Kaustubh Kodag Based in Raleigh, NC
35.7796° N, 78.6382° W
Afero SF Visit
A sleek, mobile-first productivity app built for teams and individuals to manage tasks, collaborate, and stay focused.
Service
IOT
Release date
Mar 16, 2025
Client
Afero
Location
San Francisco, USA
Most students visit Silicon Valley to take photos in front of company logos.
We went inside.
On March 16th, NC State Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre took our cohort to Afero in Los Altos, California. We sat down with Joe Britt, Co-Founder and CEO, who started his career at Apple and has spent decades building infrastructure that most people never see but millions of homes depend on.
No slide deck. No corporate pitch. Just a founder being honest about what building a real company looks like.
Afero runs the IoT platform behind the smart home ecosystem at the largest home improvement retailer in the US. Their edge is security built at the silicon level, not patched on after the fact. They recently announced partnerships with Texas Instruments and Atmosic Technologies, both aimed at solving the hard tradeoffs in enterprise IoT: supply chain resilience, battery life, and verified trust at the chip level.
The biggest takeaway from Joe was simple: the best founders understood the problem clearly before it became a trend.
That stuck with me.
Our process began with user interviews to understand productivity pain points—like task overload, lack of prioritization, and poor collaboration tools. These insights guided the creation of intuitive flows and a minimal interface that supports focus, not distraction.
We also worked closely with QuickTask’s internal dev team to ensure seamless handoff using structured design systems, scalable components, and export-ready specs. Usability testing helped refine microinteractions, especially in the task management flow and calendar views.
