Creative teams are drowning in their own output. According to Air’s internal surveys, the average creative spends 20% of their workday hunting for files: old campaign assets, archived footage, forgotten screenshots. Shane Hegde, CEO and co-founder of the New York-based startup, calls this “search debt,” and he’s spent close to a decade building a solution.
Air, which launched publicly in 2021, positions itself as the system of record for visual data, the Salesforce of images and video. Based in New York City, the company manages over 10 petabytes of data and hundreds of millions of assets, with tens of thousands of monthly active users. The creative operations platform serves two-person agencies and 200,000-person organizations with the same software. Customers range from a four-person wedding agency to a bank in Central America to a travel agency in Brazil.
Fast Company spoke with Hegde about why cloud storage fails creative teams, why he sees Air as “Switzerland” in a fragmented tool landscape, and why AI won’t replace the creative spark but may impact ad creation. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve coined the term “search debt.” Why is it a problem?
Five years ago, making images and videos was a cottage industry within most organizations. You’d make maybe one campaign a year. That started to change as social and marketing channels multiplied. And with the advent of this AI-native era, it’s gone fully exponential. It’s not just marketing now working with visual data, images, and videos. It’s sales, product, partnerships, operations. And they don’t just want to work with this data, they want to make variants of it, change it, create more.
In every other area of the enterprise with a scaled, complex data problem, businesses structure the chaos with a system of record. The sales team gets Salesforce, engineering gets GitHub. Creative work has never had that system of record. It’s never had anything that structured the chaos.
What’s the significance of that kind of system of record?
I used to be the chief digital officer of a television network, and I’ll never forget: We had a $150,000 shoot stored on a $20 hard drive that got lost in a $40 book bag, carried by an intern going home from the shoot site. That’s data loss. Now compound that across the number of shoots and assets a company generates today. It’s not just about storing the data. It’s about building a memory around what has happened, why it happened, and what you could do with those assets in the future.
We have a customer who had 50 years of footage stored in $40 hard drives. They were paying for physical storage units and hard drives. They also had an Amazon Glacier instance with about 100 terabytes of content. Then they had people on the team using Dropbox.
On Air, the entire organization can look into the archive or look at the new photo shoots that are happening in real time. They can query through all of it in seconds. They were looking for Usher onstage, singing a particular song. They went back 25 years to that exact moment, and they could flip the asset out to a L’Oréal campaign they were doing.
Google Drive has a billion users. Isn’t that type of service durable and flexible?
We have to stop trying to believe that cloud storage can solve all our problems, regardless of the type of problem. Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, or any cloud storage solution treats a piece of data the same regardless of what it is.
Let’s take Salesforce as an example. You can manage a sales pipeline in Google Sheets, but Salesforce has spent 35 years building a product that optimizes for that use case. Air is no different. We’ve optimized both our user experience and our infrastructure around this form of data.
Upload a video, and we transcode seven to 10 different outputs of it, so you can watch it on your phone in the subway or stream it in 4K at the office. We built a clipping tool, commenting, chapters, face and product tagging, rights management.
All of these little things are paper cuts when you use generalizable infrastructure to solve a really specific problem. Visual data is one of the most complex forms of data.
Adobe and Canva both serve creatives. Why aren’t they enough?
Inside an organization, an individual creative hops between 15 to 20 different tools in a given week. It’s crazy. They may use Adobe, and they use CapCut and Canva and Figma. And where you distribute content is also highly fragmented. You need to push content out to a CMS, to your ads manager, social tools, decks. There needs to be a canonical source of truth, a system of record. We want to be the connective tissue of your creative process.
To build a successful system of record, a platform, you have to think with an integration-first mindset. From my perspective, Switzerland wins. In World War II, no one invaded Switzerland. Why? Because of its positioning. Everybody needed to go through it.
A lot of creation tools struggle because they over-index on the universe they’re building. Canva cares about Canva, and Canva wants to compete with CapCut, so the two don’t play that well together. And that’s where the paper cuts start.
For the last 35 years in creative work, the center of gravity was the creation tools: Adobe, then Canva and Figma. From our perspective, for this AI-native wave, the center of gravity is going to be around orchestration.
Many parts of reaction are becoming commoditized. Not the magical spark at the beginning. That will always be deeply human. But so much of the work after that is going to be commoditized by these models.
The question becomes: What should we create, and why? And you need a product that can help shape those decisions. I think that’s a system of record. And that’s why we’re building it.
What’s your response to concerns about AI replacing creative work?
Just because a dialogue box can produce an image doesn’t mean creative work is dead. There’s a magical, illogical thing a creative does: knowing what scene to cut, why an idea resonates or doesn’t. More data-oriented forms, like direct-response ad creative, can run with a human barely in the loop. But so much of creative work is not that.
The zero-to-one creative work is going to be one of the last things to cross the chasm. I’m a big believer in continuing to invest in creative teams because of it.
You recently changed your pricing approach. What’s the rationale?
We shifted our pricing to be all credit-based and made seats unlimited and free. We believe every company is becoming a media company. Fifteen percent of our customers already have more users on Air than they have full-time employees. Crazy, right?
You add the creative team, then marketing, sales, product, partnerships, then the freelancers, agencies, and clients. So instead of seats, you buy a bundle and commit to a minimum spend. Different actions use credits at different rates. Converting an image to a video is a fairly expensive transaction on Air, versus having a thousand people look at a video in your CMS.
Today it’s the Wild West. It’s impossible to control your model spend because people are just grabbing cards and making transactions on an ongoing basis. On Air, you can structure and organize that. You can see which users are using which models and which users are burning the most credits, and why.
Being able to interrogate that data is nonexistent in creative work today. If I asked a CMO today how much content they created in the last six months, no one has an idea. If they want to know which performed best, they’re probably putting an analyst on it for at least six weeks.
What’s in your own tool kit?
Claude, now. That has changed. It used to be ChatGPT; I had everything in there, and migrating meant a big data export, which was a nightmare. I’m the biggest Notion obsessive. I think what that team has done is unbelievable. I still use Excel. I like to sit with an income statement or a three-statement model on a plane with no Wi-Fi and just think. There’s a magic in that.
We were big believers in Pitch, then moved to Figma Slides, and I’m now a big advocate. And I love Linear. It just makes you feel something. There’s an emotional response to the product, and that’s when it’s at its best. We try to do that at Air every day, and we’re inspired by companies like Linear.
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