Founders Everywhere: Craig Hering
Craig Hering is the co-founder and CEO of Suite Studios, an intelligent platform making cloud-based post-production easy and accessible to all post-production studios.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Your favorite movies, TV series, commercials, videos, and podcasts wouldn’t exist without the very important post-production process. Creatives in this field are always looking for the best ways to collaborate and work more efficiently. Suite Studios is making the post-production process simple and accessible with their intelligent, cloud-based platform. Co-founder and CEO Craig Hering worked in a production studio for 5 years and as the Creative Director he saw that there was a problem with workflow, not just internally, but in the industry in general. His brother and co-founder Michael Hering introduced him to the world of cloud computing and that’s when Craig realized there was the technology out there to solve the post-production problems he was facing. The brothers joined up with co-founder James Maxwell to get Suite Studios off the ground. The company was founded about a year ago and they were recently named one of the Top 22 Startups to Watch in 2022 by the Denver Business Journal.
Experience Post-Production’s new workflow!
What's Suite Studios’ “Northstar”?
We're making it easy for post-production studios to shift towards a fully cloud-based workflow. Suite Studios is removing the need for on-premise computing and storage by replacing them with virtual workstations and cloud-based NAS (network-attached storage) servers. Conceptually speaking, it’s similar to a remote desktop, except with these high-powered, cloud-based computers, because video editing requires a lot of computer power. Think of a Google Doc, where you see other people typing and editing in real time. Suite Studios is like that but with Adobe Premiere, Davinci, etc, so you can imagine how amazing that is! Our industry is super collaborative in nature and everyone who’s creating is working with other agencies and freelancers. In order to collaborate you need to access huge files, which are hard to share. Once you move the processing to these cloud-based workstations, there’s no more sending hard drives in the mail or file transfers. Now you can say, “here’s the link to access everything,” and start working.
What sets Suite Studios apart from competitors?
Our biggest differentiator is that we’re really building specifically for creatives. There are other companies that are very much coming at this from the technical side of things. But for many creatives, a lot of the solutions out there are just way too technical. We’re creating a product where creatives don’t need to understand anything going on behind the scenes, they can just get to creating content more efficiently.
How does Suite Studios inspire “customer love”?
The product and the experience really speaks for itself. I still remember the first time editing remotely across the country in real time - that was incredible! So many people who have tried our product tell us it’s exactly what they needed.
Any book recommendations?
One book that I really love is Zero to One by Peter Thiel.
Do you have any advice for up-and-coming founders?
My advice is go do it! Why not!? It can be pretty scary to go from that full-time, secure, salary job and transition into founding a startup. But, you have to go try it, especially if you believe in it. I’d had other projects before this, but when I got the idea for Suite Studios it was very clear to me I had to give my 100% to this. If you ever have that same feeling, just go for it!
Tell us something interesting about your startup journey.
All of this came from snowboarding! I got into video because I used to ride for a bunch of companies, and as part of that you make videos for those companies. That’s where video entered my life and it happened really early. Basically my video talent kept going and my snowboarding talent plateaued. I decided to focus on video and that’s how I got into the post-production world, which has led to the creation of Suite Studios.
