Shahed Khan

A September 16, 2011 NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry Chicago story gives his age as 16 and describes Viatask, which he was running: an errand-running business that matches people who need tasks done with people willing to do them, described as a Craigslist for errand-running. The story writes that he got the idea from the Bravo television show “Million Dollar Listings,” in which a client hired someone to buy a home, and that since he came up with the business idea in June of that year he had been traveling, attending conferences and scheduling meetings with venture capitalists. Viatask was then in pre-launch, with 4,500 users interested in using the site, 220 of them hand-picked to beta test, and requests from 80 to 120 users each week; it was to launch in Chicago in October, with plans to expand to other cities.⁠[1]

In the story he said: “I'm texting my coworker during class, and getting yelled at by my teachers.” The story writes that when it called him he was heading from one meeting to the next during the 2011 TechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch Disrupt is a technology and startup conference organized by TechCrunch, combining interviews, product demonstrations, startup competitions and industry networking for founders and investors.Open the full entry conference; he said: “Here, people don't look at my age as a factor. They call me the Viatask guy.”⁠[1]

A 2015 TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry profile writes that as a teenager he spent most of his spare time online teaching himself site design, making money here and there by sprucing up the online storefronts and other web pages of people who came across his Twitter profile. At 16, inspired by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry’s 20 Under 20 program (which, the profile explains, invites teenagers to forgo school and work on a big idea in exchange for a $100,000 stipend), he started by designing swag for small businesses, then found a co-founder online and cold-called investors about the pair’s planned business, Viatask, which was to let people outsource their errands in the manner of TaskRabbit.⁠[2]

The profile writes that Terry Howerton, CEO of the Chicago-based startup incubator TechNexus, provided him with office space and a ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco; on that 2011 trip he slept on a stranger’s couch, wore a green shirt the same color as the TechCrunch staff’s, and slipped backstage to mingle with the investors Ron Conway, Kevin RoseKevin RoseKevin Rose is an American internet entrepreneur, a co-founder of Digg and a co-founder of PROOF, and was involved in launching Moonbirds.Open the full entry and Mark Suster.⁠[2]

His personal profile on the advice platform Clarity reads “Founder Viatask, Silicon Valley Summit, MyStartupGear (Acquired '11),” describes him as a UI/UX designer and conference organizer, and gives his location as the Greater Chicago Area.⁠[3]

The 2015 TechCrunch profile writes that some press coverage followed, as did an on-stage appearance at South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2012; he says he was the youngest founder there.⁠[2]

The 2015 TechCrunch profile writes that a Y Combinator founder helped him land a job at the website-building company Weebly right out of high school; before that he had planned to attend Indiana University, and his parents are still keen on the idea. A 2019 TechCrunch article states that he had a stint as a product designer at the website builder Weebly; Kleiner Perkins’ case study describes him as a trained product designer.⁠[2][4][5]

The profile writes that a year later Mark Suster took his call and offered him a contract role as an analyst; Suster imagined it would last two months, but he spent 10 months at Suster’s Los Angeles venture firm, Upfront Ventures, leaving in April because he wanted to live in Northern CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, and by the summer he had been connected with NFX. The 2019 TechCrunch article also states that he worked at Upfront Ventures after Weebly, and Nathan Latka’s introduction to his 2019 interview describes him as a former analyst at the Los Angeles venture firm.⁠[2][4][6]

A 2017 Shaw Local article writes that in October 2015 the founders of Loom began having people test software and created a platform called The Expert Network, a network of product experts from tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Dropbox; to give feedback the experts had to record their screen, upload the recording and upload their notes, and the founders realized there was no simple way to do that, so they created a Chrome extension that lets people record their screen, use their microphone and leave video feedback.⁠[7]

The 2019 TechCrunch article writes that he, Joe Thomas and Vinay Hiremath first started Opentest, which let app makers get usability feedback from experts via video; after about six months and NFX’s accelerator, with their bootstrapped money running low, they realized that video messaging itself could be the business.⁠[4]

On November 8, 2015 TechCrunch published a profile by Connie LoizosConnie LoizosConnie Loizos is a technology journalist, founder of StrictlyVC and TechCrunch’s general manager and editor-in-chief since 2023.Open the full entry describing him as 20 years old and working as an entrepreneur-in-residence with a noted team of investors at NFX Guild, a new accelerator program in San Francisco; for the previous several months he had been supporting their portfolio companies, helping them host events, and pitching in on NFX’s next class of startups. Nathan Latka’s introduction to his 2019 interview likewise describes him as having worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at NFX.⁠[2][6]

The profile writes that he and three co-founders, all then working at other startups, were building enterprise software that lets companies get feedback on their product’s usability from product experts, such as a UX designer who had once built similar onboarding flows at SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry; the product was in alpha, and the team was signing up new clients to test it every day.⁠[2]

The profile writes that his extroverted nature, poise and beard lead many to believe he is at least five years older than he is; he still could not drink legally, and he says he has no friends his age or younger. His network includes mentors such as Mark Suster, the venture capitalist George Zachary of CRV, and NFX’s founders James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky, who sold their business Tickle to the jobs giant Monster for $100 million in 2004.⁠[2]

The profile writes that he says he might still decide to go to college some day. Over coffee at a San Francisco café he said: “I do think people underestimate what it means to drop out”; in his view dropping out makes sense only in some cases, such as getting a job offer from UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry or GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry when the goal was to graduate and get a job at Uber or Google anyway, or being convinced that it creates more opportunities for oneself.⁠[2]

A 2021 Product Hunt article writes that during what it calls “a fundraising bubble” in early 2016 the co-founders borrowed $10,000 to stay afloat; he saw not being able to raise money as a positive, because it let the team be scrappy, iterate constantly and focus on product-market fit. The article writes that Loom first launched on Product Hunt as “Open test” in 2016, initially a recording tool focused on usability testing, that the first post brought the team 3,000 users and that the post-launch uptick lasted about a week and a half; just 100 days later, with more than 12,800 users, he posted an iteration called Openvid 2.0, which then became Loom. A 2022 Product Hunt article writes instead that when Loom, then Openvid, launched on Product Hunt in 2016, 3,000 people signed up within the first 24 hours.⁠[8][9]

The 2021 Product Hunt article writes that one conversation with a remote HubSpot employee named Scott led the team to see remote work as a strong use case, and that continued customer feedback led Loom to pivot from a marketplace to a SaaS model.⁠[8]

On when Loom started, the 2019 TechCrunch article writes that he, Joe Thomas and Vinay Hiremath launched Loom in mid-2016; in a 2019 interview he said that Loom used to be called OpenTest, a completely different idea, that the product launched in June 2016, and that the team was basically bootstrapping and lived in an apartment in San Mateo; Joe Thomas recalled in November 2019 that he, Vinay Hiremath and Shahed Khan pushed out Loom’s first pixels and code from a tiny apartment in San Mateo; Kleiner Perkins’ case study writes that the idea for Loom was brought to life in 2015 by Joe Thomas, Vinay Hiremath and Shahed Khan; the 2017 Shaw Local article writes that Vinay Hiremath founded Loom in July 2016; Atlassian’s 2023 announcement gives 2016 as the year Loom was founded.⁠[4][6][10][5][7][11]

Kleiner Perkins’ case study spells his name “Sahed Khan” in its list of founders and “Shahed Khan” in the text; it writes that Joe Thomas recruited Vinay Hiremath and Khan, and that the three saw an opportunity in improving asynchronous communication with a design-forward approach; Joe Thomas credits Khan’s design background with making people truly enjoy using Loom and want to turn on their cameras and talk to their peers and customers. The 2022 Product Hunt article calls the three co-founders best friends turned co-founders.⁠[5][9]

On June 16, 2017 the Thiel Foundation named the 25 members of the 2017 class of Thiel Fellows, and he was among them. The announcement states that the two-year Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry provides young entrepreneurs with $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology entrepreneurs, investors and scientists. The list spells his name “Shahed Kahn” and gives him as from San Francisco, California, with the project Loom in the field “SaaS,” describing him: “Shahed founded Loom, a cloud-based video messaging service,” used by more than 200,000 employees at companies including HubSpot, Uber and Nielsen.⁠[12][12]

A December 27, 2017 Shaw Local article writes that Vinay Hiremath was named to the enterprise technology category of Forbes’ 2018 30 Under 30 list, and that Loom’s co-founders Joe Thomas and Shahed Khan were also named. The article writes that Loom’s Chrome extension had been used by more than 250,000 employees at companies including AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry, Dropbox and Zendesk, and that, per ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry, the company had 10 employees and $3.7 million in funding.⁠[7]

On February 19, 2019 TechCrunch covered Loom’s $11 million Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Slack, Cue founder Daniel Gross and the actor Jared Leto; an earlier pre-seed and seed round had amounted to $4 million, bringing total funding to $15 million, and Ilya Fushman, formerly Dropbox’s head of product and corporate development, was joining Loom’s board. The article writes that Loom had grown to a 16-person team and, in the two and a half years since launch, had signed up 1.1 million users from 18,000 companies, and that this was as a Chrome extension alone; the new Pro version, at $10 per user per month, adds HD recording, calls-to-action, clip editing, live annotation and analytics including viewer watch time.⁠[4]

In the article, speaking as co-founder, he said: “Loom is the next best thing to being there,” and: “We believe instantly sharable video can foster more authentic communication between people at work.” He described sales teams using Loom to send personalized messages to leads to close more deals, marketing teams using it to walk through internal presentations and social posts, and product teams using it to capture bugs and stand-ups. Of Slack, he said that “they’re trying to be the hub of text-based communication.”⁠[4]

The same day, in an interview with Nathan Latka, he said that as of February 19 Loom had just launched its first premium product, Loom Pro, at $10 per user per month, and expected 3% to 4% of existing active users to convert; Loom had about 1.1 million registered users at about 21,000 companies and about 200,000 monthly active users, counting as active anyone who records, comments or reacts with emojis. He said the company had raised just under $14 million across a pre-seed, a seed and the $11 million Series A, about $3 million of it before the Series A; the Series A was led by Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman, it took about two weeks from initial meetings to a term sheet, the company had about eight months of burn when it began planning the raise, and its monthly burn was “above $100,000.”⁠[6]

In the interview he said that half of the 16-person team was remote across Europe and Canada, with the DevOps engineer in Omaha, NebraskaNebraskaNebraska is a state of the United States bordered by South Dakota to the north, Iowa and Missouri to the east, Kansas to the south, and Colorado to the southwest, with its panhandle bordering Wyoming to the west; its capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha. It was admitted to the Union on March 1, 1867, as the 37th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 1,961,504.Open the full entry, and half in San Francisco; Loom had done no paid marketing and grew through word of mouth and the product’s virality, having run a $5 Loom credit for each referral at around 100,000 to 200,000 users; he said “conversations about selling the company have not been a topic here,” though companies similar to Monday had reached out, some of which had tried to acquire Loom; asked whether Monday’s founder had offered to acquire Loom, he said no.⁠[6]

On November 26, 2019 Joe Thomas wrote on Loom’s blog that the company had raised a $30 million Series B in October, led by Andrew Reed of Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry; Loom then had more than 1.8 million people at 50,000 companies sharing and watching more than 15 million minutes of video a month, and a team of 45. Under the heading “Some bittersweet news,” as “One last big change,” the post states: “Shahed, our co-founder, has decided to step back from Loom day-to-day to focus on something new,” and adds that he remains a close friend and advisor.⁠[10]

A later update to the post states that since that fundraise in October 2019 Loom had upsized its Series B by $28.75 million, in a round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Coatue, bringing its total funding to $73 million.⁠[10]

A March 26, 2021 Product Hunt article writes that, as a co-founder of Loom, he was the guest at Product Hunt’s weekly Clubhouse round-up the week before and described how Loom grew: the team tracked everything, including why people used Loom, where they dropped off and why, and the co-founders took turns on support shifts in Intercom; recordings had been mirrored while recording and flipped once finished, and when the team tried keeping the mirrored state in the final recording, more people kept their cameras on; finding that users did not see value until their video received its first view, it measured adoption starting from a user’s second video; inspired by LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry’s profile-view feature, it created anonymized notifications along the lines of “someone has viewed your video,” and built workspaces so an entire design team could work in the same space. He recalled that in the early days he “was basically just begging people to use the product for free” and spent months hounding people to use it. The article states that Loom had by then raised $73 million; his favorite product was Italic, an e-commerce store selling unbranded luxury goods from the manufacturers behind well-known brands.⁠[8]

On January 25, 2022 Sriram Krishnan of Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry announced that the firm was leading a $23 million funding round for Prologue and that he was joining its board. The post describes Prologue as bringing together two brands, Product Hunt and Hyper, with the aim of a flywheel that attracts, funds and amplifies the best early-stage startups, and Hyper as a $60 million early-stage venture firm focused on finding and funding a small group of exceptional founders; introducing the founders of Prologue and the team around them, it names him as “most recently the co-founder of Loom” and writes that Andreessen Horowitz built a relationship with him and the team while leading Loom’s $130 million Series C; the same passage introduces Ashley Higgins, CEO of Product Hunt, and Josh Buckley.⁠[13]

On February 9, 2022 the Indie Hackers podcast released episode 244, introducing him as the co-founder of Loom and an investor at Hyper; the episode description states that it covers his first business failure at 16 and the many iterations Loom went through before it caught fire.⁠[14]

An August 15, 2022 Product Hunt article writes that earlier that year he had departed Loom to step back into venture capital; he co-founded Prologue, a technology holding company made up of Product Hunt and the early-stage venture firm Hyper, with Josh Buckley and Patrick Olden, and as a general partner at Hyper he helps other founders launch their products and careers. On when he left Loom, Joe Thomas wrote in November 2019 that he had stepped back from Loom’s day-to-day work, while this article places his departure from Loom in 2022.⁠[9][10]

In the article he discusses Loom’s launches on Product Hunt: it is important to understand what makes a product inherently novel; many people write too much in their first post, while a clear launch page “helped us a lot in getting the skeptics to click into the post”; after talking to users and launching, the team realized there was not enough brand trust in the product, so it made sure to get back to everyone and also recorded Loom videos answering them personally; and startups should be “consistently launching their products.” He said that launching on Twitter can work for someone with a strong following, but that the Product Hunt community “is also just a very positive community”; that more than $200 billion in startup valuations first appeared on Product Hunt; that there is “no better option” for launching; and that combining Hyper and Product Hunt gives “strong competitive advantages to identify and fund the best founders.”⁠[9]

On October 12, 2023 Atlassian announced that it would acquire Loom, the company he co-founded, for about $975 million, inclusive of Loom’s cash balance and subject to customary adjustments, about $880 million of it in cash and the rest in Atlassian equity awards subject to vesting, with closing expected in Atlassian’s third quarter of fiscal 2024. The announcement states that Loom had more than 25 million users and more than 200,000 customers, and that its business users recorded almost 5 million videos a month.⁠[11]

The 2015 TechCrunch profile writes that he is the youngest child of Pakistani and Indian immigrant parents.⁠[2]

In the February 2019 interview with Nathan Latka he said he was 23, not married, with no children, and slept about seven hours a night; his favorite tool was Notion, and he recommended Nir Eyal’s book Hooked, saying it was a big driver of how the team thought about growth. He also said “I'm following Naval pretty closely” and “that being a founder is very, very tough.”⁠[6]

Loom: Official website: https://www.loom.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

X: Public account: https://x.com/_shahedk (opens in a new window).⁠[14]