Lux Narayan has spent two million views' worth of attention on one question: what makes a life legible to other people. That's his TED talk, on what obituaries reveal about living well. It's also his storytelling method: find the story before you tell it.

He wrote Name, Place, Animal, Thing, a fable about hope and living your best life, and an Amazon bestseller for one glorious day. He founded StreamAlive after two years of watching live audiences get ignored — it's now Zoom's top-rated education and AI app. Before that he co-founded Unmetric, acquired by Cision. He does stand-up when they let him.

His grandfather started the first public speaking school in Madras in the early 1970s. His uncle still runs it. Three generations, one obsession: getting a room to say something true, out loud.