Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
iHeartMedia Presents CEOs you should know. Welcome to Iheartradios CEOs
you should know of the Low Country. I'm Marcus President
Andrew Burge, and we're here with a product a service
here right here in the Low Country that I think
everybody's going to want to learn about and needs. Currently
it's Jeff Weber from Heirloom.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hey, Jeff, Hey, Andrew, thanks for having us here. This
is great.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Absolutely, I've enjoyed talking to you before we got rolling,
so I know this is going to be meaty. And
for everybody who doesn't yet know Heirloom, I think everybody
will give us a quick elevator on what other Heirloom represents.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Yeah, good, good question. A lot of people say, oh,
I've seen you guys on television. We're well, that's not
exactly us. But basically, people are familiar with the concept
of taking old VHS, tapes and photo albums and putting
them into a box, sending them off somewhere, and then
maybe a few months later, getting back a DVD and
(00:54):
then digitizing your memories and saying, oh, look at this
stuff from the eighties and nineties when I was young
and cool. That's Heirloom and so we have a nationwide model.
We operate right here from the Low Country, and so
boxes are coming into Heirloom every day with old VHS
tapes and we're reviving those memories. But instead of making
DVDs or just putting them onto a flash drive, we
(01:15):
consider that garbage in, garbage out. We put it directly
onto the cloud. And so now you're streaming it from
your iPhone or you're Android or any Internet connected device.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
So you get a USB or a DVD back and
it's like, hey, here's something else you could live exactly right.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, so we just we my co founder and I
formerly he was formerly at Facebook. We realized that was
the wrong business model. Grandma no longer has a DVD
player on her iPad, and she wants to see these
old videos. She wants to see pictures of the kids
and grandkids, and so Heirloom is changing that.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
She's definitely on social media. She is captain videos grand children.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Yes, yes, we have many, many thousands of hours of
streaming video on Airloom. We expect to pass the amount
of original video on Heirloom than what's currently on Netflix
by next year.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
So that's so interesting. See, you've got a guy from Facebook. Right,
you're co founder from Facebook and you've got a heavily
decorated founder Jeff Weber. I mean, looking at your background,
I want to learn a little bit about your trajectory
to Airloom because it's such an awesome platform. I know
I've needed it. I'm a guy who's sent off and
got the DVD back, right, and I still see that
(02:33):
service of it being in the cloud, it being forever
being able to share it for free. Correct, exactly, Heirloom
is free.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
The service is well that you pay to have it digitized,
but you have to the actual streaming is free.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Right, That's amazing. So background in intelligence, the Navy, broken
two world records, long distance runner, still teammate. Yeah, yeah,
tell us about your trajectory, Like, how did this come about?
Out this idea?
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Boy, lots of changes. I'm always pivoting, always always pivoting.
I think a major pivot in my life was September eleventh,
man I flashed back and so that was, hey, honey,
I'm I'm gonna do something different and so wanted to
serve our nation. I'm led off to Navy Officer Candidate
(03:23):
school to go through this intelligence program and there I
meet who's now my co founder. Well, another guy who's
trying to become an intelligence officer, who then after his
initial tours in the Navy, went and worked at some
other really interesting tech organizations, the US Digital Service, He
was at Facebook for a while. I spent an entire
(03:44):
twenty years in service, all of that working under the
Director of National Intelligence and so oftentimes overseas in places
that were not very friendly, oftentimes having to box up
everything we had and put into government storage for years.
And that was one of the epiphany moments when my
wife was very frustrated and said, what are we going
(04:06):
to do with all this stuff?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
This is crazy?
Speaker 3 (04:08):
And she picked up a VHS tape from nineteen ninety
and said, this is our wedding video. I told you
to make copies of this. And that was another pivotal
moment of you know, there's a problem. I'm going to
see if I can solve this.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Necessity breeze creativity. It does, so it's that simple. She said,
what are we going to do with this stuff? It's
our wedding photos. Yeah, so you solved the problem.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Yeah, I said, honey, make other copies of the VHS.
No burn it to a DVD and I said, how many,
one for your parents, one for mine, and then we
got to mail it to them.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
This is wrong.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
This is at the time after two thousand and six
when the term cloud came out and I said, I'm
just gonna put it on the cloud. So I did that,
took many months to do it all myself, and then
I was done and I was happy. And then I
realized that no one else had done this, and they
said how did you do that? And they kept coming
to me, can you make this better? I know there's
other companies out there, but I don't want a DDD.
(05:01):
Can you help me get my memories on the cloud?
And so it was a couple of years ago my
co friend and I developed Heirloom. He was in Silicon Valley.
I was in Washington, d C. Retiring from the federal government.
And we said, hey, from where do we want to
start this? And here we are in Charleston, South Carolina.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Speaking how did you do this? I think there's a
lot of people listening that would say, hey, I have
an idea. I have something good that my friends have
told me. You should sell that or you should create that.
From your wife saying hey, what do we do with
these pictures? And when all this stuff? Do you having
that idea? What was your catalyst to act on that?
What did you do first? What would you suggest people
do first if they have that idea.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Well, Andrew, what I did first was probably not the
right thing. I'm heart headed, and so I just start
moving forward. My co founder would argue, more data, Let's
learn about this particular market. If I could look back
at myself, I would say, get into engine optimization. What
(06:02):
are people typing into Google? How are they describing their problem?
We know we're solving a big problem, but I needed
some help to understand specifically what the consumer called that
particular problem. Now that's working splendidly for Heirloom, but it
didn't just happen overnight.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
But the message is the most important thing is to act. Oh,
you take that first step forward right, I'm hearing you.
It sounds like you're a tremendous activator from your background.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I can't sit still, Andrew, and oftentimes that'll lead to
some type of a failure. But it's only a failure
if you don't learn something from it. And so a
lot of learning that's gone on in the last several
years about how to start a business. I will credit
here in the low Country, here in Mount Pleasant, the
(06:50):
Harbor Entrepreneur Center does a plug for them. If you
are in the low Country, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur,
reach out to the Harbor. They will, they'll, they'll make
good advice. They did it for us at Heirloom when
we came here, and so hats off to Patrick Bryant
and Grady Johnson there at the at the Harbor.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
So say that again for if that's a good resource,
the Harbor Research Center.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Yeah, Harbor Entrepreneur Centership in Mount Pleasant. They have startup accelerators.
You want to learn about what it would take to
become an entrepreneur, reach out to the Harbor. We were
already on that trajectory. I'm a My co founder and
I being jen X, were a little bit older than
(07:35):
I think many startup startup founders, maybe in their twenties
or thirties, so maybe a little more mature. But even
then we still had some learning to do. And you know,
kudos to our many mentors, some of which came from
the Harbor Entrepreneur Center.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Well, speaking of plugs, we always like to ask, what
do you read Oh, is there anything what do you
enjoy reading? Is there anything in particular? Oh?
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Wow, And that's a that's a great question.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
One of my mentors was the guy that wrote the
book The greatst Salesman in the World, aug Mandino. One
thing he would say is you are the same person
you are today except for the people you meet and
the books that you read. So I really appreciate that question, Andrew.
Right now, I'm reading a book called The Anxious Generation.
This is about the negative effects of social media on
(08:22):
our youth.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
It's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
And so as we're turning Heirloom into more than just
a digitizing company and a cloud storage company, we realize
that we have the ability to connect people to something
that's very special, and so we're turning Heirloom into a
social media application, and we're using science to do that correctly.
And so I'm thankful to reading books like Anxious Generation. Boy,
(08:48):
several others you definitely need. I got a long list.
I don't know how much time we have to talk
about books, but I would say Greater Salesman in the
World is good to start with.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Love it. So when you talk about that book being
the effect of social media, so you're still trying to
do research on how to optimize that company rightause you
talked about SEO on the front end, understanding what is
my particular audience, what might they be searching, how are
they searching, where are they searching from? To figure out, well,
that would drive the company forward. I can learn from
(09:22):
that to optimize. And then the effects of social media
on the generation and how that helps you drive forward.
So how do you look at that being that not
since you're a form of social media, but you're putting
things more easily in the hands of your users. How
does that mesh? How does that marry together? If that's
not too hard of a question, No.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
It's it is interesting. And really our best feedback comes
from our customers, many of which are located throughout the
United States and so we don't get to speak with
them in person. But here in the Low Country when
someone comes into our office and drops off a tub
of old VHS casseets and then they come back to
pick it up and they say, this was great last week,
And we all sat around, we streamed, we cast my
(10:02):
phone to the big screen in the living room. We
were sitting around and we were laughing and crying, and
we realized that really touching something that was incredibly powerful.
It was like the old days of Facebook when remember
the throwback Thursdays? What happened to those? And so, you know,
we're trying to build an app which is really connecting
people to their special moments and then each other.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
And so you really don't.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Have a thousand friends, there's maybe a hundred, and we
want to better connect.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
You with those people.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
And so go back to pictures of you in your
old college roommate years ago, or your skateboarding video or
what are those times that you share it with your family,
your family of choice, your friends and sharing those memories.
We think that it's incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
I think that there's a huge majority of people on
social media. I know I'm one of them that hold
on to social media for that exact reason. The only
reason that I exist on Facebook and Instagram is because
I'll lose track of some of my family members and
what they're doing. Yeah, so I didn't even think of
that about that. That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
We are developing. We haven't launched it yet. This will
come out shortly, but basically a one touch button where
you can copy all the content that you've put onto
Facebook or Instagram or drup box or Google Photos, and
basically you authenticate yourself with your with that platforms, use
their name and platform, and it will take a copy
(11:27):
of it and put it all into airloom so you
can have it all in one place. We know that
there's a number of people that are leaving particular platforms
and they don't want to leave the memories that are
there or their contacts which are there, and so we're
researching how do we do that, how do we keep
people connected even as they're moving around between the platforms.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
That's awesome. I one of the things that I found
most interesting. If you can talk about future optimizations, Google
says that after twenty twenty five, over fifty percent, between
fifty and sixty percent of all search is going to
be voice activated. So can you talk for a minute
about the TExtract portion if you can, yes.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
So that that is not our baby.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Amazon Web Services AWS created a piece of artificial intelligence
called TExtract.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
TExtract will has.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
The ability to not just read optical characters like ocr
that have been from a typewriter, but basically handwriting, and
convert it to text from any language, any script in
addition to that, basically also having the ability to voice
not just voice identify and so we've had speech to
(12:39):
text for many years now, but the ability to actually
voice print someone and so it can recognize particular voice.
Now you have to play a part in that. And
so I can hear maybe an old VHS cassette from
my mom from years ago, and they say who is
that person, and I say, that's my mom, that's Carol Weber,
and so everything else it in my archives, it'll identify
(13:02):
her name. And so then it's really easy on heirloom
to say, hey, heirloom, find mom saying happy birthday, Jeff,
and it will immediately go to what was stuck on
maybe a film reel from the eighties, and there it is.
And so we just we want to better connect the
world to their memories.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
So you're not losing that personal touch of that handwriting
in the back of the picture. No, you don't have
to thumb through a thousand other things to find it.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
It's tedious, and so there are many problems that we're
trying to solve.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
This is like the old days of Google.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
They were also inspired, you know, how do we index
the world? And they've They've done tremendous work at that.
But now Heirloom is really taking a deep dive into
your memories and so your photos, your videos, old voicemails,
My goodness, people send us their tapes. So those little
micro cassettes that used to be in maybe your mom
(13:56):
or dad maybe passed away and you cleaned out the
house and you hear all those old voicemails. Bring those
back to life and then put it into Heirloom and
find it just incredible precious memories.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
There's so many implications of this to solve all of
those files and things that you don't want to lose.
And you've mentioned three things already. I have a voicemail,
I have all VHS's and a DVD. But there are
so many implications for these things. Where do you see
what are you most excited about with Heirloom.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Bringing control back to the owner of it sounds really dorky,
but bringing control back to the owner of the data,
and so you pay for storage on Heirloom and we
recognize you as the data owner. It's an entirely different
model than the free social media model. Once you put
something on Facebook, you don't necessarily own it. You didn't
(14:51):
pay anything to store it, and so we want to
delight consumers globally with a model that they can control.
And so instead of of saying, oh, I can't share
this because and we've all probably tried to do this,
you get this really cool video that's on your phone
and you say, well, my dad only does email, so
I'm going to attach it to an email. But then
(15:11):
an email says it's too big, and so how do
I share that with him? And so we're looking at
all of these problems, and I think ultimately what we're
focused on is how do we better serve the consumer?
And I've been that consumer for much of my life,
growing up with a rotary phone and then a film
camera and then the big old cam quarter when my
(15:33):
daughter was born, you know, with tapes, and it was
always arduous and problematic, and much of it was large
technology companies with planned ops a lescens we say we're
going to make your data always portable. And so with
on Heirloom, everything is in accordance with the International Standards Organization.
(15:54):
It's your data, you own it. We're simply storeds of
your data.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I think that with all the implications of this, there
are people listening that have numerous uses for this. How
can people find you? Where do we find you?
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Yeah, www, dot Airloom, dot Cloud, Heirloom, h g I
R l O L l o O M Silent h
and Heirloom. If you are in the Low Country, come
visit us at eleven e Wall Street in Mount Pleasant
nine to five Monday through Friday. Bring us your problems.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
We love it.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Old boxes and bins and tubs of photos. We asked
for a little bit of time. Kind of a precautionary
tale here oftentimes, and this will not a week goes
by that someone doesn't come in, you know, with a
heartbreaking story and say, here's this big tub of photos.
And tomorrow is the ceremony of life for my dad
(16:46):
who passed away just a couple of days ago. Can
we get this done tomorrow? We've always done it and
we'll do it. We'll try our best. But let's preserve
those memories before losing these special people in our lives.
Let's enjoy each other today. And so get into your attic,
go into the closet, pull out those dusty boxes of
(17:09):
photos and video reels. Do you know what's on them?
Are your memory safe? They're not safe from even your
DVDs and your flash drives. They're not safe from fires, floods,
media failures. Make them always available on Heirloom's cloud, and.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
So I love this statistic.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
You are the durability of Airloom because it's a redundant
cloud service, and we have a data center in Northern Virginia,
one on the West Coast, one in Singapore, one Sydney.
Even if Northern Virginia were to take a nuclear boom
and we lose that data center, as horrible as that
might be, you're never going to lose your memories. And
(17:48):
so you are four hundred and eleven times more likely
to get struck by a meteor than lose a single
file on Airloom. We want to help you keep your
memory safe forever, and so please find us here in
the low Country.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
We'd love to serve you.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
And if you or a if you're listening from elsewhere,
or your parents or grandparents live elsewhere where, as close
as your nearest ups store, you call us up. We
send you a label, you walk in, you just drop
it off. They box it up for you, and within
a couple of days it reaches our facility here in
the low Country. A couple days later, it's streaming on
(18:23):
your phone and it's always safe.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
How often do DVDs get scratched?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Oh, not that safe. They are not that safe.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
I will tell you that we have a ninety two
percent recovery of previously unreadable DVDs because we do recondition
all DVDs as they come into our facility, and so
you might not have been able to read it on
your computer, but we can probably recover that data.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Well, yea, if I got to tell you, thanks for
the conversation. Thank you for your service and your co
founder service. We appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
You are worth it, Andrew. The nation is worth it,
and so we are proud to serve. We used to
protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic,
and now we are protecting your memories.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Awesome. Right here in the low Country, it's Heir Loom,
Jeff Weber, thanks for coming in.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Thanks Andrew, cheers. You've been listening to iHeart Radio CEOs
you should know, heard every Tuesday and Saturday morning right
here on this iHeart Radio station.
iHeartMedia Presents CEOs you should know. Welcome to Iheartradios CEOs
you should know of the Low Country. I'm Marcus President
Andrew Burge, and we're here with a product a service
here right here in the Low Country that I think
everybody's going to want to learn about and needs. Currently
it's Jeff Weber from Heirloom.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hey, Jeff, Hey, Andrew, thanks for having us here. This
is great.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Absolutely, I've enjoyed talking to you before we got rolling,
so I know this is going to be meaty. And
for everybody who doesn't yet know Heirloom, I think everybody
will give us a quick elevator on what other Heirloom represents.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Yeah, good, good question. A lot of people say, oh,
I've seen you guys on television. We're well, that's not
exactly us. But basically, people are familiar with the concept
of taking old VHS, tapes and photo albums and putting
them into a box, sending them off somewhere, and then
maybe a few months later, getting back a DVD and
(00:54):
then digitizing your memories and saying, oh, look at this
stuff from the eighties and nineties when I was young
and cool. That's Heirloom and so we have a nationwide model.
We operate right here from the Low Country, and so
boxes are coming into Heirloom every day with old VHS
tapes and we're reviving those memories. But instead of making
DVDs or just putting them onto a flash drive, we
(01:15):
consider that garbage in, garbage out. We put it directly
onto the cloud. And so now you're streaming it from
your iPhone or you're Android or any Internet connected device.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
So you get a USB or a DVD back and
it's like, hey, here's something else you could live exactly right.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, so we just we my co founder and I
formerly he was formerly at Facebook. We realized that was
the wrong business model. Grandma no longer has a DVD
player on her iPad, and she wants to see these
old videos. She wants to see pictures of the kids
and grandkids, and so Heirloom is changing that.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
She's definitely on social media. She is captain videos grand children.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Yes, yes, we have many, many thousands of hours of
streaming video on Airloom. We expect to pass the amount
of original video on Heirloom than what's currently on Netflix
by next year.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
So that's so interesting. See, you've got a guy from Facebook. Right,
you're co founder from Facebook and you've got a heavily
decorated founder Jeff Weber. I mean, looking at your background,
I want to learn a little bit about your trajectory
to Airloom because it's such an awesome platform. I know
I've needed it. I'm a guy who's sent off and
got the DVD back, right, and I still see that
(02:33):
service of it being in the cloud, it being forever
being able to share it for free. Correct, exactly, Heirloom
is free.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
The service is well that you pay to have it digitized,
but you have to the actual streaming is free.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Right, That's amazing. So background in intelligence, the Navy, broken
two world records, long distance runner, still teammate. Yeah, yeah,
tell us about your trajectory, Like, how did this come about?
Out this idea?
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Boy, lots of changes. I'm always pivoting, always always pivoting.
I think a major pivot in my life was September eleventh,
man I flashed back and so that was, hey, honey,
I'm I'm gonna do something different and so wanted to
serve our nation. I'm led off to Navy Officer Candidate
(03:23):
school to go through this intelligence program and there I
meet who's now my co founder. Well, another guy who's
trying to become an intelligence officer, who then after his
initial tours in the Navy, went and worked at some
other really interesting tech organizations, the US Digital Service, He
was at Facebook for a while. I spent an entire
(03:44):
twenty years in service, all of that working under the
Director of National Intelligence and so oftentimes overseas in places
that were not very friendly, oftentimes having to box up
everything we had and put into government storage for years.
And that was one of the epiphany moments when my
wife was very frustrated and said, what are we going
(04:06):
to do with all this stuff?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
This is crazy?
Speaker 3 (04:08):
And she picked up a VHS tape from nineteen ninety
and said, this is our wedding video. I told you
to make copies of this. And that was another pivotal
moment of you know, there's a problem. I'm going to
see if I can solve this.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Necessity breeze creativity. It does, so it's that simple. She said,
what are we going to do with this stuff? It's
our wedding photos. Yeah, so you solved the problem.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Yeah, I said, honey, make other copies of the VHS.
No burn it to a DVD and I said, how many,
one for your parents, one for mine, and then we
got to mail it to them.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
This is wrong.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
This is at the time after two thousand and six
when the term cloud came out and I said, I'm
just gonna put it on the cloud. So I did that,
took many months to do it all myself, and then
I was done and I was happy. And then I
realized that no one else had done this, and they
said how did you do that? And they kept coming
to me, can you make this better? I know there's
other companies out there, but I don't want a DDD.
(05:01):
Can you help me get my memories on the cloud?
And so it was a couple of years ago my
co friend and I developed Heirloom. He was in Silicon Valley.
I was in Washington, d C. Retiring from the federal government.
And we said, hey, from where do we want to
start this? And here we are in Charleston, South Carolina.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Speaking how did you do this? I think there's a
lot of people listening that would say, hey, I have
an idea. I have something good that my friends have
told me. You should sell that or you should create that.
From your wife saying hey, what do we do with
these pictures? And when all this stuff? Do you having
that idea? What was your catalyst to act on that?
What did you do first? What would you suggest people
do first if they have that idea.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Well, Andrew, what I did first was probably not the
right thing. I'm heart headed, and so I just start
moving forward. My co founder would argue, more data, Let's
learn about this particular market. If I could look back
at myself, I would say, get into engine optimization. What
(06:02):
are people typing into Google? How are they describing their problem?
We know we're solving a big problem, but I needed
some help to understand specifically what the consumer called that
particular problem. Now that's working splendidly for Heirloom, but it
didn't just happen overnight.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
But the message is the most important thing is to act. Oh,
you take that first step forward right, I'm hearing you.
It sounds like you're a tremendous activator from your background.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I can't sit still, Andrew, and oftentimes that'll lead to
some type of a failure. But it's only a failure
if you don't learn something from it. And so a
lot of learning that's gone on in the last several
years about how to start a business. I will credit
here in the low Country, here in Mount Pleasant, the
(06:50):
Harbor Entrepreneur Center does a plug for them. If you
are in the low Country, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur,
reach out to the Harbor. They will, they'll, they'll make
good advice. They did it for us at Heirloom when
we came here, and so hats off to Patrick Bryant
and Grady Johnson there at the at the Harbor.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
So say that again for if that's a good resource,
the Harbor Research Center.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Yeah, Harbor Entrepreneur Centership in Mount Pleasant. They have startup accelerators.
You want to learn about what it would take to
become an entrepreneur, reach out to the Harbor. We were
already on that trajectory. I'm a My co founder and
I being jen X, were a little bit older than
(07:35):
I think many startup startup founders, maybe in their twenties
or thirties, so maybe a little more mature. But even
then we still had some learning to do. And you know,
kudos to our many mentors, some of which came from
the Harbor Entrepreneur Center.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Well, speaking of plugs, we always like to ask, what
do you read Oh, is there anything what do you
enjoy reading? Is there anything in particular? Oh?
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Wow, And that's a that's a great question.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
One of my mentors was the guy that wrote the
book The greatst Salesman in the World, aug Mandino. One
thing he would say is you are the same person
you are today except for the people you meet and
the books that you read. So I really appreciate that question, Andrew.
Right now, I'm reading a book called The Anxious Generation.
This is about the negative effects of social media on
(08:22):
our youth.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
It's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
And so as we're turning Heirloom into more than just
a digitizing company and a cloud storage company, we realize
that we have the ability to connect people to something
that's very special, and so we're turning Heirloom into a
social media application, and we're using science to do that correctly.
And so I'm thankful to reading books like Anxious Generation. Boy,
(08:48):
several others you definitely need. I got a long list.
I don't know how much time we have to talk
about books, but I would say Greater Salesman in the
World is good to start with.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Love it. So when you talk about that book being
the effect of social media, so you're still trying to
do research on how to optimize that company rightause you
talked about SEO on the front end, understanding what is
my particular audience, what might they be searching, how are
they searching, where are they searching from? To figure out, well,
that would drive the company forward. I can learn from
(09:22):
that to optimize. And then the effects of social media
on the generation and how that helps you drive forward.
So how do you look at that being that not
since you're a form of social media, but you're putting
things more easily in the hands of your users. How
does that mesh? How does that marry together? If that's
not too hard of a question, No.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
It's it is interesting. And really our best feedback comes
from our customers, many of which are located throughout the
United States and so we don't get to speak with
them in person. But here in the Low Country when
someone comes into our office and drops off a tub
of old VHS casseets and then they come back to
pick it up and they say, this was great last week,
And we all sat around, we streamed, we cast my
(10:02):
phone to the big screen in the living room. We
were sitting around and we were laughing and crying, and
we realized that really touching something that was incredibly powerful.
It was like the old days of Facebook when remember
the throwback Thursdays? What happened to those? And so, you know,
we're trying to build an app which is really connecting
people to their special moments and then each other.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
And so you really don't.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Have a thousand friends, there's maybe a hundred, and we
want to better connect.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
You with those people.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
And so go back to pictures of you in your
old college roommate years ago, or your skateboarding video or
what are those times that you share it with your family,
your family of choice, your friends and sharing those memories.
We think that it's incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
I think that there's a huge majority of people on
social media. I know I'm one of them that hold
on to social media for that exact reason. The only
reason that I exist on Facebook and Instagram is because
I'll lose track of some of my family members and
what they're doing. Yeah, so I didn't even think of
that about that. That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
We are developing. We haven't launched it yet. This will
come out shortly, but basically a one touch button where
you can copy all the content that you've put onto
Facebook or Instagram or drup box or Google Photos, and
basically you authenticate yourself with your with that platforms, use
their name and platform, and it will take a copy
(11:27):
of it and put it all into airloom so you
can have it all in one place. We know that
there's a number of people that are leaving particular platforms
and they don't want to leave the memories that are
there or their contacts which are there, and so we're
researching how do we do that, how do we keep
people connected even as they're moving around between the platforms.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
That's awesome. I one of the things that I found
most interesting. If you can talk about future optimizations, Google
says that after twenty twenty five, over fifty percent, between
fifty and sixty percent of all search is going to
be voice activated. So can you talk for a minute
about the TExtract portion if you can, yes.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
So that that is not our baby.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Amazon Web Services AWS created a piece of artificial intelligence
called TExtract.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
TExtract will has.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
The ability to not just read optical characters like ocr
that have been from a typewriter, but basically handwriting, and
convert it to text from any language, any script in
addition to that, basically also having the ability to voice
not just voice identify and so we've had speech to
(12:39):
text for many years now, but the ability to actually
voice print someone and so it can recognize particular voice.
Now you have to play a part in that. And
so I can hear maybe an old VHS cassette from
my mom from years ago, and they say who is
that person, and I say, that's my mom, that's Carol Weber,
and so everything else it in my archives, it'll identify
(13:02):
her name. And so then it's really easy on heirloom
to say, hey, heirloom, find mom saying happy birthday, Jeff,
and it will immediately go to what was stuck on
maybe a film reel from the eighties, and there it is.
And so we just we want to better connect the
world to their memories.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
So you're not losing that personal touch of that handwriting
in the back of the picture. No, you don't have
to thumb through a thousand other things to find it.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
It's tedious, and so there are many problems that we're
trying to solve.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
This is like the old days of Google.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
They were also inspired, you know, how do we index
the world? And they've They've done tremendous work at that.
But now Heirloom is really taking a deep dive into
your memories and so your photos, your videos, old voicemails,
My goodness, people send us their tapes. So those little
micro cassettes that used to be in maybe your mom
(13:56):
or dad maybe passed away and you cleaned out the
house and you hear all those old voicemails. Bring those
back to life and then put it into Heirloom and
find it just incredible precious memories.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
There's so many implications of this to solve all of
those files and things that you don't want to lose.
And you've mentioned three things already. I have a voicemail,
I have all VHS's and a DVD. But there are
so many implications for these things. Where do you see
what are you most excited about with Heirloom.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Bringing control back to the owner of it sounds really dorky,
but bringing control back to the owner of the data,
and so you pay for storage on Heirloom and we
recognize you as the data owner. It's an entirely different
model than the free social media model. Once you put
something on Facebook, you don't necessarily own it. You didn't
(14:51):
pay anything to store it, and so we want to
delight consumers globally with a model that they can control.
And so instead of of saying, oh, I can't share
this because and we've all probably tried to do this,
you get this really cool video that's on your phone
and you say, well, my dad only does email, so
I'm going to attach it to an email. But then
(15:11):
an email says it's too big, and so how do
I share that with him? And so we're looking at
all of these problems, and I think ultimately what we're
focused on is how do we better serve the consumer?
And I've been that consumer for much of my life,
growing up with a rotary phone and then a film
camera and then the big old cam quarter when my
(15:33):
daughter was born, you know, with tapes, and it was
always arduous and problematic, and much of it was large
technology companies with planned ops a lescens we say we're
going to make your data always portable. And so with
on Heirloom, everything is in accordance with the International Standards Organization.
(15:54):
It's your data, you own it. We're simply storeds of
your data.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I think that with all the implications of this, there
are people listening that have numerous uses for this. How
can people find you? Where do we find you?
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Yeah, www, dot Airloom, dot Cloud, Heirloom, h g I
R l O L l o O M Silent h
and Heirloom. If you are in the Low Country, come
visit us at eleven e Wall Street in Mount Pleasant
nine to five Monday through Friday. Bring us your problems.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
We love it.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Old boxes and bins and tubs of photos. We asked
for a little bit of time. Kind of a precautionary
tale here oftentimes, and this will not a week goes
by that someone doesn't come in, you know, with a
heartbreaking story and say, here's this big tub of photos.
And tomorrow is the ceremony of life for my dad
(16:46):
who passed away just a couple of days ago. Can
we get this done tomorrow? We've always done it and
we'll do it. We'll try our best. But let's preserve
those memories before losing these special people in our lives.
Let's enjoy each other today. And so get into your attic,
go into the closet, pull out those dusty boxes of
(17:09):
photos and video reels. Do you know what's on them?
Are your memory safe? They're not safe from even your
DVDs and your flash drives. They're not safe from fires, floods,
media failures. Make them always available on Heirloom's cloud, and.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
So I love this statistic.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
You are the durability of Airloom because it's a redundant
cloud service, and we have a data center in Northern Virginia,
one on the West Coast, one in Singapore, one Sydney.
Even if Northern Virginia were to take a nuclear boom
and we lose that data center, as horrible as that
might be, you're never going to lose your memories. And
(17:48):
so you are four hundred and eleven times more likely
to get struck by a meteor than lose a single
file on Airloom. We want to help you keep your
memory safe forever, and so please find us here in
the low Country.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
We'd love to serve you.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
And if you or a if you're listening from elsewhere,
or your parents or grandparents live elsewhere where, as close
as your nearest ups store, you call us up. We
send you a label, you walk in, you just drop
it off. They box it up for you, and within
a couple of days it reaches our facility here in
the low Country. A couple days later, it's streaming on
(18:23):
your phone and it's always safe.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
How often do DVDs get scratched?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Oh, not that safe. They are not that safe.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
I will tell you that we have a ninety two
percent recovery of previously unreadable DVDs because we do recondition
all DVDs as they come into our facility, and so
you might not have been able to read it on
your computer, but we can probably recover that data.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Well, yea, if I got to tell you, thanks for
the conversation. Thank you for your service and your co
founder service. We appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
You are worth it, Andrew. The nation is worth it,
and so we are proud to serve. We used to
protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic,
and now we are protecting your memories.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Awesome. Right here in the low Country, it's Heir Loom,
Jeff Weber, thanks for coming in.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Thanks Andrew, cheers. You've been listening to iHeart Radio CEOs
you should know, heard every Tuesday and Saturday morning right
here on this iHeart Radio station.
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