He looked at the beige box wheezing in the apartment window and refused to accept it. Co-founder and co-CEO of Windmill, the company that made air conditioning something you'd actually want to look at.
Most people accept the window AC. Danny Mayer started a company because he wouldn't.
Right now Danny Mayer spends his days running Windmill, the air-care brand the press keeps calling "the iPhone of air conditioning." He shares the co-CEO title with his brother Mike, and together they have spent the last several years doing something nobody asked a Harvard economics graduate to do: caring deeply about the machine bolted into your window.
Windmill started as a single smart window unit and has since grown into a connected suite - air purifiers, an air circulator and fan, auto-refilling filters, app and voice control, a subscription that quietly mails you replacements before you remember to reorder. The throughline is an idea that sounds obvious only after someone has the nerve to act on it: the appliances we live closest to should be quiet, efficient, a little more eco-honest, and pleasant to look at.
The detail that tells you everything: the unit's LED display fades out after about sixty seconds. Most hardware shouts for your attention. Windmill's design philosophy is to disappear into the room. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the kind of choice that separates a product company from a parts company.
Our love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the AC had festered over decades.— The Windmill founding thesis
August 2018. A hot morning in New York. Mike was helping Danny haul boxes up the stairs of a Nolita walk-up, and the apartment's window AC was busted. Somewhere between the heat and the frustration, a conversation started - about how the window-AC market had sat decades behind the times, and how the whole experience, from buying to installing to living with the thing, was quietly miserable.
They pulled in a third person who happened to be perfect for it: Ryan Figlia, a childhood friend nicknamed "Dr. Cool," who descends from a New York City air-conditioning family and knew manufacturing and supply chains cold. Two brothers and an industry insider decided they could do better. They spent roughly two years researching and building before launching in June 2020 - and within 24 hours had a waitlist of thousands.
Danny's half of the partnership is the finance and operations engine. Before Windmill he spent a decade moving through banking, private equity and health-tech leadership - the unglamorous discipline that keeps an ambitious hardware company from running out of runway.
Brother and co-CEO. Product design, marketing and customer experience.
Co-founder. Third-generation AC expert. Manufacturing and supply chain.
Co-founder and co-CEO. Finance, operations and the numbers behind the build.
Soft curves, simple lines, a real bamboo finish option, and a display that dims itself. Built to vanish into a room, not dominate it.
An efficient compressor, a more eco-responsible refrigerant, airflow optimization, dual filtration with medical-grade HEPA and activated carbon, plus carbon-offset partnerships.
WiFi and voice control, a magnetic front cover, free shipping, TaskRabbit installation, and filters that auto-refill by subscription.
Windmill is nicknamed "the iPhone of air conditioning" - a comparison the team leans into.
Danny is based in Miami, which is a fitting home base for someone in the business of staying cool.
Co-founder Ryan Figlia goes by "Dr. Cool" and comes from NYC air-conditioning royalty.
The company grew from one window unit into purifiers, fans, filters and a broader smart-air suite.
Before founding a hardware brand, Danny was CFO and Chief of Staff at a health-tech company.
The founding lesson, per the team: don't wait until everything is just right - launch and learn.
The mission is simple to say and hard to do: modernize home air and comfort - and make products people are genuinely glad to live with.— On Windmill's ambition