Your Hard Drive Is the Cloud: OWC and Strada on Rethinking Remote Workflow

Michael Cioni built four startups, and each one taught him something the last one couldn't. What he learned at Frame.io and Adobe was that the cloud, despite its flexibility, was too expensive and the internet too slow for the workflows creative professionals actually live in. That insight became Strada: a peer-to-peer network that lets you share files directly off your own local storage — OWC drives included — without uploading them to a cloud service first. Larry O'Connor saw it in motion at IBC and recognized immediately what Strada represented: a practical, powerful use case for OWC hardware that cloud infrastructure simply can't replicate. He describes a generation of professionals who have been told cloud is the answer for everything, sometimes at the expense of understanding what on-premise storage can actually do. OWC has consistently pushed back against that narrative, and the partnership with Strada is the clearest expression of that position yet. The conversation covers how Strada evolved — starting with AI-assisted media tagging, shifting to peer-to-peer file access after direct customer feedback, and planning to bring AI enrichment back in 2027, this time running locally on your own hardware. Michael explains why building the company in public, with weekly live streams and open beta testing, wasn't just a marketing strategy — it was a financial necessity for a startup that can't afford to build the wrong thing. Larry echoes this, noting that customer-first thinking has always driven OWC's product decisions. They also discuss storage pricing volatility, the real-world limits of internet bandwidth for high-resolution formats like 8K RED RAW, and what it means to give creative professionals access to that footage remotely in seconds — without requiring a full upload first. 👉 If this conversation sparked something, subscribe so you don't miss what's next. Drop a comment — are you still paying for cloud storage you wish you could replace? Larry and Michael would probably love to hear it. Strada: https://strata.tech OWC: https://www.owc.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.