practice was already working — we used a group chat we already had. Our tools followed the rhythm. They never led it.
Four
An honest ask
The best thing you could do with this page is close it and put a call on the calendar.
You do not need us for any of it. There is nothing to join, nothing to sign, no community waiting on the other side, and nobody keeping track. We would rather say that plainly than put a button here that nobody answers.
But there is one thing we want.
We are looking for one more family. Not to approve of this — to try it for a few months and then tell us what we got wrong. That is worth more to us than agreement, because all of this generalizes from a single family, and we cannot tell from the inside how much was the framework and how much was just us. A second family would find that out almost immediately.
If any of that sounds like your family: tell the person who sent you here that you would like to talk. That is not a placeholder for a form — it is how this works, and it is how the four of us started. One conversation, with somebody you already know.