Announcing LettuceTalk, the First Impact Moonshot 🌕

Building joy into the conversations we avoid most with our aging parents

Dear Moonshotters,

Michelle here.

Today, I’m proud to announce LettuceTalk, the first Impact Moonshot. But first, let me tell you its story.

I was raised by my mom in Koreatown, Los Angeles. Since I was small, the two of us have talked across a language barrier — her Korean, my English, and our occasional chirps of Konglish. In our home, I learned to listen in Korean, speak in English, and translate continuously. This worked for everyday conversation, but as my mom grew older and faced health scares, I froze when it came to critical questions about her care. And the longer I put it off, the more I feared that one day, I’d be too late.

Talking about aging, caregiving, and death with the people we love most — it’s heartbreakingly difficult. With a language and cultural barrier, this became impossible. I didn't even know the Korean word for “retirement” — how was I supposed to start the most vulnerable conversation of my life when I literally didn’t have the words?

So I built LettuceTalk, multilingual conversation cards to open the caregiving discussions we avoid most with the people we love most.

When I brought LettuceTalk to my family, my mom, brother, and I talked for three hours. About dying. And we laughed.

My mom told me stories I’d never heard about her values and care wishes. I opened up about my fears taking on the brunt of her care. My brother asked how he could better support us when he lived abroad. We cried, but we also discovered something impossible: joy and clarity inside a conversation about life’s darkest topic — death.

I soon learned that I wasn’t alone. Millions of us put off life’s most important conversations until it’s too late. Daunted not only by the vulnerability they require, but also the immense divide we carry between generations, cultures, language, and emotional resilience with our parents.

So I shared LettuceTalk with more families navigating similar challenges, and the response blew me away.

One early user, Alyssa, used LettuceTalk with her Taiwanese dad, who’d had a sudden stroke and lost his ability to speak. His first language, Mandarin, came back to him before the others, and LettuceTalk helped him recover his ability to communicate with her and express his care wishes during a severe health emergency.

A middle-aged cashier choked up as he flipped through the cards, wishing he had LettuceTalk just a few years earlier — he'd missed his chance to have these conversations with his Filipino mom before she passed. Doctors told me about immigrant patients who show up alone to devastating medical news, with no one to translate or walk through their care needs at home.

And that’s when I knew I’d built something real. Deeper than product-market fit, ROI, and any other traditional success metric I’d found thus far.

It’s what I had spent this last decade searching for across the world’s innovation ecosystems — building technology that moves hearts. Crafting products that reveal joy in life’s darkest moments, and make deeply human problems actionable.

The revelation? Even death conversations contain joy. They always did. We just needed a way to find it.

LettuceTalk gives you permission to start life’s hardest conversations with the people you love most. It turned years of fear and avoidance in my family into love and clarity, and I hope it can help you do the same.

1 of 50 cards in LettuceTalk’s standard deck.

LettuceTalk is available to order now at lettucetalk.imoonshots.com. Caregiving conversation cards designed to help families bridge language, culture, and generational divides when discussing care. If you’ve ever struggled to talk to your parents about their care, I see you, and I made this for you.

I also have a request: If you know anyone facing caregiving challenges or struggling to talk with their parents about care, please share LettuceTalk with them. These conversations can't wait, and I need your help to reach them.

And for Impact Moonshots newsletter subscribers, use code MOONSHOT at checkout for 15% off your order as a thank you for your early support. If you’re ordering multiple decks as gifts for caregivers in your life, use the code CAREGIFT25 to take 25% off 2 or more decks.

This is the first Impact Moonshot, building joy where no one expects it.

Our journey together is just beginning.

With love,

Michelle

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