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When his son turned 16, Geoff Weber suggested he apply for a job at a local golf club. Being on the autism spectrum, his son worried about his ability to show up to work each day and the risk of potential disappointment.
The challenge ignited the idea of a home-based business.
During their conversation, Weber turned to notice a stack of boxes in the corner, filled with memories his friends and family had asked him to digitalize. Weber was still working in his previous job as an intelligence officer, so he told his son to turn that into a home business.
The two set up a small prototype facility in their basement, ran an advertisement on Facebook, and began digitizing, Weber said.
Today, Heirloom Cloud employs 13 people in the Charleston region through Berkely County and Mount Pleasant. Within the past two years established in the two locations, it has reached over 1,000 orders, Weber said.
Geoff Weber is co-founder of Heirloom Cloud. (Photo/Heirloom Cloud)
The company focuses on digitalizing media to an accessible cloud or USB so clients can access their data and memories on their phone instead of VCRs, floppy disks, old phones, chips, DVDs, photo albums and more, Weber said.
Weber is now retired from his intelligence job, running the digital company with his co-founder, John Rahaghi, at 11 eWall St. in Mount Pleasant. Together, the pair invested $150,000 to originally launch the company.
Heirloom has recently hired its fifth employee on the neurodiversity spectrum, Weber said. To him, neurodiversity opportunities are personal, considering his youngest son’s experience. Weber’s son continues to work for Heirloom on the digital marketing team.
“We take a strength-based approach to neurodiversity,” Weber said. “Some people may do these DEI initiatives to sound good. No, no, I want people with autism working at Heirloom because they are phenomenal.”
Heirloom also employs another distinct group
Within Weber’s goal to grow Heirloom to 200 employees, he anticipates half to be on the autism spectrum, hoping to reduce the roughly 80% unemployment rate of adults with autism.
In addition to a drive to increase neurodiverse employment rates, Weber said Heirloom received a Gold Standard award from the South Carolina Department of Veteran Affairs as a military friendly employer, Weber and Rahaghi being veterans themselves.
The company recently trained and hired six veterans into the tech company, Weber said. The percentage of veterans that Heirloom has hired beats all other counties in South Carolina.
John Rahagi is co-founder of Heirloom Cloud. (Photo/Heirloom Cloud)
“Veterans, folk in the neurodiverse spectrum … we see the opportunity to continue to make that really big impact to both help the company and to help an underserved community,” Rahaghi said. “Being veterans ourselves, we know what it’s like to transition and to try and get set up in the civilian world.”
Weber said 40 years ago, people were transferring their memories to VHS tapes and 20 years ago, they were transferring those VHS tapes to CDs. Today, Heirloom transfers those CDs to the digital world.
Over the next couple years, Rahaghi said Heirloom hopes to be able to consolidate all the memories with as much automation as possible, taking advantage of machine learning and AI for photos and videos.
“Volume, variety and velocity of data has been increasing dramatically,” Weber said. “So, it’s really cool to put data into an AI driven platform, but before AI can do anything with that data, you have to digitize it, and that’s really become our niche.”
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Heirloom customers purchase a box from the company and fill it with their personal media before shipping it back to the Mount Pleasant location, Weber said.
“There’s another company in the United States … people will put everything into one of their boxes, like our customers, and then they transferred to a DVD,” Weber said. “When we founded this company, we’re like ‘no.’ There’s no DVD player on your iPad, so we’re going to make it so it streams and it’s forever safe.”
What separates Heirloom from the crowd
The data infrastructure that Heirloom uses is the same as Netflix as well as the U.S. Cental Intelligence Agency, Weber said, having formally worked with the CIA. Both organizations are running from Amazon web services and storage.
Different from other large storage companies such as Google or iCloud, Weber said once customer content is digitalized, Heirloom no longer has access to it and does not watch or analyze it during its digitalization.
In addition to data storage that is individually focused, Heirloom is also beginning to work with government agencies for data storage, Rahaghi said. For counties such as Charleston County, they would work to digitalize old media to be more accessible to citizens.
“We’re really focused on is creating that type of experience where people cannot only store, but they can have easy access to all these priceless memories at any time through any device to share with friends and family, and to be able to keep doing that for new memories,” Rahaghi said.
Both Rahaghi and Weber said they hope one day to know people default to their Heirloom account to automatically share and capture photos. Weber said this is when he knows they will have “made it” with their company.
