What Is Air? Tell Us About Your Product And Overall Mission.

Air is a cloud collaboration tool for creative minds that fundamentally changes the way teams approach visual work. Our product makes collaboration easier, and eliminates the need to move assets to and from the cloud.

The low down is - traditional cloud storage was built in essence for storage, not creativity or ease of use. This positions it poorly to support modern workflows and rapid transitions to remote work, and significantly hinders the 700 million creative minds who work with visual content every day. Our goal at Air is to give teams [and individuals] time and space back for what matters most - their creativity. Our workspace makes collaboration easier and more efficient by eliminating the need to move assets to and from the cloud, instead allowing teams to comment, share and discuss visual work directly on the cloud. Plus, we’ve automated many of the menial tasks (image search, organization, tagging, etc) that take up countless hours, giving time back to our end users.

What Is Your Background? What Led You To Starting Your Own Company, And How Did You Choose This Space?

We met in college and have been close friends for years. Prior to Air, we were both working at the intersection of media and technology, and were similarly frustrated by the creative limitations of collaboration on visual assets. In short, content was becoming increasingly important across industries, but teams didn't have the right tools to work with content effectively. It was clear to both of us that there was an opportunity to solve this technical problem, and support new and increasing important visual workflows. We built Air with the mindset that you should be able to do more with your content than just store it in the cloud.

What Was The Inspiration Behind The Company Name?

What better way to visualize “the cloud” than with “Air”, an essential element, metaphor for endless potential, source that fuels the fire…

In actuality, we don’t have a great inspiration story. I (Shane) always have a million great name ideas that have no purpose or project yet attached. We knew we wanted to launch a business together, so I came to Tyler with the name and the idea flowed from there.

What Was The Fundraising Process Like For You? Tell Us About Your Investors And What You Use The Money You’ve Raised For.

We launched Air in March and immediately had to conduct our Series A round remotely with just four months of runway to raise capital. It was a really challenging process for the team - it took us +40 days of nonstop work to arrive at a term sheet and more than 100 digital meetings with +50 firms. We ultimately raised $12M from leading investors including Tiger Global, Slack Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and more, and resolve is now an integral part of our story. We are excited to further expand the business and are using this capital for talent acquisition, technological innovation and to support customer expansion and engagement.

It Seems As If Every Day Another SaaS Company Springs Up Aiming To Get The Attention Of Decision Makers At Enterprises Of All Sizes. What Are Some Of The Strategies You Find Work Best When It Comes To Marketing And Pitching Air To Enterprises?

Shane Hegde: The very core of our business is meant to solve a problem. We have a unique approach to investor and customer conversations alike - we set out with every conversation to help diagnose workflow issues that may be blocking the individual or their teams from performing to their best potential. If our platform offers a solution, then we know the product is on a good track. If not, we always ask for feedback so that we can test new features to better meet a wide range of user needs. The day we stop listening to our customers and potential users is the day our product loses its competitive edge - we can’t be the platform that fundamentally changes how teams approach visual work without understanding what creatives need from it.

Tyler Strand: Shane and I have also always prided ourselves in being very anti-tech. While we’re selling a technical product, we deliberately market the product and the brand in a more familiar and personable way. A lot about sales is personalizing based on your audience, so when demoing a workspace we often scrape previous content from that brand’s Instagram to plug in rather than stock photos. This is especially impactful to help potential users fully visualize how they can interact with our platform to fit their needs.

Shane Hegde: Absolutely. Every company needs a human voice in what they do, and we’ve found that it resonates better to speak in granular (sometimes punny) conversation rather than superfluous enterprise industry terms.

Can You Tell Us About Some Of Your Numbers? How Has Growth Been Since Your Launch?

Since launching in March 2020, we’ve grown to support thousands of users at more than 200 companies, ranging from mom-and-pop shops to household names like Clorox, The Infatuation, NBA Players Association and Duke Basketball. Our customer retention rate sits just above 60%, which is great when the top 10% of enterprise software sees roughly 48%. Our sales strategy is scrappy and product-led (which means word of mouth is really our bread and butter), so we’re excited to keep spreading the word and onboarding as many creatives as possible.

As Co-Founders, How Do You Guys Complement Each Other In Terms Of Skill Sets and Strengths?

Shane Hegde: Tyler and I complement each other, but Tyler’s definitely the team’s fan favorite. You could describe us as yin and yang, Bonnie and Clyde, good cop and bad cop …

Tyler Strand: Yeah, Shane is definitely the ideas guy between us - he is always five years ahead of where we are all the time. It’s a helpful push and pull because he’s always asking how we can dream bigger and get there faster, while I’m the one chasing behind to make sure we can make some of those goals a reality. Not to play into the “air / space” metaphor too much, but if Shane’s shooting for the stars, I’m pushing the team to land us on the moon!

What Have Been Both Your Favorite And Least-liked Parts Of Your Entrepreneurial Journey? What Have Been Your Most Challenging And Most Exciting Moments For You And The Company?

Shane Hegde: Tyler and I always had a really clear thesis with the business: after spending years working with tremendous amounts of content on a daily basis and feeling constrained by inefficiencies of existing infrastructure, we knew there had to be a better way to manage media in the cloud. That said, from the beginning of our journey with Air we agreed that collaborating with our customers early on was a necessary and vital step in creating products that answered traditional pain points organizations faced. This process has made our core business a lot stronger and we feel confident really running with this thesis.

Tyler Strand: To build off that, many people assume that finding product market fit means iterating on the product. Really, we iterated on the market. Our core product hasn’t changed that drastically since the beginning, but we spent time really refining the product to fit Air’s ideal end user, creatives. The most exciting moments of our journey have come when we finally shared the product with the world. It’s a bit nerve-wracking at first since you don’t know whether people will even care about it. But, the satisfaction of pushing the product out beyond the walls of the office and seeing how people interact with it makes all the difference. We’d be remiss not to mention our stellar team, and the fun we’ve had developing the product and brand (despite long nights).

Anything Exciting That Will Be Launching Soon?

This month we launched a first-of-its-kind Creator Program, offering a select group of freelancers lifetime access to Air’s Pro Plan in exchange for sharing insights to inform its product roadmap. This builds on the company’s philosophy of developing long-term, symbiotic customer relationships - previously driven by clients like Hydrow and The Dodo whose insights directly led to the creation of Air’s public boards and permissions.

How Do You Think Your Industry Will Change Post-COVID?

Shane Hegde: We’ve noticed that human interaction has become really, really important through this period and we’re seeing that play out from a team perspective. Unique office makeups and distributed teams are here to stay, and collaboration tools are going to help support those team and visual work capabilities. But all in all, they aren’t everything and don’t replace in-person connections, and I do really think we’ll go back to working together in-person again, just with more flexibility from a schedule perspective.

Tyler Strand: The pandemic changed our assumptions around how intrinsic being in-person is as a company versus being virtual and forced us to get used to working in a distributed way. What hasn’t changed is the fact that the world continues to need media to operate, and individuals use the same tools and services to follow companies, brands and others. In fact, the need for content work and streamlined collaboration seems to have been heightened. The functions of Air have been really useful to meet these trends head on, and we’re hoping to continue to prove effective for teams even when working in-person does resume.

What Are Your Daily Routines? Walk Us Through Your Typical Workday Schedule.

Shane Hegde: I'm usually up before 7AM and like to be working before 8AM. For me, the morning is the best time to get things done. I usually like to talk to Tyler before the team gets in, but he has learned to simply ignore my Slack messages at this point. My girlfriend makes fun of me because I call accidentally skipping lunch "intermittent fasting" and by afternoon I'm dreaming of some athletic activity I will likely not complete that evening. Dinners are my continued search for the best pad thai the world offers and by evening I've likely tried to call Tyler to see if he'll talk to me yet. Once all fails I'm committed to calling his wife Amanda before bed (who will also always ignore me while completing her aforementioned crossword).

Tyler Strand: I've found that waking up early is the only way to get any individual work done before the chaos of the day kicks in. I usually start the day with a cup of coffee while listening to "The Daily", and I'm at my desk by about 8am. If I'm lucky, I can sneak in an hour or two of uninterrupted time to think, read, and write before my meetings pick up for the day. By 6pm or so, things are usually winding down. I'll usually do some exercise, grab dinner, and sign back on for an hour or so to respond to emails or prep for tomorrow. I'm typically in bed (lately doing the NY Times crossword puzzle) by about 11:00pm.

What Are The Top Three Most Important Skills A Modern Day Entrepreneur Needs In Order To Be Successful? What Advice Do You Have For Entrepreneurs Who Are Just Starting Out?

Shane Hegde: We mentioned this earlier, but resolve is super important. A strength of Tyler’s that has fortunately spread across our team at Air is his ability to remain even-keeled through adversity and stressful situations. There are going to be questions that are really hard to solve, but you have to trust that you’ll work through them as best you can and figure them out.

Tyler Strand: Right, it also takes a healthy blend of being strategic and a little irrational. You have to be open to hearing (sometimes constant) feedback from the market or investors, but also know when to trust your gut and ignore it. When you’re developing a product or a business, it won’t always seem like it’s working, but you have to push through and keep problem-solving regardless of the ups and downs.

Tell Us About A Moment Or Time Period That Either Made You Laugh Or Taught You An Important Lesson.

Shane Hegde: Tyler and I have had some harrowing days trying to get Air off the ground, and some of the earliest were my favorite. Term Sheet through the Flood: https://air.inc/a/HJNNOsAKf. On the linked video our office had flooded after a torrential downpour in Brooklyn, and we were fighting with investors to get some additional cash in the bank so that we could make payroll the next week. Looking back I think Tyler and I learned how to keep cool through the chaos during days like this. I'll never forget those moments and how they felt. 

Tyler Strand: My first job out of college was as a Product Manager at a global electronic music company called SFX Entertainment. They acquired a music streaming startup I'd built in college, so I wound up working as a PM on their video and live streaming initiatives. The company was large and publicly traded, but it had achieved its scale through financial engineering and acquisition. It was only a few years old when I joined, and within a year of my time there it had gone bankrupt. I learned a lot from watching the company rise and fail. SFX was never focused on solving a core problem for its customers. I think it's so important to earn scale as a business little by little. Start with a hypothesis, build something small, and test that users want what you've built. SFX didn't have this mindset, and I saw firsthand how harmful that can be to a business.

If You Can Have A One-Hour Meeting With Someone Famous Who Is Alive, Who Would It Be And Why?

Shane Hegde: Ta-Nehisi Coates. I'm jealous of his ability to communicate complex emotions in familiar terms. There have been many of these translators across history, but for some reason his language resonates most with me. It's brutally honest, and always on point. I feel like we'd have a great day just hopping around town and talking nonsense. 

Tyler Strand: Probably Ben Thompson from Stratechery. I've been reading his blog and listening to his podcast for years, and he consistently has the most insightful take on what's happening in tech. I have a background in engineering and love building things, so Ben has given me an appreciation for how critical the strategy behind what you build can be.

Who is Your Role Model?

Shane Hegde: Bieber. Mostly because he's Tyler's role model and he will never admit it. The guy absolutely kills the game and makes tunes that just slap. He's also just been at the top for so long you can't not respect his hustle. Also, the kid can dance. 

Tyler Strand: I draw a lot of inspiration from both of my parents. My dad is an entrepreneur, which definitely influenced my career path. He's run his own business since he was 25, so growing up I got to watch and learn a lot about what that takes. My mom is a scientist and a teacher. She's really intellectually curious and a life-long learner, which is something I really admire.

What Do You Do In Your Free Time?

Shane Hegde: Honestly? Absolutely nothing. Not that I don't like or have free time, I'm just a big fan of doing nothing. Ordering in some delicious treat of a meal (please see "pad thai" above), watching YouTube videos, maybe going on a run. There's friends and family and hysterical adventures along the way, but I'm a big big believer in reserving time for nothing. 

Tyler Strand: I spend most of my free time eating, exercising, or traveling with my wife. COVID has changed a lot about how I do these three things. I live in New York and love exploring the food scene, but in the past year I've spent a lot of time learning to cook. These days, my exercise routine revolves largely around my Peloton. And I spent a few months road tripping around the US and visiting some of our national parks this year.

Is There A Parable You Often Think About For Inspiration?

Shane Hegde: There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” I think David Foster Wallace's point here is that sometimes the most unbelievably obvious realities and foundationally important decisions are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. What do you want to do next? What matters to you? And in ambiguity, common sense prevails. 

Tyler Strand: In high school I learned a Taoist story called "We'll see" in which a farmer's horse runs away, to which all of his neighbors say they're so sorry for his bad luck. He responds, "we'll see," and the next day his horse returns with several others. The story goes on to describe a series of seemingly good or bad events befall the farmer, but he always withholds judgement. I think about this story often and try never to be too quick to judge a situation. Only time will reveal the full story!

What Is Your Favorite Quote And Why Does It Resonate With You?

Shane Hegde: "He didn't teach me how to live, he lived and let me watch him do it." I'm extremely grateful to have had great mentors in my life and I try my best to constantly learn from those around me. I'm not one that excels in the classroom or lecture hall, but I love learning from experiences and the brilliant folks we have around our business. 

Tyler Strand: I find myself saying, "Perfect is the enemy of done" pretty often. I'm not actually sure where it comes from, but I find it to be pretty helpful in the context of a startup. We always wish we had more time, but at an early stage company, we never do. We have to be comfortable with imperfection for the sake of moving forward. This can be uncomfortable, but I think it's important, especially at our stage. 

What Does Success Mean To You?

Shane Hegde: Employing tens of thousands of individuals who are learning and working toward their vocation. Enjoying the process and struggles along the way. 

Tyler Strand: Success means being able to wake up and do what you love every day. For me, that means building a product people love and doing it with great team. I try to focus on that every day.

Shane Hegde & Tyler Strand’s Favorites Stack:

Books:

SH: When Breath Becomes Air

TS: The Innovator's Dilemma, Sapiens, Atlas Shrugged

Health & Fitness:

SH: Nike sneaks, acai-blueberry-pomegranate Vitamin Water, wireless Beats 

TS: Peloton, running outside, RX bars

Brands:

SH: Tims, some sort of black hat, hoodie (lol at Ty's answers) 

TS: Lululemon, Nike, Patagonia

Consumer Products:

SH: Gatorade water bottle, Jeep Wrangler, Notion 

TS: Whoop fitness tracker, Powerbeats headphones, Cuisinart Cold Brew Coffeemaker

Newsletters & Podcasts:

SH: My YouTube recommendations feed truly runs my life, TechCrunch, NYTimes, Morning Brew, Product Hunt 

TS: The Daily, Stratechery, Planet Money, Reply All, 99% Invisible, Axios, Term Sheet