Aaron Greenberg on Biographies, AI, and Why Real Stories Matter More Than Ever

Aaron Greenberg, Founder, Biograph

Aaron Greenberg is the founder of Biograph, a storytelling company that works with families and multigenerational businesses to represent their history, identity, values, and legacy. Speaking with Aaron, I quickly learned the product is something far more than a beautiful book.

He Was Making Books as a Kid (Literally)

Aaron didn't wake up one day and decide to become a writer. He always was one.

In kindergarten and first grade, his school taught "the art of bookmaking." He still has some of those early titles in his closet.

He laughed telling me, "My classics were like the first time my dad gave me pop… and then you flip to the back and it says, 'Aaron Greenberg is seven years old. He's the author of 10 books… including his most recent, How I Fell Down the Front Steps.'"

It's funny. But it's also foreshadowing.

This wasn't a hobby. It was wiring.

Soon he was borrowing books from his mom's nightstand — Grisham, Baldacci, detective thrillers. Eventually, he fell hard for Shakespeare, not the most typical childhood storyline, but a telling one.

With Shakespeare, something clicked. "These truths that I knew all along suddenly had language," Aaron told me. "And I loved it."

The PhD Setback

Three years into his PhD, Aaron hit a major setback on a qualifying exam. He nearly walked away.

What saved him was advice from an advisor: Think back to why you started.

Aaron reflected: "If you can stay in touch with that younger self who set out to do something, almost any obstacle thrown your way won't stand a chance."

That’s good old fashion resilience and determination.

Writing Isn’t a Solo Sport

One of the most interesting parts of Aaron's journey is how his view of writing evolved.

He used to believe in the "lone genius" myth — the isolated author, divinely inspired, hammering out brilliance in solitude.

Over time, he came to see the opposite.

"Writing is really a collective act," he said. "It's embedded in our environments. It's tangled up in social relationships and traditions."

That philosophy shapes Biograph at every level. "We don't write your story and hand it back to you. We help you uncover it, shape it, and use it to strengthen relationships and create continuity."

That's a meaningful difference — and it's what separates Biograph's work from a typical memoir-writing service.

When Did It Become a Business?

I asked the question many writers quietly avoid: When did you realize storytelling wasn't just something you loved, but something you could build a business around?

Aaron's answer was direct. "When people started paying me to do it, I realized it had value beyond the intrinsic value it gave me."

He admitted he'd bought into a common misconception, that the humanities live on one side of some invisible divide, and serious business and entrepreneurship live on the other. But as people began seeking him out, that myth dissolved. The skills were real. The concept had merit. Biograph started to take shape.

The Moment It Became a Family Business

Here's the part I loved most.

Aaron's younger brother AJ — engineer, banker, practical, an Excel wizard — left his steady job to help build Biograph.

"That's when it became real," Aaron told me. "AJ would never make a decision based on impulse or emotion. He did the math."

The partnership works because they're different. "AJ can work as much magic with a CRM or an InDesign layout as I can with language."

Inspiration and story on one side. Thoughtful engineering and human design on the other. That combination can build almost anything.

Creating in the Age of AI

Beyond crafting enduring works for clients, Aaron invests in the future by teaching — and increasingly, that means grappling with AI alongside his students at the School of the Art Institute and Lake Forest College.

He's not anti-tool. Far from it. Aaron is direct about where AI genuinely earns its place: synthesizing large volumes of material, surfacing patterns across sources, organizing sprawling research, catching errors, clarifying structure. In a workflow built around rigorous interviewing and long-form writing, those are real contributions.

But he's equally precise about where AI falls short, and where its overuse quietly costs something.

"Every time you offload something you should be thinking about to a large language model, you're accumulating cognitive debt. And one day it will come due."

That line stuck with me.

For Aaron, the risk isn't that AI writes badly. The risk is that it writes plausibly — producing something that sounds like a voice without actually being one. In a white-glove service where craftsmanship is the value, that distinction is everything. No algorithm can do the work of sitting with someone for hours, earning their trust, and finding the thread that makes their story feel alive. That requires a human presence, and a human judgment.

So his guidance to students is practical: AI can shoulder some of the mechanical load, but even that comes with a caveat. Sometimes the path to a genuine insight or a creative breakthrough runs through the labor, not around it.

The friction of drafting, the struggle to find the right word, the slow accretion of a paragraph, these aren't inefficiencies to be optimized away. They're often where the thinking happens.

Aaron wants his students to cultivate and preserve their agency and empathy; the quality of attention that craftsmanship demands, and the relationships that make any of it meaningful in the first place. Those aren't features an AI can approximate. They're the work.

Clients are Pleasantly Surprised

Families often come to Biograph because they feel the generational gap. Something is slipping, stories half-remembered, history never properly recorded, values assumed rather than expressed.

Aaron put it simply: "Stories are our best shot at bringing people together across generations."

What families don't anticipate is what happens during the process itself. Present-day communication improves. Relationships strengthen. Values become clearer. Future planning gets easier. The book or film is the artifact, but the process is often the real gift.

“Clients often didn’t realize how much they needed our service until they experienced it for themselves,” Aaron said.

Biograph's work extends beyond families to businesses with founding stories worth capturing, institutions, foundations, and cultural organizations — any place where memory, identity, and continuity matter.

Why I’m Rooting for Biograph

Relationships drive everything, fundraising, leadership, culture, families, boards, teams. And stories are the connective tissue.

Biograph isn't just preserving memories. It's making sure the next generation inherits more than financial assets. It's ensuring that the people who built something — a family, a company, a community — aren't reduced to a name on a wall or a date in a spreadsheet.

Between phones, social media, and AI, the world feels increasingly thin and fast. It's genuinely refreshing to see people like Aaron and AJ slowing things down, and helping families return to what matters.

To learn more about Biograph, visit biographbook.com.

________________________________________________________________________

I help nonprofits raise more money through education, coaching, and strategic planning. I also lead high-impact professional development, coaching programs, and retreats for companies of all sizes. If you’re ready to strengthen your fundraising strategy, turn board members into advocates, or build a comprehensive legacy giving program, let’s talk.