They Had Two Weeks of Money Left. One Product Hunt Launch Changed Everything.

This is the story of Joe Thomas, Vinay Hiremath, and Shahed Khan, three people who built Loom from near bankruptcy to a $975 million acquisition by Atlassian, and what happened to each of them after.

Three People, Three Completely Different Paths

They were not of the same world. That turned out to be their greatest strength.

Joe Thomas came from a childhood in Indiana with no discernible way into tech. He studied economics at Indiana University. He knew that he didn't want to pursue an economics career. He then asked a friend to teach him Adobe Creative Suite after university. He used it to form a one-person web design company of his own before being taken on for a full-time role at a startup company named MediaPass, which he quickly knew he liked the style of. After 2 years of work, he felt he was ready to create a company of his own.

Vinay Hiremath was born in 1991. He dropped out of a University degree at the University of Illinois in his second year. He then went on to learn to code in Palo Alto to a level beyond superficial. At Backplane, the Silicon Valley startup at which Vinay worked after teaching himself to code, they didn't merely learn the web stack. They learned how to work all the way down, at microservices and finally data centre infrastructure, a skill he applied at the next company where he worked: Bertrand Serlet's Upthere, a startup that Serlet (the father of OS X) built in order to facilitate shared cloud data between users. He was able to build systems on a large scale long before he had any need to.

At Backplane, Vinay met Shahed Khan.

Shahed was a product designer. Where Joe's thinking process was based on product strategy and Vinay's was technical architecture, Shahed's was based on experience: how will the thing feel? What will someone see the first time they use this? Why will they come back? This meant that the product that the three of them were to build had to have a different feel from things built by engineers who treat design as an afterthought. This approach to design-first thinking is something we have seen repeatedly in the most successful startups, including how the three co-founders of Airtable spent three years perfecting their product before releasing it publicly.

Joe discovered Vinay and Shahed and rang them. He told them about an idea, and they listened. They sat down in front of a whiteboard of three possibilities and chose to build Loom.

The First Idea That Did Not Work

The company they started in 2015 wasn't actually called Loom. It was called Opentest.

The premise was simple. User testing tools of the time provided a huge volume of largely irrelevant and unhelpful feedback. What if you could get feedback directly from product experts? What if you could collect specific and targeted insights from people who knew what they were supposed to be looking at?

It was a sound premise. The product did not gain any traction.

Revenue didn't budge. The team was out of other ideas. But within Opentest, an afterthought feature was generating quite a lot of traction, which meant that the product it was meant to serve wasn't.

They had created a Chrome extension that simultaneously recorded the screen and camera and allowed instant sharing of the recorded video. It was designed for collecting user feedback. But everyone started using it to share things with their co-workers. They used it to get across concepts that would take 3 paragraphs via email. They used it because it was quicker, cleaner, and more human than anything else out there.

They looked at what was really working and shifted focus.

Two Weeks of Money and a Product Hunt Launch

Mid-2016: Loom had less than two weeks until its funds ran out.

They then separated the Chrome extension out from the Opentest product, built it into its own new standalone product named OpenVid and launched it on Product Hunt on June 30 2016. It got 2,500 signups on day one. "One day changed everything for us." The Product Hunt launch had led to Loom's first VC funding by the 1517 Fund. They then moved to San Francisco, renamed the product Loom. What had been an internal feature on a doomed user-testing tool had become a real product that had found its audience and a real company that had found its vision.

The crisis Loom found itself in was perhaps the most critical part of their story and the one that distinguished the companies that made it from those that didn't. This kind of pivot under pressure is not unique to Loom. Brian Long and Andrew Jones of Adaptive Security made a similar last-minute pivot ten days before their Y Combinator Demo Day, scrapping their original product entirely to build what would eventually become one of the fastest-growing startups in the US. Loom's team was sufficiently aware of its situation to be able to abandon what wasn't working for what was working, had the necessary technical expertise to respond quickly, and was sufficiently confident in its own abilities and in each other to make a tough call when it was running out of time and money.

What Each Founder Brought to the Product

Loom worked because three entirely different people, with entirely different expertise, were building the same thing.

Joe Thomas was the product owner. He understood that making people record a video instead of writing an email was a behavior change. That a behavior change product lived or died by design. If recording a Loom felt like work, it would never be used. And if it felt effortless, people would do it instead of writing the email they were about to send. All his product decisions flowed from that: Did it make the behavior easier or harder?

Vinay Hiremath was the technical owner. Video at scale is actually difficult. Encoding, compression, latency, across devices, immediate shareable links: each of these problems required the level of system design and deep engineering expertise that Vinay had spent years honing long before Loom existed. He did not just build a video recorder. He built the system on top of which the video recorder would feel instantaneous, reliable, and friction-free at millions of uses a day.

Shahed Khan was the design owner. His background as a trained product designer, as one of Loom's investors, Kleiner Perkins, wrote, was "the secret ingredient that makes people want to turn on their cameras." That's not trivial. Persuading someone to voluntarily show their face, in a work setting, for a quick message, necessitates a tool that feels secure, simple, and approachable. Shahed made it so. As we explored in our piece on brand building, the experience a user has with a product is what builds long-term trust, and Shahed understood this before most people in the industry had named it.

The Growth That Followed

In the months after its Product Hunt launch and the 1517 Fund seed round, Loom raised nearly $11 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins in February 2019.

Then the pandemic hit.

Hundreds of millions of people who had previously preferred in-person communication were forced to work remotely overnight. The problem that Loom had been trying to solve, how to have clarity and personalisation without being in the same room, was suddenly the number one problem of most of the world for most of working life. As we explored in our article on how AI is changing the way remote teams work, this shift permanently changed what people expected from their workplace communication tools, and Loom was already there with the answer.

The growth took off. Loom raised a $28 million Series B in 2020 and a $130 million Series C at a $1.5B valuation in 2021. The company officially became a unicorn in under 6 years.

By 2023, Loom had 25 million registered users across 400,000 companies in 230 countries. 1.5 billion minutes of video had been recorded on the platform. Brex, HubSpot, and tens of thousands of remote-first companies across every industry relied on Loom as part of their daily communication.

The Acquisition Nobody Regretted, and One Person Did Not Know What to Do With

In October 2023, Atlassian purchased Loom for $975 million, one of the largest exits in workplace productivity software history, and a remarkable journey for a company that was just weeks from running out of cash in 2016.

Joe Thomas continued as Head of Product Management for Loom within Atlassian, building out the product he spent eight years building from within the confines of a larger entity that had more capital and distribution.

Shahed Khan went from actively building Loom into the product he was instrumental in creating to one that was behind him post-acquisition.

Vinay Hiremath's post-acquisition story has become one of the most widely read founder essays of 2024. His blog post "I Am Rich and Have No Idea What to Do With My Life" was stark. He described being disoriented by having arrived at the destination he had worked a decade to reach, only for that destination to feel like an illusion of achievement. His parents were retired, which was the impetus for so much of what he built. He had the money and the freedom, but zero clue about his direction forward.

He was offered $60 million to remain CTO of Loom within Atlassian, but turned it down.

He broke off a relationship, attempted to transition into robotics, but the doors were shut, joined DOGE for four weeks, but decided it wasn't a fit, and took an unprepared solo expedition into the Himalayas, which led to severe altitude sickness.

"Everything feels like a side-quest, but not in an inspirational way," he wrote.

The reason the post did so well is due to the unflinching honesty in a world where almost no entrepreneur would admit that actually accomplishing their goals has not really answered the question that accomplishment was supposed to answer: that the money is there. Still, the identity built while building the thing cannot come with it. It's an irony that founders across the board face, from Euan Blair of Multiverse to others, who have spoken of the struggles and uncertainties involved in bringing something into the world that comes to mean the whole world to you.

Where They Are in 2026

Joe Thomas is currently working on getting Loom's async video technology into Atlassian's other tools, Jira, Confluence, and Trello, which is exactly what this acquisition was meant for: getting async video integrated natively into how development and product teams work, rather than having yet another disparate tool they have to work into their workflows.

Shahed Khan, meanwhile, returned to his roots and does work on product design and UX.

Vinay Hiremath returned to the building. He is now working on a new, stealth company, concluding after the mountains and the government and the crisis of existence that what he actually needed wasn't to get out of building things but to go back to building things.

"I needed to get back to ambiguity," he wrote at the close of his viral post. "Address my insecurities. Rediscover myself."

And that he is doing.

What the Loom Story Teaches Every Founder

The story of Loom teaches three overlooked lessons.

First, pivoting with no runway is what the best founders do. Two weeks of runway isn't usually the point when most founders realise the right product they should be building. Two weeks of runway usually means you're trying to survive, not thrive. Joe, Vinay, and Shahed noticed exactly what the users were doing and found the real product inside the one that wasn't working. The attention paid to users, not the market, or the technology, or the investment thesis, was what allowed them to pull through. This is the same lesson Eoin Hinchy of Tines learned over fifteen years working inside broken security systems before he finally built the solution: the problem has to be real and felt before the product can be right.

Second, complementary skill sets are more important than most founders confess. Joe, Vinay, and Shahed are not interchangeable. All three had a domain they were masters of and trusted each other on. Most founding teams fail due to disputes over product strategy, technical design or UX design. These three survived because they did not overlap domains. We saw the same dynamic at work in how Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang divided responsibility at Deel, where one owned the market and the other owned the product, and neither crossed into the other's territory.

Third, the exit is not the end. Vinay's piece is the most genuine narrative ever written by a startup CEO detailing what takes place after you sell out. You have been paid. Your calendar has been cleared. And the issue you have ignored since day one about working at that office now becomes inevitable. It serves as a reminder that while building a business, you're also building an identity, which doesn't just magically shift to the next venture.

Final Thought: The Chrome Extension That Changed Workplace Communication

Loom started as part of an abandoned product. It lived on because 3 people paid close enough attention to see what was actually working inside the thing that wasn't. It turned into a product with 25,000,000 users in 230 countries. They sold it for nearly a billion dollars.

Then one of them realised he didn't know what to do next.

That is the full story of Loom. Not just the funding rounds or the acquisition headline. The story from first build to last, including the part where the money comes in, the schedule frees up, and the question that was always waiting beneath the surface of building is finally not ignorable.