Geoff Weber, co-founder and CEO of Heirloom Cloud Corporation, appeared on the iHeart podcast CEOs You Should Know to share his insights on entrepreneurship and building a mission-driven startup. Weber discussed his journey in developing Heirloom, a secure cloud platform designed to preserve the world’s stories by digitizing and storing precious memories, such as photos and videos, for generations to come. He emphasized the importance of privacy, security, and emotional well-being in the digital age, reflecting on the company’s vision to create a healthier alternative to traditional social media. Weber also highlighted the challenges and rewards of founding a startup, particularly one that aims to provide a meaningful service to families and individuals while focusing on long-term legacy preservation.
Andrew Burge:
iHeartMedia Presents CEOs you should know. Welcome to iHeart Radio's CEOs You Should Know of the Lowcountry. I'm Andrew Burge, and we're here with a product and a service right here in the Lowcountry that I think everybody's going to want to learn about and need. Currently, I’m with Geoff Weber from Heirloom.
Geoff Weber:
Hey, Andrew, thanks for having us here. This is great!
Andrew Burge:
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 Heirloom represents.
Geoff Weber:
Yeah, good question. A lot of people say, oh, I've seen you guys on television. 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 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 Lowcountry, 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 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.
Andrew Burge:
So you get a USB or a DVD back and it's like, hey, here's something else you could lose, right?
Geoff Weber:
Yeah, so we just, 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.
Andrew Burge:
She's definitely on social media. She is the captain of the video's grandchildren.
Geoff Weber:
Yes, yes, we have many, many thousands of hours of streaming video on Heirloom. We expect to pass the amount of original video on Heirloom than what's currently on Netflix by next year.
Andrew Burge:
So that's so interesting. See, you've got a guy from Facebook. Right, your co-founder from Facebook and you've got a heavily decorated founder Geoff Weber. I mean, looking at your background, I want to learn a little bit about your trajectory to Heirloom 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 service of it being in the cloud, it being forever being able to share it for free. Correct, exactly, Heirloom is free?
Geoff Weber:
The service is, well, that you pay to have it digitized, but the actual streaming is free.
Andrew Burge:
Right, that's amazing. So background in intelligence, the Navy, broken two world records, long distance runner, SEAL team eight. Yeah, yeah, tell us about your trajectory, Like, how did this come about? This idea?
Geoff Weber:
Boy, lots of changes. I'm always pivoting, always always pivoting. I think a major pivot in my life was September 11th. Man, I flashed back, and so that was, hey, honey, I'm gonna do something different and so I wanted to serve our nation. I'm led off to Navy Officer Candidate School to go through this intelligence program and there I meet the guy who's now my co founder. He’s 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 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 to do with all this stuff?
Andrew Burge:
This is crazy!
Geoff Weber:
And she picked up a VHS tape from 1990 and said, this is our wedding video. I told you to make copies of this. And that was another pivotal moment, you know, there's a problem. I'm going to see if I can solve this.
Andrew Burge:
Necessity breeds 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.
Geoff Weber:
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’ve got to mail it to them!
Andrew Burge:
This is wrong.
Geoff Weber:
This was after 2006 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 DVD. Can you help me get my memories on the cloud? And so it was a couple of years ago my co-founder and I developed Heirloom. He was in Silicon Valley, and I was in Washington, DC, 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!
Andrew Burge:
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 have 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?
Geoff Weber:
Well, Andrew, what I did first was probably not the right thing. I'm hard 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 search engine optimization (SEO). What 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.
Andrew Burge:
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.
Geoff Weber:
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 Lowcountry, here in Mount Pleasant, the Harbor Entrepreneur Center… a plug for them. If you are in the Lowcountry, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur, reach out to the Harbor. They'll give 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 Harbor.
Andrew Burge:
So say that again for if that's a good resource, the Harbor Entrepreneur Center?
Geoff Weber:
Yes, the Harbor Entrepreneur Center 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. Me and my co-founder, being Gen-X, were a little bit older than 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.
Andrew Burge:
Well, speaking of plugs, we always like to ask, what do you read? Is there anything you enjoy reading? Is there anything in particular?
Geoff Weber:
Wow, And that's a great question! One of my mentors was the guy that wrote the book “The Greatest Salesman in the World”, Og 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 our youth. It's fascinating. 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 read books like “The Anxious Generation”. Boy, several others you definitely need to read. I’ve got a long list. I don't know how much time we have to talk about books, but I would say “The Greatest Salesman in the World” is good to start with.
Andrew Burge:
Love it. So when you talk about that book being the effect of social media, you're still doing research on how to optimize that company. 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 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?
Geoff Weber:
It's 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 Lowcountry when someone comes into our office and drops off a tub of old VHS cassettes and then they come back to pick it up and they say, this was great last week! We all sat around, we streamed, we cast my phone to the big screen in the living room. We were sitting around and we were laughing and crying, and we realized that we touched something that was incredibly powerful. It was like the old days of Facebook, remember “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. And so you really don't have a thousand friends, there's maybe a hundred, but we want to better connect you with those people. 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.
Andrew Burge:
I think that there's a huge majority of people on social media. I know I'm one of them that holds 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 about that. That's interesting.
Geoff Weber:
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 Dropbox or Google Photos, and basically you authenticate yourself with your with that platforms, use their name and platform, and it will take a copy of it and put it all into Heirloom 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.
Andrew Burge:
That's awesome. 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.
Geoff Weber:
So, that is not our baby. Amazon Web Services (AWS) created a piece of artificial intelligence called Textract.It has 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 identification and so we've had speech to text for many years now, but the ability to actually voice-print someone and so it can recognize a 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 that person is, and I say, that's my mom, that's Carol Weber, and so everything else in my archives, it'll identify her name. And so then it's really easy on Heirloom to say, hey, Heirloom, find mom saying happy birthday, Geoff, 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 want to better connect the world to their memories.
Andrew Burge:
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.
Geoff Weber:
It's tedious, and so there are many problems that we're trying to solve. This is like the old days of Google. They were also inspired, you know, how do we index the world? And 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 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.
Andrew Burge:
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 you are most excited about with Heirloom?
Geoff Weber:
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 pay anything to store it, and so we want to delight consumers globally with a model that they can control. And so instead 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 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 camcorder when my daughter was born, you know, with tapes, and it was always arduous and problematic, and much of it was large technology companies with planned obsolescence say we're going to make your data always portable. And so with Heirloom, everything is in accordance with the International Standards Organization. It's your data, you own it. We're simply stewards of your data.
Andrew Burge:
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?
Geoff Weber:
Yew, www.heirloom.cloud. If you are in the Lowcountry, come visit us at 11 eWall Street in Mount Pleasant, nine to five Monday through Friday. Bring us your problems. We love it. Old boxes and bins and tubs of photos. We ask 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 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 photos and video reels. Do you know what's on them? Are your memories safe? They're not safe, even on your DVDs and your flash drives. They're not safe from fires, floods, or media failures. Make them always available on Heirloom's cloud. So I love this statistic, with the durability of Heirloom, 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 bomb and we lose that data center, as horrible as that might be, you're never going to lose your memories. And so you are 411 times more likely to get struck by a meteor than lose a single file on Heirloom. We want to help you keep your memories safe forever, and so please find us here in the Lowcountry. We'd love to serve you. And if you're listening from elsewhere, or your parents or grandparents live elsewhere, we’re 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 Lowcountry. A couple days later, it's streaming on your phone and it's always safe.
Andrew Burge:
How often do DVDs get scratched?
Geoff Weber:
Oh, they’re not safe. They are not that safe. I will tell you that we have a 92% 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.
Andrew Burge:
Well, yea, if I got to tell you, thanks for the conversation. Thank you for your service and your co-founder’s service. We appreciate it.
Geoff Weber:
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.
Andrew Burge:
Awesome. Right here in the low Country, it's Heirloom! Geoff Weber, thanks for coming in.
Geoff Weber:
Thanks Andrew, cheers.
Andrew Burge:
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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