Air CEO Shane Hegde on why creative teams need a system of record
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 si