The Library
The app has a librarian; this is the shelf behind it. Twelve books — on family narrative, ritual, habits, moments, and what technology owes the people who use it — and the one thing we took from each.
Bruce Feiler
Feiler surfaces a finding that quietly runs underneath everything Haklo does: children who know their family’s story — the highs, the hard parts, and how the family came through — are measurably more resilient. Not because of the facts, but because of the telling. The weekly gathering exists so the telling happens, and the memoir exists so it isn’t lost.
Casper ter Kuile
Ter Kuile’s argument is that a ritual is not one more thing to do — it’s the container that lets a good thing repeat without depending on anyone’s willpower. Most families don’t lack love; they lack a structure that makes returning to each other normal. Haklo is that structure, and deliberately nothing more. The ritual is the product. The app is furniture.
Michelle Icard
Icard shows that the hardest conversations with tweens and teens go better when someone hands you a structure — an opening line, a shape, a way in — so the talk actually happens instead of waiting for a perfect moment that never comes. That’s the same bet Haklo makes about the family meeting itself, and her chapter on talking about technology as a family is the one we’d put in every parent’s hands.
John Gottman
Gottman spent decades watching couples and found that relationships live or die on small bids for connection — and whether the other person turns toward them. A weekly check-in is a standing appointment for turning toward each other. The “Heard” moment in a gathering is a bid, set gently in front of the person it was meant for, with a whole table there to witness it.
Esther Perel
Perel’s deeper lesson is that closeness isn’t ambient — it’s designed, and it needs deliberate space to breathe. We borrowed her posture for the technology itself: at a Haklo gathering, the phone is a guest at the table, not the host. It’s honest about what it’s doing, it recedes when the family is talking, and it never takes a turn.
BJ Fogg
Fogg’s model says a behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt line up — and that the reliable lever is ability. Make the thing tiny. That’s why the first gathering is fifteen minutes, one phone, three questions we hand you, no prep. A family meeting small enough to actually start is worth ten ambitious ones that never happen.
Chip Heath & Dan Heath
The Heaths show that we remember peaks and endings, and that defining moments can be built on purpose. Haklo is shaped around a few of them — the weekly reveal of a secret kindness, the close of a gathering, and once a year, a family opening a cloth-bound book of their own words. We try not to spend those moments cheaply, and we try not to claim them before they’re real.
Richard Rumelt
Rumelt insists that strategy starts with diagnosis — naming the actual constraint before prescribing anything. It’s how we build: find the one thing that’s truly binding, fix that, and resist the temptation to do six impressive things instead. It’s also how the coaching works between gatherings — understand what’s actually in the way of the next one, then help with exactly that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb’s via negativa — the idea that what you refuse to do matters more than what you add — is Haklo’s spine. No ads. No selling your family’s words. No training AI on them. No AI voice at the table. Every one of those refusals removes a way the product could quietly betray you, and together they matter more than any feature we could ship.
Clayton Christensen
Christensen’s jobs-to-be-done lens asks what a product is hired to do. Nobody hires Haklo for its screens. Families hire it to make a ritual happen that they’ve wanted for years and haven’t started — and to hold what that ritual produces. Every feature gets measured against that job, and the ones that serve the app instead of the ritual don’t ship.
Thomas Sowell
Sowell’s point is that knowledge is distributed — the people closest to a decision hold what no central system can. A family knows things about itself that no model ever will. So Haklo’s AI never decides; it proposes, and the family confirms. That gate isn’t a legal formality. It’s an admission about where the knowledge actually lives.
Shoshana Zuboff
Zuboff names the line that Haklo is built on one side of: the difference between what people author for themselves and what is extracted from them. Your family’s record is authored — written by you, kept for you, funded by a subscription instead of your data. The annual memoir ends with a colophon saying no machine curated your year. That sentence is the whole architecture, printed.
None of these authors are affiliated with Haklo. We just read them, and it shows.