Our story
Twenty months of goodwill, then a calendar entry.
The history of one family's practice, with the dates and the quotations — and an honest account of what our own record can and cannot show.
Who we are
Scherer-Frailey Ventures is four self-employed adults in one extended family. Ed and Julia are brother and sister. Derek and Jason are Julia's sons. We live in four separate households and work in four fields with almost nothing to do with each other: software and tooling, music teaching, creative media and visual art, and software consulting.
None of us has ever been anyone else's employee, client, or investor. Whatever holds this together, it is not commercial interest.
2020
The agreement
On 11 September 2020, Derek posted a proposal to the family group chat. He was explicit that the idea was Julia's — “Mom has an idea for how to make progress, especially in areas outside of a project owner's competency.” The plan was that each of us would operate as a solo entrepreneur on our own work and as a contractor for the others.
The sentence that turned out to matter was the one that refused to specify anything:
“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 — 11 September 2020
Two things in that first day's exchange are worth noting, because both took us years to recognize we already had. Ed listed the kinds of help we were offering each other — “accountability holding … sanity checks (bouncing ideas off others) … ‘big picture’ reviews … enthusiasm building” — which is very close to the list we would write down formally four and a half years later. And step three of Derek's proposal read “Test runs. Start cranking out some practice projects — stuff to throw away or stuff to prototype real ideas.” That is the Demo Day, two years early.
Derek also noted that the group chat was probably insufficient and floated better tools. That question stayed open for nearly two years, and it is the first evidence for something we now believe firmly: tooling is not the thing that starts a practice.
2020 – 2022
Twenty months in which almost nothing repeated
Everyone was in. Everyone meant it. And for nearly two years, the agreement produced no recurring practice at all.
We talked often — links, drafts, encouragement through some genuinely hard stretches, and a good deal of substantive help. But it was mostly one to one, each of us was still building alone, and there was no occasion that obliged anybody to show up. The clearest signal of the whole period is a message from June 2021: “May want a pow wow soon, like the life plan workshops we did in the past.” An intention, not a schedule.
Our own archive is nearly empty for that stretch — 43 messages in the rest of 2020, and 26 in the whole of 2021.
It would be easy, and wrong, to read that as “nothing happened.” A great deal happened. It happened in conversations that left no trace, because nothing in that period required anyone to produce anything.
That distinction turned out to be one of the more useful things we have worked out about ourselves, and it now shapes how we read any group's history, including our own: a practice that obliges no artifact leaves no record — which is not the same as leaving no effect.
Summer 2022
Eleven weeks in which everything structural happened
On 23 May 2022, Derek proposed an agenda and a standing slot. Three items: a minute or two each around the room with a status; open discussion; and “tools and processes — those things that aren't going into the business or the product, but rather stuff you use on the business or product.” Ed suggested breaking the third item out when it was of narrow interest, which is the first time we are on record tuning our own meeting.
Members started posting weekly goal lists to the group that same day. The first video call links appear a week later.
The name arrived without ceremony. On 6 June somebody simply wrote “Heartbeat meeting today. 10:30am? 11am?” Nobody proposed it; it just started being used.
On 27 June, Julia proposed two things in one message. The first was that we practice our elevator pitches in the meeting — that became agenda item one and has stayed there ever since. The second was that we “get together at our house on August 1 for a ‘demo day’ during which we demonstrate whatever we believe to be most significant about the work we're currently engaged in.” Ed immediately raised inviting outsiders eventually; Julia argued for keeping it internal first, and that view held.
The first Demo Day was actually held on 8 August, at Ed and Helen's house, a week later than planned — Derek was sick. It is a small detail and we keep it because it is true, and because the thing that mattered was that it was moved rather than dropped. Earlier that summer the weekly meeting had already been shifted to avoid a holiday rather than skipped. That norm — the slot moves, the slot does not vanish — is older than almost everything else here.
- 11 Sept 2020
The founding message. Julia's idea, posted by Derek. An agreement to be available. No schedule.
- 2020–2022
Informal. Frequent conversation, mostly one to one, almost entirely unrecorded. All four of us still building alone.
- 23 May 2022
An agenda and a standing weekly slot, proposed by Derek. The first thing that repeats.
- 6 June 2022
It gets a name. “Heartbeat,” used casually and never formally adopted.
- 27 June 2022
Julia proposes elevator pitches and a Demo Day in a single message.
- 8 Aug 2022
The first Demo Day, a week late because Derek was sick. Everyone shows something rather than describing it.
- 9 Aug 2022
We finally set up proper tooling — the day after the first Demo Day, and twenty-three months after the founding.
- Feb 2025
A charter, written retroactively, four and a half years in. Never formally ratified.
- Aug 2026
The pattern gets separated from us and named Kinvergence, so that another family could use it.
Since
What has changed, and what has not
None of it was designed. It accumulated. The agenda has been revised many times, the meeting has been shortened and lengthened, and the tools underneath it have been chosen, configured, argued about and replaced more than once.
The elevator pitch alone took years to settle. Jason proposed compressing it further — “one sentence pitch — even a sentence fragment: like movie posters.” Ed formalized a two-step version a few months later. Derek invented a variant for Jason specifically, a fast “raid pitch” for a sudden influx of people who had no idea who he was. By 2025 it had become “30-second pitches” plus a set of prepared answers to quick questions.
We also now choose one thing to work on about ourselves each year. In 2025 the theme was “No Excuses!”, adopted after we noticed each other arriving at Demo Day unprepared and explaining why. For 2026 it is “Align!” — as Julia put it in August, “we need to bring our individual and group identities into alignment.”
What has not changed is that it repeats.
We checked that rather than trusting our memory. Going back through four years of our own message archive week by week, the weekly call shows activity in the large majority of weeks from August 2022 onward, and the longest gap we ever had was three weeks. Most of the apparent single-week gaps turn out to be Demo Day weeks — the monthly gathering takes the same slot and stands in for that week's call rather than adding to it.
We had asserted this in writing for years before anyone counted. When we finally counted, it held. Two other things we had asserted did not, and we corrected them.
The record
What we got wrong about ourselves
We have published incorrect claims about our own history twice. Both were confident, both were plausible, and neither had been checked.
- “Held continuously since roughly 2021.” The archive puts the standing agenda and the fixed slot in May 2022. We were a year out.
- “Five years of practice.” The agreement is six years old. The practice is four. Those are different things, and conflating them flattered us.
- Cumulative counts. Figures like “285+ meetings” circulated in our own drafts and did not survive checking. We no longer use any count that cannot be re-derived from a source, which is why this page gives dated events instead.
Everything on this page is drawn from our own message archives, going back unbroken to the founding day. Where something is recollection rather than record, we say so. We keep the corrections rather than quietly editing the originals, because how a group gets its own history wrong is more instructive than the history.
One family is not evidence.
This is the entire basis for everything else on this site. It is one family, related to each other, in one city, over four years. We cannot tell from the inside how much of it was the method and how much was just us.
If you have a family and an hour a week, you are in a position to find that out — and to tell us we are wrong.
Start with one meeting