Operations

Air CEO Shane Hegde Says Creative Teams Are Drowning in Their Own Output — and Cloud Storage Isn't the Cure

The startup founder argues that Google Drive and Dropbox were never built for visual data at scale. His pitch: a system of record for creative work, modeled on what Salesforce did for sales.

Written by Elena Brooks · Bureau Business · Jun 14, 2026

The Problem Hegde Is Selling Against

Before Air can sell a system of record, it has to sell the problem. Hegde's framing is blunt: creative teams are generating more visual content than ever — across social channels, sales decks, product launches, partner campaigns — and storing it in infrastructure that was never designed for it.

According to Air's internal surveys, the average creative spends 20% of their workday hunting for files. Hegde calls this "search debt." The cost isn't just time. It's institutional memory. A $150,000 shoot stored on a $20 hard drive in a $40 book bag, carried by an intern — that's a real example from Hegde's own past as chief digital officer of a television network. The asset doesn't just get lost. The context around it disappears too.

Why Cloud Storage Fails Here

The core of Hegde's argument is that Google Drive, Dropbox, and SharePoint treat all data the same. A spreadsheet and a 4K video file get the same infrastructure, the same search logic, the same organizational metaphors.

Air, by contrast, transcodes uploaded video into seven to ten different outputs automatically. It builds in face and product tagging, rights management, commenting, and clipping tools. One customer — a media company with 50 years of footage spread across physical storage units, Amazon Glacier, and Dropbox — can now query the entire archive in seconds. They found Usher onstage singing a specific song, pulled from 25 years back, and cleared it for a L'Oréal campaign.

That's the product demo. The business argument is that Salesforce didn't replace spreadsheets by being a better spreadsheet. It won by optimizing for a specific workflow at scale.

The Switzerland Strategy

Hegde is explicit that Air is not trying to compete with Adobe, Canva, or Figma. He calls the positioning "Switzerland" — neutral, necessary, and hard to route around. Creation tools, he argues, over-index on their own ecosystems. Canva wants to beat CapCut; the two don't integrate cleanly. That fragmentation creates the opening Air is building into.

The bet is that as AI commoditizes more of the production layer — variant generation, format resizing, direct-response ad creative — the strategic value shifts toward orchestration: knowing what assets exist, what performed, and what to make next. A system of record becomes the decision-support layer, not just the storage layer.

The Pricing Shift and What It Signals

Air recently moved to unlimited seats with credit-based pricing. The logic is structural: 15% of Air's customers already have more users on the platform than they have full-time employees. Once freelancers, agencies, clients, and cross-functional teams get access, seat-based pricing becomes a ceiling on adoption.

Credit consumption scales with action complexity — converting an image to video costs more than streaming a video to a thousand viewers. The model also gives operators visibility into AI spend, which Hegde describes as currently unmanaged inside most organizations.

The Accountability Question

Hegde is bullish on creative teams and says he's a "big believer in continuing to invest" in them. That's a reasonable position for a CEO whose product is only valuable if creative output keeps growing. The more interesting test is whether Air's own organizational practices hold up to the same scrutiny he applies to his customers' file management. The company doesn't publish headcount or attrition data publicly, and the Fast Company interview doesn't surface those numbers.

What's clear is the market thesis: every company is becoming a media company, visual data is becoming enterprise-critical, and the infrastructure layer hasn't caught up. If Hegde is right about the problem, the question is whether Air can hold the center of gravity it's claiming before a better-capitalized platform decides Switzerland is worth invading.

Key takeaways

Air's internal surveys put the average creative's file-search time at 20% of the workday — one-fifth of labor cost spent on retrieval, not production.
Hegde frames Air as 'Switzerland' in a fragmented tool landscape: neutral connective tissue between creation tools (Adobe, Canva, Figma) and distribution channels, rather than a competitor to any of them.
Air recently moved to unlimited seats with a credit-based pricing model, betting that the number of people touching creative assets inside an organization will keep expanding well beyond the core creative team.
Hegde draws a line between commoditizable creative work — direct-response ad production — and 'zero-to-one' creative work, which he argues will remain human-driven longest.
The company manages over 10 petabytes of data and serves customers ranging from two-person agencies to organizations with 200,000 employees, suggesting the infrastructure problem scales across market segments.

FAQ

What is 'search debt' and why does it matter for creative teams?

Shane Hegde coined the term to describe the cumulative time and institutional memory lost when creative teams can't efficiently find existing assets. Air's internal surveys put the average creative's file-search time at 20% of the workday — a direct labor cost that compounds as organizations produce more visual content across more channels.

How does Air differentiate from Google Drive or Dropbox?

Air argues that general-purpose cloud storage treats all file types identically. Air is built specifically for visual data: it transcodes video into multiple formats on upload, adds face and product tagging, supports rights management and commenting, and enables fast querying across large archives. The analogy Hegde uses is Salesforce versus Google Sheets — both can hold sales data, but one is optimized for the workflow.

Why did Air move to unlimited seats and credit-based pricing?

Because the user base inside Air's customers keeps expanding beyond the core creative team. Fifteen percent of Air's customers already have more platform users than full-time employees, once freelancers, agencies, and cross-functional teams are included. Seat-based pricing was a structural ceiling on that growth. Credits scale with the complexity of actions taken, not the number of people with access.

What is Air's position on AI replacing creative work?

Hegde draws a distinction between production-layer tasks — like direct-response ad creative — which he says can run with minimal human involvement, and 'zero-to-one' creative work, which he argues will remain human-driven longest. His business interest aligns with this view: Air's value proposition depends on creative output continuing to grow, not contracting.

Who are Air's customers?

Air serves a wide range: from four-person wedding agencies to a bank in Central America to a travel agency in Brazil to organizations with 200,000 employees. The company manages over 10 petabytes of data and hundreds of millions of assets, with tens of thousands of monthly active users.

Citations

Air CEO Shane Hegde on why creative teams need a system of recordAir's internal surveys show the average creative spends 20% of their workday searching for files; Air manages over 10 petabytes of data and hundreds of millions of assets.
Air CEO Shane Hegde on why creative teams need a system of recordAir shifted to unlimited seats and credit-based pricing; 15% of customers have more users on Air than full-time employees.
Air CEO Shane Hegde on why creative teams need a system of recordHegde previously served as chief digital officer of a television network and recounts a $150,000 shoot lost on a $20 hard drive carried by an intern.
Air CEO Shane Hegde on why creative teams need a system of recordAir launched publicly in 2021 and is headquartered in New York City; customers range from two-person agencies to 200,000-person organizations.