Podcasts about Katerra

Omar Zhan started a Monthly AEC Podcast Digest called, "Voice of Construction" to help AEC professionals find the best podcast episodes to help them learn about the topics they are interested in. I was able to sit down with Omar to talk about his time at Katerra, Rivian and his journey through the AEC industry. Omar is now working on a project called Surfaice which is an AI tool for repeatable project management. We also got to touch on marketing in the AEC industry, clean energy, and even how the pyramids were built. Thanks for checking it out and please let me know what you thought!

Why is there so much bespoke design happening with real estate development projects? What is meant by design productization? Why have some companies championed vertically integrated construction? What was Katerra's business model and secret sauce? Why is innovating in construction tech so difficult? What are the challenges for VCs when considering non-software investments in construction tech? Why is the construction industry facing major challenges when manufacturers are investing in industrialized construction and developers/contractors want to do more prefab work? How is the labor crisis impacting the construction industry? Why is the transition to offsite construction critical in a shrinking labor pool environment? When evaluating the space, how are construction robots commonly segmented? Why is changing the established behavior of architects as it relates to building design and construction tech so challenging? What is a coordinated construction model? Why is the logistics related to offsite construction so tricky?Justin Schwaiger - General Manager US at Kope, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how observing the effects of earthquakes locally and internationally in his youth was a major factor in steering him into a career where he could impact and improve the built environment.

  Richard Harpham has more than 20 years of experience launching products into international markets for both start-up ventures and enterprise organizations. Currently he is a co-founder of Skema, Inc.    Richard has experienced most of the highs and lows of bringing disruptive technology to developers, designers and contractors. He was an early hire at the start-up, Revit Technology Corp, and then after Revit was acquired by Autodesk, spent nine years helping to bring it and a ‘new' concept of BIM to the U.S. market.    At the same time, he also led global marketing for AutoCAD and all Autodesk AEC products. More recently, at Katerra, he led software strategy to support transformational changes in how buildings are designed, engineered, and delivered.   Show Highlights   Skema founded to address challenges in design for constructability. Focus on modular, repeatable elements in building design. Tips to design with constructability in mind early in the process. Emphasis customer implementation and value experience over sales and marketing AI in Architecture and Construction applications are mostly narrow and specific. Skema uses machine learning and AI for design assistance and understanding visual aspects of previous designs. AI needed as a design assistant, not a replacement for human architects. Importance of asking the right questions about AI technology.   “Let's have the machine look after the things that aren't the inspirational and differentiated part of design, so that you can put more time into thinking about the quality and things that you bring as a designer that truly make the difference to the owner, the client, the occupier, and probably help you win more work and make more money in the process when you deliver the designs.” -Richard Harpham     Show Resource and Information Connect with Charlie Cichetti and GBES   GBES is excited our membership community is growing. Consider joining our membership community as members are given access to some of the guests on the podcasts that you can ask project questions. If you are preparing for an exam, there will be more assurance that you will pass your next exam, you will be given cliff notes if you are a member, and so much more. Go to to learn more about the 4 different levels of access to this one-of-a-kind career-advancing green building community!   If you truly enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave a positive rating and review on .  We have prepared more episodes for the upcoming weeks, so come by again next week! Thank you for tuning in to the !   Copyright © 2024 GBES

The home of great construction stories. We go behind the headlines to meet the people who envision, create and manage the built world. Brought to you by the Chartered Institute of Building.Got a topic you'd like us to cover? Email the podcast editor Rod Sweet rod@atompublishing.co.ukIn this episode:New-homes confidence crisis [01:20]In December, CIOB published results from a survey that showed an overwhelmingly negative public perception of new-build houses.It asked 2,000 UK adults what they thought, and 55% of them believed that old houses are better than new ones.32% described new-build housing as ‘poor-quality'.There is a new set of standards called the New Homes Quality Code that is supposed to hold builders accountable, but signing up to it is voluntary.CIOB recommends that government reviews this to consider making it mandatory.CM deputy editor Cristina Lago spoke to the report's author, the CIOB's David Parry, to find out what this all means.Get the CIOB report: https://www.ciob.org/industry/research/newbuilds Lego-style building system [09:51]A 96-unit apartment complex built with Lego-style, snap-together blocks has opened its doors to residents in Palm Springs, Florida.It was put up by a small crew of unskilled workers armed only with mallets and glue guns.The blocks are made from recycled plastic and glass fibre. Glued together, they form a monolithic structure that is impervious to water, mould, and termites, and can withstand 250mph winds. The material is lighter and stronger than concrete, and making the blocks produces a tiny fraction of the emissions concrete does.The company behind the system, Renco USA, spent 10 years in testing, research and development.In October they raised $18m in their first funding round to build a US factory with a view to making the system available across the country.Renco USA executive Patrick Murphy tells this month's 21CC Podcast how they did it, and why they're not like Katerra.Can project managers be coaches? [19:21]Dave Stitt FCIOB used to be hard as nails.A civil engineer, he came into the industry as a teenager and rose through the ranks at big UK contractors Taylor Woodrow, Birse, and Wates, thinking he had to be the toughest, meanest, and bossiest person on site.Then he reformatted his style after he found himself leading culture-change programmes at national construction firms.Now, he coaches construction leadership teams on team-building and people skills, and is convinced that construction managers should stop giving orders on site.Instead, they should coach.But how do you do that, and won't it lead to chaos? Hear Dave make his case.

Check out episode 246 from March of 2022. Forest and Zach were on the verge of launching Parspec. Well now they've been at it for a year-and-a-half and it sounds like it's going pretty well. With AI, customer feedback and a host of talented employees, Parspec is ready to provide you better access to data and to make your product search faster and easier. They're dangerously good at this and they're getting better and better. Forest Flager pursued a PhD and spent some time on the research and teaching team at Stanford University, followed by a stint at the technology driven off-site construction company Katerra, where he led the company's software and design automation efforts. Forest founded Parspec Inc. in 2020 with the mission of simplifying the process of discovering and sourcing the best available construction products and materials. Zach Mix leads Sales and Business Development for Parspec. After spending the past decade working for lighting & electrical companies including Green Creative, WattStopper, & ElectroRep, Zach is energized by providing top-tier software technology to help lighting & electrical companies perform their best. When he's not working, Zach switches to Dad-mode and enjoys time with his family. 

Brent Wadas is the CEO at BotBuilt, a Y-Combinator Construction technology company based in Durham, NC that is revolutionizing building homes with robots to address the labor shortage and housing affordability crisis. Brent served in the US Army in Afghanistan after 9/11, where he fulfilled his patriotic calling. BotBuilt employs a methodology that makes homebuilding less capital intensive, creating less waste and enabling a much more sustainable building process. Brent served over 10 years in the US Army as Assistant (to the) Regional Manager. Brent is an experienced business entrepreneur with a flair for achieving goals through actions and a passion for bringing dreams into focus.(1:34) - Brent Wadas' entrepreneurial & military journey(8:57) - What makes BotBuilt special(13:52) - Feature: CREx - Makes it easy to get data out of Yardi, Salesforce, and more.(15:15) - BotBuilt's factories: Durham, NC(16:56) - Lessons from Katerra's $2 billion saga(22:29) - Delivering a venture-scale return in Contech(25:51) - BotBuilt's unit economics & business model(31:49) - Contech adoption among homebuilders(34:40) - Collaboration Superpower: William "Wild Bill" Donovan (Head of the OSS, precursor to CIA) - Wiki (35:54) - Brent's 'Grand Daddy's' influence: 1st Scientific sharing agreement between USA & USSR

Roger Krulak, Founder and President of FullStack Modular, joins the show to discuss offsite construction and the processes of FullStack Modular. This is a wide-ranging conversation that you don't want to miss. We discuss the best process for design and construction, insights from a developer's perspective and how developers should rethink their approach, some of the missteps Katerra had and the subsequent perception of modular/offsite construction, media coverage of offsite construction, and so much more!FullStack Modular | Website | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | EmailThank you to our sponsors!Travel by Design, an original podcast from Marriott BonvoyBehind the façade of every world-class hotel, there's a story waiting to be heard. Join host Hamish Kilburn as he meets the architects, designers, and visionaries who dive deep into the craft of design and connect us to the world's most extraordinary travel experiences.Show Music:Intro - "Keep Calm and Chill" by SoundrollOutro - "Remember These Days," by Matt LargeIf you enjoy our content, you can check out similar content from our fellow creators at Gābl Media. Spaces Podcast Spaces Podcast website Spaces Podcast // Gābl Media All rights reserved

#cio #cloudcomputing #digitaltransformation This episode of CXOTalk explores business transformation from the perspective of Seagate's Chief Information Officer, Ravi Naik. He has a unique perspective on cloud technology because he is also Executive Vice President of the company's multicloud product offering.The conversation includes these topics:● On the CIO and IT strategy at Seagate● What is multi-cloud?● Why is multicloud important to enterprise cloud adoption?● On cloud vendor lock-in in the public cloud● On managing the dual roles of CIO and EVP of cloud services● How can CIOs overcome challenges to being business leaders?● On customer experience and the Chief Information Officer● How can cloud providers improve customer experience?● How do multicloud environments create business value?● How can CIOs be effective driving digital transformation?In his role as CIO, Ravi Naik is leading large transformative initiatives, leveraging ideas and platforms focused on future growth. With his passion for technology, as EVP of Lyve Cloud, he is pioneering the next chapter of innovation and leadership in Seagate storage services.Prior to joining Seagate in 2017, Ravi was the senior vice president of technology at Katerra, a startup revolutionising the construction industry by transforming the way buildings and spaces come to life. Before Katerra, in 2007 Ravi joined SanDisk to lead an enterprise-wide transformation initiative. Following the success of SanDisk transformation, he was appointed CIO, remaining with the organisation through its sale to Western Digital in 2016. Before that, he held leadership positions in Mercury Interactive, Hewlett Packard, and 3Com Corporation. Naik holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bombay in India.

Brian Potter is the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he discusses why the construction industry has been slow to industrialize and innovate.He explains why:* Construction isn't getting cheaper and faster,* We should have mile-high buildings and multi-layer non-intersecting roads,* “Ugly” modern buildings are simply the result of better architecture,* China is so great at building things,* Saudi Arabia's Line is a waste of resources,* Environmental review makes new construction expensive and delayed,* and much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.More really cool guests coming up; subscribe to find out about future episodes!You may also enjoy my interviews with Tyler Cowen (about talent, collapse, & pessimism of sex). Charles Mann (about the Americas before Columbus & scientific wizardry), and Austin Vernon about (Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you share it, post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(0:00) - Why Saudi Arabia's Line is Insane, Unrealistic, and Never going to Exist (06:54) - Designer Clothes & eBay Arbitrage Adventures (10:10) - Unique Woes of The Construction Industry  (19:28) - The Problems of Prefabrication (26:27) - If Building Regulations didn't exist… (32:20) - China's Real Estate Bubble, Unbound Technocrats, & Japan(44:45) - Automation and Revolutionary Future Technologies (1:00:51) - 3D Printer Pessimism & The Rising Cost of Labour(1:08:02) - AI's Impact on Construction Productivity(1:17:53) - Brian Dreams of Building a Mile High Skyscraper(1:23:43) - Deep Dive into Environmentalism and NEPA(1:42:04) - Software is Stealing Talent from Physical Engineering(1:47:13) - Gaps in the Blog Marketplace of Ideas(1:50:56) - Why is Modern Architecture So Ugly?(2:19:58) - Advice for Aspiring Architects and Young Construction PhysicistsTranscriptWhy Saudi Arabia's Line is Insane, Unrealistic, and Never going to Exist Dwarkesh Patel Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Brian Potter, who is an engineer and the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he writes about how the construction industry works and why it has been slow to industrialize and innovate. It's one of my favorite blogs on the internet, and I highly, highly recommend that people check it out. Brian, my first question is about The Line project in Saudi Arabia. What are your opinions? Brian Potter It's interesting how Saudi Arabia and countries in the Middle East, in general, are willing to do these big, crazy, ambitious building projects and pour huge amounts of money into constructing this infrastructure in a way that you don't see a huge amount in the modern world. China obviously does this too in huge amounts, some other minor places do as well, but in general, you don't see a whole lot of countries building these big, massive, incredibly ambitious projects. So on that level, it's interesting, and it's like, “Yes, I'm glad to see that you're doing this,” but the actual project is clearly insane and makes no sense. Look at the physical arrangement layout–– there's a reason cities grow in two dimensions. A one-dimensional city is the worst possible arrangement for transportation. It's the maximum amount of distance between any two points. So just from that perspective, it's clearly crazy, and there's no real benefit to it other than perhaps some weird hypothetical transportation situation where you had really fast point-to-point transportation. It would probably be some weird bullet train setup; maybe that would make sense. But in general, there's no reason to build a city like that. Even if you wanted to build an entirely enclosed thing (which again doesn't make a huge amount of sense), you would save so much material and effort if you just made it a cube. I would be more interested in the cube than the line. [laughs] But yeah, those are my initial thoughts on it. I will be surprised if it ever gets built. Dwarkesh Patel Are you talking about the cube from the meme about how you can put all the humans in the world in a cube the size of Manhattan? Brian Potter Something like that. If you're just going to build this big, giant megastructure, at least take advantage of what that gets you, which is minimum surface area to volume ratio.Dwarkesh Patel Why is that important? Would it be important for temperature or perhaps other features? Brian Potter This is actually interesting because I'm actually not sure how sure it would work with a giant single city. In general, a lot of economies of scale come from geometric effects. When something gets bigger, your volume increases a lot faster than your surface area does. So for something enclosed, like a tank or a pipe, the cost goes down per thing of unit you're transporting because you can carry a larger amount or a smaller amount of material. It applies to some extent with buildings and construction because the exterior wall assembly is a really burdensome, complicated, and expensive assembly. A building with a really big floor plate, for instance, can get more area per unit, per amount of exterior wall. I'm not sure how that actually works with a single giant enclosed structure because, theoretically, on a small level, it would apply the same way. Your climate control is a function of your exterior surface, at some level, and you get more efficient climate control if you have a larger volume and less area that it can escape from. But for a giant city, I actually don't know if that works, and it may be worse because you're generating so much heat that it's now harder to pump out. For examples like the urban heat island effect, where these cities generate massive amounts of waste heat, I don't know if that would work if it didn't apply the same way. I'm trying to reach back to my physics classes in college, so I'm not sure about the actual mechanics of that. Generally though, that's why you'd want to perhaps build something of this size and shape. Dwarkesh Patel What was the thought process behind designing this thing? Because Scott Alexander had a good blog post about The Line where he said, presumably, that The Line is designed to take up less space and to use less fuel because you can just use the same transportation across. But the only thing that Saudi Arabia has is space and fuel. So what is the thought process behind this construction project? Brian PotterI get the sense that a lot of committees have some amount of success in building big, impressive, physical construction projects that are an attraction just by virtue of their size and impressiveness. A huge amount of stuff in Dubai is something in this category, and they have that giant clock tower in Jeddah, the biggest giant clock building and one of the biggest buildings in the world, or something like that. I think, on some level, they're expecting that you would just see a return from building something that's really impressive or “the biggest thing on some particular axis”. So to some extent, I think they're just optimizing for big and impressive and maybe not diving into it more than that. There's this theory that I think about every so often. It's called the garbage can theory of organizational decision-making, which basically talks about how the choices that organizations make are not the result of any particular recent process. They are the result of how, whenever a problem comes up, people reach into the garbage can of potential solutions. Then whatever they pull out of the garbage can, that's the decision that they end up going with, regardless of how much sense it makes. It was a theory that was invented by academics to describe decision-making in academia. I think about that a lot, especially with reference to big bureaucracies and governments. You can just imagine the draining process of how these decisions evolve. Any random decision can be made, especially when there's such a disconnect between the decision-makers and technical knowledge.Designer Clothes & eBay Arbitrage Adventures Dwarkesh PatelTell me about your eBay arbitrage with designer clothes. Brian Potter Oh man, you really did dive deep. Yeah, so this was a small business that I ran seven or eight years ago at this point. A hobby of mine was high-end men's fashion for a while, which is a very strange hobby for an engineer to have, but there you go. That hobby centers around finding cheap designer stuff, because buying new can be overwhelmingly expensive. However, a lot of times, you can get clothes for a very cheap price if you're even a little bit motivated. Either it shows up on eBay, or it shows up in thrift stores if you know what to look for. A lot of these clothes can last because they're well-made. They last a super, super, super long time–– even if somebody wore it for 10 years or something, it could be fine. So a lot of this hobby centered around finding ways to get really nice clothes cheaply. Majority of it was based around eBay, but it was really tedious to find really nice stuff on eBay. You had to manually search for a bunch of different brands, filter out the obviously bad ones, search for typos in brands, put in titles, and stuff like that. I was in the process of doing this, and I thought, “Oh, this is really annoying. I should figure out a way to automate this process.” So I made a very simple web app where when you searched for shoes or something, it would automatically search the very nice brands of shoes and all the typos of the brand name. Then it would just filter out all the junk and let you search through the good stuff. I set up an affiliate system, basically. So anybody else that used it, I would get a kick of the sales. While I was interested in that hobby, I ran this website for a few years, and it was reasonably successful. It was one of the first things I did that got any real traction on the internet, but it was never successful in proportion to how much effort it took to maintain and update it. So as I moved away from the hobby, I eventually stopped putting time and effort into maintaining the website. I'm curious as to how you even dug that up. Dwarkesh Patel I have a friend who was with you at the Oxford Refugees Conference, Connor Tabarrok. I don't know if you remember him. Brian Potter Nice. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. Finding other information about you on the internet was quite difficult actually. You've somehow managed to maintain your anonymity. If you're willing to reveal, what was the P&L of this project? Brian Potter Oh, it made maybe a few hundred dollars a month for a few years, but I only ever ran it as a side hobby business, basically. So in terms of time per my effort or whatever, I'm sure it was very low. Pennies to an hour or something like that. Unique Woes of The Construction Industry   Dwarkesh Patel A broad theme that I've gotten from your post is that the construction industry is plagued with these lossy feedback loops, a lack of strong economies of scale, regulation, and mistakes being very costly. Do you think that this is a general characteristic of many industries in our world today, or is there something unique about construction? Brian Potter Interesting question. One thing you think of is that there are a lot of individual factors that are not unique at all. Construction is highly regulated, but it's not necessarily more regulated than medical devices or jet travel, or even probably cars, to some extent, which have a whole vat of performance criteria they need to hit. With a couple of things like land use, for example, people say, “Oh, the land requirements, could you build it on-site,” explaining how those kinds of things make it difficult. But there is a lot that falls into this category that doesn't really share the same structure of how the construction industry works.I think it's the interaction of all those effects. One thing that I think is perhaps underappreciated is that the systems of a building are really highly coupled in a way that a lot of other things are. If you're manufacturing a computer, the hard drive is somewhat independent from the display and somewhat independent from the power supply. These things are coupled, but they can be built by independent people who don't necessarily even talk to each other before being assembled into one structured thing. A building is not really like that at all. Every single part affects every single other part. In some ways, it's like biology. So it's very hard to change something that doesn't end up disrupting something else. Part of that is because a job's building is to create a controlled interior environment, meaning, every single system has to run through and around the surfaces that are creating that controlled interior. Everything is touching each other. Again, that's not unique. Anything really highly engineered, like a plane or an iPhone, share those characteristics to some extent. In terms of the size of it and the relatively small amount you're paying in terms of unit size or unit mass, however, it's quite low. Dwarkesh Patel Is transportation cost the fundamental reason you can't have as much specialization and modularity?Brian Potter Yeah, I think it's really more about just the way a building is. An example of this would be how for the electrical system of your house, you can't have a separate box where if you needed to replace the electrical system, you could take the whole box out and put the new box in. The electrical system runs through the entire house. Same with plumbing. Same with the insulation. Same with the interior finishes and stuff like that. There's not a lot of modularity in a physical sense. Dwarkesh Patel Gotcha. Ben Kuhn  had this interesting comment on your article where he pointed out that many of the reasons you give for why it's hard to innovate in construction, like sequential dependencies and the highly variable delivery timelines are also common in software where Ben Koon works. So why do you think that the same sort of stagnation has not hit other industries that have superficially similar characteristics, like software? Brian Potter How I think about that is that you kind of see a similar structure in anything that's project-based or anything where there's an element of figuring out what you're doing while you're doing it. Compared to a large-scale manufacturing option where you spend a lot of time figuring out what exactly it is that you're building. You spend a lot of time designing it to be built and do your first number of runs through it, then you tweak your process to make it more efficient. There's always an element of tweaking it to make it better, but to some extent, the process of figuring out what you're doing is largely separate from the actual doing of it yourself. For a project-based industry, it's not quite like that. You have to build your process on the fly. Of course, there are best practices that shape it, right? For somebody writing a new software project or anything project-based, like making a movie, they have a rough idea for how it's going to go together. But there's going to be a lot of unforeseen things that kind of come up like that. The biggest difference is that either those things can often scale in a way that you can't with a building. Once you're done with the software project, you can deploy it to 1,000 or 100,000, or 1 million people, right? Once you finish making a movie, 100 million people can watch it or whatever. It doesn't quite look the same with a building. You don't really have the ability to spend a lot of time upfront figuring out how this thing needs to go. You kind of need to figure out a way to get this thing together without spending a huge amount of time that would be justified by the sheer size of it. I was able to dig up a few references for software projects and how often they just have these big, long tails. Sometimes they just go massively, massively over budget. A lot of times, they just don't get completed at all, which is shocking, but because of how many people it can then be deployed to after it's done, the economics of it are slightly different. Dwarkesh Patel I see, yeah. There's a famous law in software that says that a project will take longer than you expect even after you recount for the fact that it will take longer than you expect. Brian Potter Yeah. Hofstadter's law or something like that is what I think it is. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. I'm curious about what the lack of skill in construction implies for startups. Famously, in software, the fact that there's zero marginal cost to scaling to the next customer is a huge boon to a startup, right? The entire point of which is scaling exponentially. Does that fundamentally constrain the size and quantity of startups you can have in construction if the same scaling is not available?Brian Potter Yeah, that's a really good question. The obvious first part of the answer is that for software, obviously, if you have a construction software company, you can scale it just like any other software business. For physical things, it is a lot more difficult. This lack of zero marginal cost has tended to fight a lot of startups, not just construction ones. But yeah, it's definitely a thing. Construction is particularly brutal because the margins are so low. The empirical fact is that trying what would be a more efficient method of building doesn't actually allow you to do it cheaper and get better margins. The startup that I used to work at, Katerra, their whole business model was basically predicated on that. “Oh, we'll just build all our buildings in these big factories, get huge economies of scale, reduce our costs, and then recoup the billions of dollars that we're pumping into this industry or business.” The math just does not work out. You can't build. In general, you can't build cheap enough to kind of recoup those giant upfront costs. A lot of businesses have been burned that way. The most success you see in prefabrication type of stuff is on the higher end of things where you can get higher margins. A lot of these prefab companies and stuff like that tend to target the higher end of the market, and you see a few different premiums for that. Obviously, if you're targeting the higher end, you're more likely to have higher margins. If you're building to a higher level of quality, that's easier to do in a factory environment. So the delta is a lot different, less enormous than it would be. Building a high level of quality is easier to do in a factory than it is in the field, so a lot of buildings or houses that are built to a really high level of energy performance, for instance, need a really, really high level of air sealing to minimize how much energy this house uses. You tend to see a lot more houses like that built out of prefab construction and other factory-built methods because it's just physically more difficult to achieve that on-site. The Problems of Prefabrication Dwarkesh Patel Can you say more about why you can't use prefabrication in a factory to get economies of scale? Is it just that the transportation costs will eat away any gains you get? What is going on? Brian PotterThere's a combination of effects. I haven't worked through all this, we'll have to save this for the next time. I'll figure it out more by then. At a high level, it's that basically the savings that you get from like using less labor or whatever is not quite enough to offset your increased transportation costs. One thing about construction, especially single-family home construction, is that a huge percentage of your costs are just the materials that you're using, right? A single-family home is roughly 50% labor and 50% materials for the construction costs. Then you have development costs, land costs, and things like that. So a big chunk of that, you just can't move to the factory at all, right?  You can't really build a foundation in a factory. You could prefab the foundation, but it doesn't gain you anything. Your excavation still has to be done on-site, obviously. So a big chunk can't move to the factory at all. For ones that can, you still basically have to pay the same amount for materials. Theoretically, if you're building truly huge volume, you could get material volume discounts, but even then, it's probably not looking at things like asset savings. So you can cut out a big chunk of your labor costs, and you do see that in factory-built construction, right? These prefab companies are like mobile home companies. They have a small fraction of labor as their costs, which is typical of a factory in general, but then they take out all that labor cost while they still have their high material costs, and then they have overhead costs of whatever the factory has cost them. Then you have your additional overhead cost of just transporting it to site, which is pretty limited. The math does not really work out in favor of prefab, in terms of being able to make the cost of building dramatically cheaper. You can obviously build a building in a prefab using prefab-free methods and build a successful construction business, right? Many people do. But in terms of dramatically lowering your costs, you don't really see that. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, yeah. Austin Vernon has an interesting blog post about why there's not more prefabricated homes. The two things he points out were transportation costs, and the other one was that people prefer to have homes that have unique designs or unique features. When I was reading it, it actually occurred to me that maybe they're actually both the result of the same phenomenon. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but have you heard of the Alchian-Allen theorem in economics? Brian Potter Maybe, but I don't think so. Dwarkesh Patel Basically, it's the idea that if you increase the cost of some category of goods in a fixed way––let's say you tax oranges and added a $1 tax to all oranges, or transportation for oranges gets $1 more expensive for all oranges––people will shift consumption towards the higher grade variety because now, the ratio of the cost between the higher, the more expensive orange and the less expensive orange has decreased because of the increase in fixed costs. It seems like you could use that argument to also explain why people have strong preferences for uniqueness and all kinds of design in manufactured houses. Since transportation costs are so high, that's basically a fixed cost, and that fixed cost has the effect of making people shift consumption towards higher-grade options. I definitely think that's true. Brian PotterI would maybe phrase this as, “The construction industry makes it relatively comparatively cheap to deliver a highly customized option compared to a really repetitive option.” So yeah, the ratio between a highly customized one and just a commodity one is relatively small. So you see a kind of industry built around delivering somewhat more customized options. I do think that this is a pretty broad intuition that people just desire too much customization from their homes. That really prevents you from having a mass-produced offering. I do think that is true to some extent. One example is the Levittown houses, which were originally built in huge numbers–– exactly the same model over and over again. Eventually, they had to change their business model to be able to deliver more customized options because the market shipped it. I do think that the effect of that is basically pretty overstated. Empirically, you see that in practice, home builders and developers will deliver fairly repetitive housing. They don't seem to have a really hard time doing that. As an example, I'm living in a new housing development that is just like three or four different houses copy-pasted over and over again in a group of 50. The developer is building a whole bunch of other developments that are very similar in this area. My in-laws live in a very similar development in a whole different state. If you just look like multi-family or apartment housing, it's identical apartments, you know, copy-pasted over and over again in the same building or a bunch of different buildings in the same development. You're not seeing huge amounts of uniqueness in these things. People are clearly willing to just live in these basically copy-pasted apartments. It's also quite possible to get a pretty high amount of product variety using a relatively small number of factors that you vary, right? I mean, the car industry is like this, where there are enough customization options. I was reading this book a while ago that was basically pushing back against the idea that the car industry pre-fifties and sixties we just offering a very uniform product. They basically did the math, and the number of customization options on their car was more than the atoms in the universe. Basically just, there are so many different options. All the permutations, you know, leather seats and this type of stereo and this type of engine, if you add it all up, there's just a huge, massive number of different combinations. Yeah, you can obviously customize the house a huge amount, just by the appliances that you have and the finishes that are in there and the paint colors that you choose and the fixtures and stuff like that. It would not really theoretically change the underlying way the building comes together. So regarding the idea that the fundamental demand for variety is a major obstruction, I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence for that in the construction industry. If Construction Regulation Vanished… Dwarkesh Patel I asked Twitter about what I should ask you, and usually, I don't get interesting responses but the quality of the people and the audience that knows who you are was so high that actually, all the questions I got were fascinating. So I'm going to ask you some questions from Twitter. Brian Potter Okay. Dwarkesh Patel 0:26:45Connor Tabarrok asks, “What is the most unique thing that would or should get built in the absence of construction regulation?”Brian Potter Unique is an interesting qualifier. There are a lot of things that just like should get built, right? Massive amounts of additional housing and creating more lands in these really dense urban environments where we need it, in places like San Francisco–– just fill in a big chunk of that bay. It's basically just mud flat and we should put more housing on it. “Unique thing” is more tricky. One idea that I really like (I read this in the book, The Book Where's My Flying Car),  is that it's basically crazy that our cities are designed with roads that all intersect with each other. That's an insane way to structure a material flow problem. Any sane city would be built with multiple layers of like transportation where each one went in a different direction so your flows would just be massively, massively improved. That just seems like a very obvious one.If you're building your cities from scratch and had your druthers, you would clearly want to build them and know how big they were gonna get, right? So you could plan very long-term in a way that so these transportation systems didn't intersect with each other, which, again, almost no cities did. You'd have the space to scale them or run as much throughput through them as you need without bringing the whole system to a halt. There's a lot of evidence saying that cities tend to scale based on how much you can move from point A to point B through them. I do wonder whether if you changed the way they went together, you could unlock massively different cities. Even if you didn't unlock massive ones, you could perhaps change the agglomeration effects that you see in cities if people could move from point A to point B much quicker than they currently can. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, I did an episode about the book, where's my flying car with Rohit Krishnan. I don't know if we discussed this, but an interesting part of the book is where he talks about transistor design. If you design transistors this way, can you imagine how slow they would be? [laughs] Okay, so Simon Grimm asks, “What countries are the best at building things?”Brian Potter This is a good question. I'm going to sort of cheat a little bit and do it in terms of space and time, because I think most countries that are doing a good job at building massive amounts of stuff are not ones that are basically doing it currently.The current answer is like China, where they just keep building–– more concrete was used in the last 20 years or so than the entire world used in the time before that, right? They've accomplished massive amounts of urbanization, and built a lot of really interesting buildings and construction. In terms of like raw output, I would also put Japan in the late 20th century on there. At the peak of the concern and wonder of “Is Japan gonna take over the world?”, they were really interested in building stuff quite quickly. They spent a lot of time and effort trying to use their robotics expertise to try to figure out how to build buildings a lot more quickly. They had these like really interesting factories that were designed to basically extrude an entire skyscraper just going up vertically.All these big giant companies and many different factories were trying to develop and trying to do this with robotics. It was a really interesting system that did not end up ever making economic sense, but it is very cool. I think big industrial policy organs of the government basically encouraged a lot of these industrial companies to basically develop prefabricated housing systems. So you see a lot of really interesting systems developed from these sort of industrial companies in a way that you don't see in a lot of other places. From 1850 to maybe 1970 (like a hundred years or something), the US was building huge massive amounts of stuff in a way that lifted up huge parts of the economy, right? I don't know how many thousands of miles of railroad track the US built between like 1850 and 1900, but it was many, many, many thousands of miles of it. Ofcourse, needing to lay all this track and build all these locomotives really sort of forced the development of the machine tool industry, which then led to the development of like better manufacturing methods and interchangeable parts, which of course then led to the development of the automotive industry. Then ofcourse, that explosion just led to even more big giant construction projects. So you really see that this ability to build just big massive amounts of stuff in this virtuous cycle with the US really advanced a lot of technology to raise the standard of development for a super long period of time. So those are my three answers. China's Real Estate Bubble, Unbound Technocrats, and JapanDwarkesh Patel Those three bring up three additional questions, one for each of them! That's really interesting. Have you read The Power Broker, the book about Robert Moses? Brian Potter I think I got a 10th of the way through it. Dwarkesh Patel That's basically a whole book in itself, a 10th of the way. [laughs] I'm a half of the way through, and so far it's basically about the story of how this one guy built a startup within the New York state government that was just so much more effective at building things, didn't have the same corruption and clientelism incompetence. Maybe it turns into tragedy in the second half, but so far it's it seems like we need this guy. Where do we get a second Robert Moses? Do you think that if you had more people like that in government or in construction industries, public works would be more effectively built or is the stagnation there just a result of like other bigger factors? Brian Potter That's an interesting question. I remember reading this article a while ago that was complaining about how horrible Penn Station is in New York. They're basically saying, “Yeah, it would be nice to return to the era of like the sort of unbound technocrat” when these technical experts in high positions of power in government could essentially do whatever they wanted to some extent. If they thought something should be built somewhere, they basically had the power to do it. It's a facet of this problem of how it's really, really hard to get stuff built in the US currently. I'm sure that a part of it is that you don't see these really talented technocrats occupy high positions of government where they can get stuff done. But it's not super obvious to me whether that's the limiting factor. I kind of get the sense that they would end up being bottlenecked by some other part of the process. The whole sort of interlocking set of institutions has just become so risk averse that they would end up just being blocked in a way that they wouldn't when they were operating in the 1950s or 1960s.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. All right, so speaking of Japan, I just recently learned about the construction there and how they just keep tearing stuff down every 30 to 40 years and rebuilding it. So you have an interesting series of posts on how you would go about building a house or a building that lasts for a thousand years. But I'm curious, how would you build a house or a building that only lasts for 30 or 40 years? If you're building in Japan and you know they're gonna tear it down soon, what changes about the construction process? Brian Potter Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I'm not an expert on Japanese construction, but I think like a lot of their interior walls are basically just paper and stuff like that. I actually think it's kind of surprising that last time I looked, for a lot of their homes, they use a surprising post and beam construction method, which is actually somewhat labor-intensive to do. The US in the early 1800s used a pretty similar method. Then once we started mass producing conventional lumber, we stopped doing that because it was much cheaper to build out of two-by-fours than it was to build big heavy posts. I think the boring answer to that question is that we'd build like how we build mobile homes–– essentially just using pretty thin walls, pretty low-end materials that are put together in a minimal way. This ends up not being that different from the actual construction method that single-family homes use. It just even further economizes and tightens the use of materials–– where a single-family home might use a half inch plywood, they might try to use three-sixteenths or even an eighth inch plywood or something like that. So we'd probably build a pretty similar way to the way most single-family homes and multi-family homes are built currently, but just with even tighter use of materials which perhaps is something that's not super nice about the way that you guys build your homes. But... [laughs]Dwarkesh Patel Okay, so China is the third one here. There's been a lot of talk about a potential real estate bubble in China because they're building housing in places where people don't really need it. Of course, maybe the demographics aren't there to support the demand. What do you think of all this talk? I don't know if you're familiar with it, but is there a real estate bubble that's created by all this competence in building? Brian PotterOh, gosh, yeah, I have no idea. Like you, I've definitely heard talk of it and I've seen the little YouTube clips of them knocking down all these towers that it turns out they didn't need or the developer couldn't, finish or whatever. I don't know a huge amount about that. In general, I wish I knew a lot more about how things are built in China, but the information is in general, so opaque. I generally kind of assume that any particular piece of data that comes out of China has giant error bars on it as to whether it's true or not or what the context surrounding it is. So in general, I do not have a hard opinion about that. Dwarkesh Patel This is the second part of Simon's question, does greater competence and being able to build stuff translate into other good outcomes for these countries like higher GDP or lower rents or other kinds of foreign outcomes? Brian Potter That's a good question. Japan is an interesting place where basically people point to it as an example of, “Here's a country that builds huge amounts of housing and they don't have housing cost increases.” In general, we should expect that dynamic to be true. Right? There's no reason to not think that housing costs are essentially a supply-demand problem where if you built as much as people wanted, the cost would drop. I have no reason to not think that's true. There is a little bit of evidence that sort of suggests that it's impossible to build housing enough to overcome this sort of mechanical obstacle where the cost of it tends to match and rise to whatever people's income level are. The peak and the sort of flattening of housing costs in Japan also parallel when people basically stopped getting raises and income stopped rising in Japan. So I don't have a good sense of, if it ends up being just more driven by some sort of other factors. Generally though I expect the very basic answer of “If you build a lot more houses, the housing will become cheaper.”Dwarkesh PatelRight. Speaking of how the land keeps gaining value as people's income go up, what is your opinion on Georgism? Does that kind of try and make you think that housing is a special asset that needs to be more heavily taxed because you're not inherently doing something productive just by owning land the way you would be if you like built a company or something similar?Brian Potter I don't have any special deep knowledge of Georgism. It's on my list of topics to read more deeply about. I do think in general, taxing encourages you to produce less of something for something that you can't produce less of. It's a good avenue for something to tax more heavily. And yeah, obviously if you had a really high land value tax in these places that have a lot of single-family homes in dense urban areas, like Seattle or San Francisco, that would probably encourage people to use the land a lot more efficiently. So it makes sense to me, but I don't have a ton of special knowledge about it. Dwarkesh Patel All right, Ben Kuhn asked on Twitter, “What construction-related advice would you give to somebody building a new charter city?”Brian Potter That is interesting. I mean, just off the top of my head, I would be interested in whether you could really figure out a way to build using a method that had really high upfront costs. I think it could otherwise be justified, but if you're gonna build 10,000 buildings or whatever all at once, you could really take advantage of that. One kind of thing that you see in the sort of post-World War II era is that we're building huge massive amounts of housing, and a lot of times we're building them all in one place, right? A lot of town builders were building thousands and thousands of houses in one big development all at once. In California, it's the same thing, you just built like 6 or 10 or 15,000 houses in one big massive development. You end up seeing something like that where they basically build this like little factory on their construction site, and then use that to like fabricate all these things. Then you have something that's almost like a reverse assembly line where a crew will go to one house and install the walls or whatever, and then go to the next house and do the same thing. Following right behind them would be the guys doing the electrical system, plumbing, and stuff like that. So this reverse assembly line system would allow you to sort of get these things up really, really fast, in 30 days or something like that. Then you could have a whole house or just thousands and thousands of houses at once. You would want to be able to do something similar where you could just not do the instruction the way that the normal construction is done, but that's hard, right? Centrally planned cities or top-down planned cities never seem to do particularly well, right? For example, the city of Brasilia, the one that was supposed to be a planned city— the age it goes back to the unfettered technocrat who can sort of build whatever he wants. A lot of times, what you want is something that will respond at a low level and organically sort out the factories as they develop. You don't want something that's totally planned from the top-down, that's disconnected from all the sorts of cases on the ground. A lot of the opposition to Robert Moses ended up being that in a certain form, right? He's bulldozing through these cities that are these buildings and neighborhoods that he's not paying attention to at all. So I think, just to go back to the question, trying to plan your city from the top down doesn't have a super, super great track record. In general, you want your city to develop a little bit more organically. I guess I would think to have a good sort of land-use rules that are really thought through well and encourage the things that you want to encourage and not discourage the things that you don't want to discourage. Don't have equity in zoning and allow a lot of mixed-use construction and stuff like that. I guess that's a somewhat boring answer, but I'd probably do something along those lines. Dwarkesh Patel Interesting, interesting. I guess that implies that there would be high upfront costs to building a city because if you need to build 10,000 homes at once to achieve these economies of scale, then you would need to raise like tens of billions of dollars before you could build a charter city. Brian Potter Yeah, if you were trying to lower your costs of construction, but again, if you have the setup to do that, you wouldn't necessarily need to raise it. These other big developments were built by developers that essentially saw an opportunity. They didn't require public funding to do it. They did in the form of loan guarantees for veterans and things like that, but they didn't have the government go and buy the land. Automation and Revolutionary Future Technologies Dwarkesh Patel Right, okay, so the next question is from Austin Vernon. To be honest, I don't understand the question, you two are too smart for me, but hopefully, you'll be able to explain the question and then also answer it. What are your power rankings for technologies that can tighten construction tolerances? Then he gives examples like ARVR, CNC cutting, and synthetic wood products. Brian Potter Yeah, so this is a very interesting question. Basically, because buildings are built manually on site by hand, there's just a lot of variation in what ends up being built, right? There's only so accurately that a person can put something in place if they don't have any sort of age or stuff like that. Just the placement itself of materials tends to have a lot of variation in it and the materials themselves also have a lot of variation in them. The obvious example is wood, right? Where one two by four is not gonna be exactly the same as another two by four. It may be warped, it may have knots in it, it may be split or something like that. Then also because these materials are sitting just outside in the elements, they sort of end up getting a lot of distortion, they either absorb moisture and sort of expand and contract, or they grow and shrink because of the heat. So there's just a lot of variation that goes into putting a building up.To some extent, it probably constrains what you are able to build and how effectively you're able to build it. I kind of gave an example before of really energy efficient buildings and they're really hard to build on-site using conventional methods because the air ceiling is quite difficult to do. You have to build it in a much more precise way than what is typically done and is really easily achieved on-site. So I guess in terms of examples of things that would make that easier, he gives some good ones like engineered lumber, which is where you take lumber and then grind it up into strands or chips or whatever and basically glue them back together–– which does a couple of things. It spreads all the knots and the defects out so they are concentrated and everything tends to be a lot more uniform when it's made like that. So that's a very obvious one that's already in widespread use. I don't really see that making a substantial change.I guess the one exception to that would be this engineered lumber product called mass timber elements, CLT, which is like a super plywood. Plywood is made from tiny little sheet thin strips of wood, right? But CLT is made from two-by-four-dimensional lumber glued across laminated layers. So instead of a 4 by 9 sheet of plywood, you have a 12 by 40 sheet of dimensional lumber glued together. You end up with a lot of the properties of engineered material where it's really dimensionally stable. It can be produced very, very accurately. It's actually funny that a lot of times, the CLT is the most accurate part of the building. So if you're building a building with it, you tend to run into problems where the rest of the building is not accurate enough for it. So even with something like steel, if you're building a steel building, the steel is not gonna be like dead-on accurate, it's gonna be an inch or so off in terms of where any given component is. The CLT, which is built much more accurately, actually tends to show all these errors that have to be corrected. So in some sense, accuracy or precision is a little bit of like a tricky thing because you can't just make one part of the process more precise. In some ways that actually makes things more difficult because if one part is really precise, then a lot of the time, it means that you can't make adjustments to it easily. So if you have this one really precise thing, it usually means you have to go and compensate for something else that is not built quite as precisely. It actually makes advancing precision quite a bit more complicated. AR VR, is something I'm very bullish on. A big caveat of that is assuming that they can just get the basic technology working. The basic intuition there is that right now the way that pieces are, when a building is put together on site, somebody is looking at a set of paper plans, or an iPad or something that tells them where everything needs to go. So they figure that out and then they take a tape measure or use some other method and go figure out where that's marked on the ground. There's all this set-up time that is really quite time consuming and error prone. Again, there's only so much accuracy that a guy dragging a tape 40 feet across site being held by another guy can attain, there's a limit to how accurate that process can be. It's very easy for me to imagine that AR would just project exactly where the components of your building need to go. That would A, allow you a much higher level of accuracy that you can easily get using manual methods. And then B, just reduce all that time it takes to manually measure things. I can imagine it being much, much, much faster as well, so I'm quite bullish on that. At a high level and a slightly lower level, it's not obvious to me if they will be able to get to the level where it just projects it with perfect accuracy right in front of you. It may be the case that a person moving their head around and constantly changing their point of view wont ever be able to project these things with millimeter precision––it's always gonna be a little bit jumpy or you're gonna end up with some sort of hard limit in terms of like how precisely you can project it. My sense is that locator technology will get good enough, but I don't have any principle reason believing that. The other thing is that being able to take advantage of that technology would require you to have a really, really accurate model of your building that locates where every single element is precisely and exactly what its tolerances are. Right now, buildings aren't designed like that, they are built using a comparatively sparse set of drawings that leaves a lot to sort of be interpreted by the people on site doing the work and efforts that have tried to make these models really, really, really precise, have not really paid off a lot of times. You can get returns on it if you're building something really, really complex where there's a much higher premium to being able to make sure you don't make any error, but for like a simple building like a house, the returns just aren't there. So you see really comparatively sparse drawings. Whether it's gonna be able to work worth this upfront cost of developing this really complex, very precise model of where exactly every component is still has to be determined. There's some interesting companies that are trying to move in this direction where they're making it a lot easier to draw these things really, really precisely and whave every single component exactly where it is. So I'm optimistic about that as well, but it's a little bit TBD. Dwarkesh Patel This raises a question that I actually wanted to ask you, which is in your post about why there aren't automatic brick layers. It was a really interesting post. Somebody left in an interesting comment saying that bricks were designed to be handled and assembled by humans. Then you left a response to that, which I thought was really interesting. You said, “The example I always reach for is with steam power and electricity, where replacing a steam engine with an electric motor in your factory didn't do much for productivity. Improving factory output required totally redesigning the factory around the capabilities of electric motors.” So I was kind of curious about if you apply that analogy to construction, then what does that look like for construction? What is a house building process or building building process that takes automation and these other kinds of tools into account? How would that change how buildings are built and how they end up looking in the end? Brian Potter I think that's a good question. One big component of the lack of construction productivity is everything was designed and has evolved over 100 years or 200 years to be easy for a guy or person on the site to manipulate by hand. Bricks are roughly the size and shape and weight that a person can move it easily around. Dimensional lumber is the same. It's the size and shape and weight that a person can move around easily. And all construction materials are like this and the way that they attach together and stuff is the same. It's all designed so that a person on site can sort of put it all together with as comparatively little effort as possible. But what is easy for a person to do is usually not what is easy for a machine or a robot to do, right? You typically need to redesign and think about what your end goal is and then redesign the mechanism for accomplishing that in terms of what is easy to get to make a machine to do. The obvious example here is how it's way easier to build a wagon or a cart that pulls than it is to build a mechanical set of legs that mimics a human's movement. That's just way, way, way easier. I do think that a big part of advancing construction productivity is to basically figure out how to redesign these building elements in a way that is really easy for a machine to produce and a machine to put together. One reason that we haven't seen it is that a lot of the mechanization you see is people trying to mechanize exactly what a person does. You'd need a really expensive industrial robot that can move exactly the way that a human moves more or less. What that might look like is basically something that can be really easily extruded by a machine in a continuous process that wouldn't require a lot of finicky mechanical movements. A good example of this technology is technology that's called insulated metal panels, which is perhaps one of the cheapest and easiest ways to build an exterior wall. What it is, is it's just like a thin layer of steel. Then on top of that is a layer of insulation. Then on top of that is another layer of steel. Then at the end, the steel is extruded in such a way that it can like these inner panels can like lock together as they go. It's basically the simplest possible method of constructing a wall that you can imagine. But that has the structural system and the water barrier, air barrier, and insulation all in this one really simple assembly. Then when you put it together on site, it just locks together. Of course there are a lot of limitations to this. Like if you want to do anything on top of like add windows, all of a sudden it starts to look quite a bit less good. I think things that are really easy for a machine to do can be put together without a lot of persistent measurement or stuff like that in-field. They can just kind of snap together and actually want to fit together. I think that's kind of what it looks like. 3D Printer Pessimism & The Rising Cost of LabourDwarkesh Patel What would the houses or the buildings that are built using this physically look like? Maybe in 50 to 100 years, we'll look back on the houses we have today and say, “Oh, look at that artisanal creation made by humans.” What is a machine that is like designed for robots first or for automation first? In more interesting ways, would it differ from today's buildings? Brian Potter That's a good question. I'm not especially bullish on 3D building printing in general, but this is another example of a building using an extrusion process that is relatively easy to mechanize. What's interesting there is that when you start doing that, a lot of these other bottlenecks become unlocked a little bit. It's very difficult to build a building using a lot of curved exterior surfaces using conventional methods. You can do it, it's quite expensive to do, but there's a relatively straightforward way for a 3D-printed building to do that. They can build that as easily as if it was a straight wall. So you see a lot of interesting curved architecture on these creations and in a few other areas. There's a company that can build this cool undulating facade that people kind of like. So yeah, it unlocks a lot of options. Machines are more constrained in some things that they can do, but they don't have a lot of the other constraints that you would otherwise see. So I think you'll kind of see a larger variety of aesthetic things like that. That said, at the end of the day, I think a lot of the ways a house goes together is pretty well shaped to just the way that a person living inside it would like to use. I think Stewart Brand makes this point in––Dwarkesh Patel Oh, How Buildings Learn. Brian Potter There we go. He basically makes the point that a lot of people try to use dome-shaped houses or octagon-shaped houses, which are good because, again, going back to surface area volume, they include lots of space using the least amount of material possible. So in some theoretical sense, they're quite efficient, but it's actually quite inconvenient to live inside of a building with a really curved wall, right? Furniture doesn't fit up against it nicely, and pictures are hard to hang on a really curved wall. So I think you would see less variation than maybe you might expect. Dwarkesh Patel Interesting. So why are you pessimistic about 3D printers? For construction, I mean. Brian Potter Yeah, for construction. Oh God, so many reasons. Not pessimistic, but just there's a lot of other interesting questions. I mean, so the big obvious one is like right now a 3D printer can basically print the walls of a building. That is a pretty small amount of the value in a building, right? It's maybe 7% or 8%, something like that. Probably not more than 10% of the value in a building. Because you're not printing the foundation, you're not printing like the overhead vertical, or the overhead spanning structure of the building. You're basically just printing the walls. You're not even really printing the second story walls that you have in multiple stories. I don't think they've quite figured that out yet. So it's a pretty small amount of value added to the building. It's frankly a task that is relatively easy to do by manual labor. It's really pretty easy for a crew to basically put up the structure of a house. This is kind of a recurring theme in mechanization or it goes back to what I was talking about to our previous lead. Where it takes a lot of mechanization and a lot of expensive equipment to replace what basically like two or three guys can do in a day or something like that. The economics of it are pretty brutal. So right now it produces a pretty small value. I think that the value of 3D printing is basically entirely predicated on how successful they are at figuring out how to like deliver more components of the building using their system. There are companies that are trying to do this. There's one that got funded not too long ago called Black Diamond, where they have this crazy system that is like a series of 3D printers that would act simultaneously, like each one building a separate house. Then as you progress, you switch out the print head for like a robot arm. Cause a 3D printer is basically like a robot arm with just a particular manipulator at the end, right?So they switch out their print head for like a robot arm, and the robot arm goes and installs different other systems like the windows or the mechanical systems. So you can figure out how to do that reliably where your print head or your printing system is installing a large fraction of the value of the building. It's not clear to me that it's gonna be economic, but it obviously needs to reach that point. It's not obvious to me that they have gotten there yet. It's really quite hard to get a robot to do a lot of these tasks. For a lot of these players, it seems like they're actually moving away from that. I think in ICON is the biggest construction 3D printer company in the US, as far as I know. And as far as I know, they've moved away from trying to install lots of systems in their walls as they get printed. They've kind of moved on to having that installed separately, which I think has made their job a little bit easier, but again, not quite, it's hard to see how the 3D printer can fulfill its promises if it can't do anything just beyond the vertical elements, whichare really, for most construction, quite cheap and simple to build. Dwarkesh Patel Now, if you take a step back and talk how expensive construction is overall, how much of it can just be explained by the Baumol cost effect? As in labor costs are increasing because labor is more productive than other industries and therefore construction is getting more expensive. Brian Potter I think that's a huge, huge chunk of it. The labor fraction hasn't changed appreciably enough. I haven't actually verified that and I need to, but I remember somebody that said that they used to be much different. You sent me some literature related to it. So let's add a slight asterisk on that. But in general the labor cost has remained a huge fraction of the overall cost of the building. Reliably seeing their costs continue to rise, I think there's no reason to believe that that's not a big part of it. Dwarkesh Patel Now, I know this sounds like a question with an obvious answer, but in your post comparing the prices of construction in different countries, you mentioned how the cost of labor and the cost of materials is not as big a determiner of how expensive it is to construct in different places. But what does matter? Is it the amount of government involvement and administrative overhead? I'm curious why those things (government involvement and administrative overhead) have such a high consequence on the cost of construction. Brian Potter Yeah, that's a good question. I don't actually know if I have a unified theory for that. I mean, basically with any heavily regulated thing, any particular task that you're doing takes longer and is less reliable than it would be if it was not done right. You can't just do it as fast as on your own schedule, right? You end up being bottlenecked by government processes and it reduces and narrows your options. So yeah, in general, I would expect that to kind of be the case, but I actually don't know if I have a unified theory of how that works beyond just, it's a bunch of additional steps at any given part of the process, each of which adds cost. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. Now, one interesting trend we have in the United States with construction is that a lot of it is done by Latino workers and especially by undocumented Latino workers. What is the effect of this on the price and the quality of construction? If you have a bunch of hardworking undocumented workers who are working for below-market rates in the US, will this dampen the cost of construction over time? What do you think is going to happen? Brian Potter I suspect that's probably one of the reasons why the US has comparatively low construction costs compared to other parts of the world. Well, I'll caveat that. Residential construction, which is single-family homes and multi-family apartment buildings all built in the US and have light framed wood and are put together, like you said, by a lot of like immigrant workers. Because of that, it would not surprise me if those wages are a lot lower than the equivalent wage for like a carpenter in Germany or something like that. I suspect that's a factor in why our cost of residential construction are quite low. AI's Impact on Construction ProductivityDwarkesh Patel Overall, it seems from your blog post that you're kind of pessimistic, or you don't think that different improvements in industrialization have transferred over to construction yet. But what do you think is a prospect of future advances in AI having a big impact on construction? With computer vision and with advances in robotics, do you think we'll finally see some carry-over into construction productivity or is it gonna be more of the same? Brian Potter Yeah, I think there's definitely gonna be progress on that axis. If you can wire up your computer vision systems, robotic systems, and your AI in such a way that your capabilities for a robot system are more expanded, then I kind of foresee robotics being able to take a larger and larger fraction of the tasks done on a typical construction site. I kind of see it being kind of done in narrow avenues that gradually expand outward. You're starting to see a lot of companies that have some robotic system that can do one particular task, but do that task quite well. There's a couple of different robot companies that have these little robots for like drawing wall layouts on like concrete slabs or whatever. So you know exactly where to build your walls, which you would think would not be like a difficult problem in construction, but it turns out that a lot of times people put the walls in the wrong spot and then you have to go back and move them later or just basically deal with it. So yeah, it's basically a little Roomba type device that just draws the wall layout to the concrete slab and all the other systems as well–– for example, where the lines need to run through the slab and things like that. I suspect that you're just gonna start to see robotics and systems like that take a larger and larger share of the tasks on the construction site over time. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, it's still very far away. It's still very far away. What do you think of Flow? That's Adam Neumann's newest startup and backed with $350 million from Andreeseen Horowitz.Brian Potter I do not have any strong opinions about that other than, “Wow, they've really given him another 350M”. I do not have any particularly strong opinions about this. They made a lot they make a lot of investments that don't make sense to me, but I'm out of venture capital. So there's no reason that my judgment would be any good in this situation–– so I'm just presuming they know something I do not. Dwarkesh Patel I'm going to be interviewing Andreeseen later this month, and I'm hoping I can ask him about that.Brian Potter You know, it may be as simple as he “sees all” about really high variance bets. There's nobody higher variance in the engine than Adam Neumann so, maybe just on those terms, it makes sense. Dwarkesh Patel You had an interesting post about like how a bunch of a lot of the knowledge in the construction industry is informal and contained within best practices or between relationships and expectations that are not articulated all the time. It seems to me that this is also true of software in many cases but software seems much more legible and open source than these other physical disciplines like construction despite having a lot of th

In der Mittagsfolge begrüßen wir heute Matti Niebelschütz, Co-Founder und MD von CoachHub, und sprechen mit ihm über die erfolgreiche Series-C-Finanzierungsrunde in Gesamthöhe von 200 Millionen US-Dollar. CoachHub ist eine Talententwicklungsplattform, auf der Coaching-Programme für die Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter aller Karrierelevel erstellt werden können. Der globale Coach-Pool umfasst mehr als 3.500 zertifizierte Business-Coaches in 90 Ländern, die Coachings in über 60 Sprachen anbieten und mehr als 500 Kundinnen und Kunden betreuen. Die Programme basieren auf der Forschung und Entwicklung des Coaching Labs, das von Prof. Jonathan Passmore geleitet wird und 30 Verhaltenswissenschaftlerinnen und -wissenschaftler beschäftigt. Im September 2021 übernahm Das Coaching Startup den französischen Digital-Coaching-Pionier MoovOne und im Februar 2022 die Coaching-Sparte von Klaiton in Österreich. CoachHub wurde im Jahr 2018 von den Brüdern Matti und Yannis Niebelschütz in Berlin gegründet. In einer Series-C-Finanzierungsrunde hat CoachHub nun 200 Millionen US-Dollar eingesammelt. Dabei haben Sofina und Softbank Vision Fund 2 die Runde angeführt. Sofina ist eine familiengeführte Investmentgesellschaft, die an der Euronext Brüssel notiert ist und ein Vermögen von ca. 11 Milliarden Euro verwaltet. Zum Portfolio von Sofina gehört u.a. Gorillas, Typeform, Ankorstore, Moody, Lemonilo, DeHaat, SellerX, Tessian, Oviva, Petkit, Twin, Reetoo, Dott, Vinted, K12, Forma, Lenskart, Graphcore, Medgenome, ThoughtSpot, Act, PineLabs, Spartoo und Labster. Softbank ist ein japanischer Tech-Konzern, der mit seinem zweiten Vision Fund über 108 Milliarden US-Dollar in Startups investiert. Neben den 38 Milliarden US-Dollar, die Softbank diesem Fonds selbst beisteuert, beteiligten sich auch Unternehmen wie Microsoft oder Apple an dem Kapital. Mit den Vision Fonds wurde u.a. in Unternehmen wie Uber, eToro, Nvidia, ByteDance, Cruise, Fanatics, Flipkart, Rappi, Swiggy, WeWork, Katerra, Mapbox, Opendoor, DoorDash und Slack investiert. Des Weiteren beteiligten sich auch die bestehenden Investoren Molten Ventures, Speedinvest, HV Capital, Signals Venture Capital und Silicon Valley Bank/ SVB Capital. Mit dem frischen Kapital möchte CoachHub sein Produkt weiterentwickeln und den Vertrieb ausbauen, um die globale Expansion zu beschleunigen.

A senior operations and finance executive, Claire Broido Johnson is the director of the University System of Maryland Momentum Fund. (MMF). She has a proven track record in creating and managing successful businesses and driving operations: including as founder of SunEdison and program executive at the Department of Energy during the Obama Administration.  At DOE, Claire guided the deployment of $11 billion in economic stimulus funds in 2009-2010 to improve the economy through the deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. A bottom-line focused innovator, Claire also runs CBJ Energy where she developed an energy efficiency financing product for Serious Energy, launched new products and new states for Next Step Living, and managed energy projects and research for Katerra.  Recognized for financial and operational expertise, she currently serves on the boards of BlocPower.io,  the National Sierra Club Foundation, and Living Classrooms. Claire is also on the advisory board of Upsurge Baltimore, a Baltimore-based incubator, and a member of Blu Ventures network of early-stage DC/Baltimore investors   Claire earned a B.A. in environmental science and public policy from Harvard College, where she helped to create that major, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.    Claire recommends Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business by Gino and Mark C Winters to supercharge your entrepreneurial efforts. Quotables“I think finally even the most unresponsive person is realizing that climate change is here and there need to be solutions.” – Claire Broido Johnson“I think all of us who are mentors and who care about climate change have to support early stage startups with good ideas.” - Claire Broido Johnson“I have believed for a long time that the way we do innovation in this country, in general, is broken.” – Amy Simpkins “I am trying to innovate the process of innovation.” – Amy Simpkins“I move fast and break things.” – Claire Broido Johnson“The small scrappy startups are here because we believe we can make a difference fundamentally.” – Amy Simpkins“If you have one of those great ideas there's no time like the present to find your mentor, fill your toolbox, and go make it happen because the world depends on you.” -Amy SimpkinsIf you enjoyed the conversation, please share the episode with other innovators. Leave us a positive review and subscribe to Power Flow on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out our awesome merch! And hey, we're new, so you can even apply to be a sponsor or a guest.You can follow Power Flow Podcast on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Tik Tok. Thank you for listening. See you at the whiteboard!

We're a half-century old in episode years. That's a unit of measurement, right? Over the past few years, disruption as a concept has moved from strategic thinking to mission critical for organizations, and we have been honored to cover it all over the course of 50 episodes. Listeners, thank you for joining in to hear about the 10-day hospital, the rise and fall of Katerra, sustainability, leadership and company culture, digital twins, and so much more. Here is to 50 more jam-packed episodes and beyond.  

Hey lighting folks who put together luminaire schedules and specification packages listen up:  Zach and Forest tell us about their startup, Parpec, which is designed to “automate part number entry, datasheet lookup and annotation tasks to eliminate hours of tedious and error-prone work.”  Through machine learning and AI, Parspec will save you hours of tedious data entry for each item on your spec sheet.  Enter a part number and - bing bang boom - Parspec fills in the rest.  But hold your horses - Parspec is still a start-up, so go over to their website and check it out before it goes live.Forest Flager pursued a PhD and spent some time on the research and teaching team at Stanford University, followed by a stint at the technology driven off-site construction company Katerra, where he led the company's software and design automation efforts. Forest founded Parspec Inc. in 2020 with the mission of simplifying the process of discovering and sourcing the best available construction products and materials.Zach Mix leads Sales and Business Development for Parspec. After spending the past decade working for lighting & electrical companies including Green Creative, WattStopper, & ElectroRep, Zach is energized by providing top-tier software technology to help lighting & electrical companies perform their best. When he's not working, Zach switches to Dad-mode and enjoys time with his family.  

Brian Potter is the author of https://constructionphysics.substack.com/ (Construction Physics), the best blog on construction news and innovation that I've found. "https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innovate-in-construction?utm_source=url (Why It's Hard to Innovate in Construction)" is one of my favorite and a central theme in today's discussion. Brian is a structural engineer by training. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Progress and previously led an engineering team at Katerra. Enjoy the episode! Have any topics you want me to discuss, guests to interview, or feedback about the show? DM me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/buildingoptimal/ (@buildingoptimal) or send me an email at jared@gossettco.com. And thank you to Lowe's for sponsoring today's episode! Learn more about Lowe's for Pros https://www.lowes.com/l/Pro/pro-benefits.html?cm_mmc=inf-_-b-_-prd-_-tol-_-gpr-_-jgos-_-wb-_-smp-_-rev-_-spy081221 (HERE) Want more good stuff? Sign up for the Building Optimal email http://buildingoptimal.com/email (HERE).

This week we are thrilled to be joined by Mark Erlich. Mark retired as Executive Secretary-Treasurer (EST) of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters (NERCC) in 2017 and is now a fellow at the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program. As a member of Carpenters Local 40 since 1975, he worked at his craft as an apprentice, journeyman, foreman, and superintendent. He continues to serve as a member on the Boston Zoning Board of Appeals, MassINC board, and the Federal Reserve Advisory Council. The conversation was interesting throughout and covered a lot of topics including, the great recession (depression?) of 2008, the current perceived labor shortage, how labor unions function as a key to climbing out of poverty and into the middle class, the seeming rise of labor strikes (“striketober”), the surprising trend in NYC towards open shop labor on large projects, thresholds or tipping points that may trigger union involvement in a project, advantages of using union labor (skilled tradesman, safety, quality, schedule), the growth of misclassifying people who are employees as independent contractors. Finally, we get Marks take on modular construction and his skepticism of tech evangelists who avow to ‘disrupt' the industry (i.e. Katerra) and Mark's impression of the positive changing dynamics of the Union Workforce. Thank you as always for rating and reviewing the Real Estate Addicts Podcast! Podcast Sponsor: First Boston Capital Partners www.grossmanco.com/private-lending/ Trusted partner & private lender providing loans to builders, developers and real estate investors in MA, CT, RI, NH & NY.

At this point, most real estate investors are familiar with value-add improvements. All the standard upgrades like countertops, flooring, and bathrooms. But what about the closets? Well, my guest today has found a niche that is creating an average increase of $45/unit with a 37% ROI with less than 3 hours of labor! Jim Monk is the President of Clozzits.com. He's been a serial entrepreneur for 17 years, he's helped build three multi-million dollar companies and his newest venture has expanded into 18 markets in just two and a half years. His company has developed a program to increase rents by 3% to 8% while improving the net operating income of your buildings and your asset value. And they've worked with huge companies like Katerra, Harbor Group, MMA, and Pinnacle and hundreds of thousands of units. In this episode, Jim talks about how the idea of renovating closets got started, the incredible organic growth that they've had and shares how their simple process can add so much value to your properties. We also dig into his thoughts (and concerns) with cryptocurrencies and whether or not these hot markets in the US are sustainable. This is a jam-packed interview that I know you won't want to miss. Key Takeaways with Jim Monk How Clozzits help to make your units stand apart from your competitors. Jim's concerns with the big players in the multifamily real estate space and how inflation costs could impact returns in the future. How his company can help investors to get a 37% ROI with an average increase of $45/unit. The beauty of the simplicity, the quality, the costs and the turnaround time for the completed work. Why newer entrepreneurs should seek advice from those who are at least two steps ahead of them. Meaning if you own 100 units, talk to somebody that owns a thousand units. Jim's thoughts on cryptocurrency, both the positive aspects and the negative. Predictions on whether or not the hot markets continue to be hot in the next 3-5 years, especially in the Sunbelt markets. Why building processes and procedures are the most important key to success for scaling a business and managing people. Jim's favorite hacks for scaling and growing companies, including listening to podcasts! Keep an open mind as you never know when or how things may change. Want the Full Show Notes? To get access to the full show notes, including audio, transcripts, and links to all the resources mentioned, visit https://acceleratedinvestorpodcast.com/243 Rate & Review If you enjoyed today's episode of The Accelerated Real Estate Investor Podcast, hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, so future episodes are automatically downloaded directly to your device. You can also help by providing an honest rating & review over on Apple Podcasts. Reviews go a long way in helping us build awareness so that we can impact even more people. THANK YOU! Connect with Josh Cantwell Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Sign Up For My Coaching Program! To unlock your potential and start earning real passive income, visit joshcantwellcoaching.com Get The Flip System Book! To get access to a free copy of The Flip System, visit getflipsystem.com/podcast

Conversation on the lessons from the rise and fall of Katerra with Brian Potter Katerra former employee. Prof Jennifer Whyte Head of the School of Project Management University of Sydney. Daryl Patterson Chief Product Officer Head of Design Lendlease Digital.

Contrary to the popular belief the construction industry is an innovative and forward thinking industry.   However, there are some risks inherent in construction that can slow the pace of innovation.    Brian Potter — a structural engineer, returns to Construction Genius to discuss why it's seemingly hard to innovate in construction and how construction companies can do it more effectively.   We also discuss: • What construction companies should focus on to make innovation happen, • The difference between the United States, Europe, and Asia in terms of innovation.   We also touch on some opportunities for innovation in terms of 3D printing, and the future of innovation in the construction industry for the next 4-5 years. Press that play button and let's get started!   Discussion Points:   • 0:00 Introduction   • 3:02 The construction industry is quite advanced than outsiders actually think it is   • 4:53 Why it's hard to innovate in the construction industry   • 7:25 Micro approach vs macro approach to innovation?   • 8:20 Who should be initiating innovation in a construction company?   • 10:50 The role of project owners in terms of driving innovation   • 12:21 Characteristics of a General Contractor or Subcontractor who are effective at innovation   • 13:37 Maintaining profitability while promoting innovativeness   • 16:02 How construction companies manage risk without taking so much of a toll on the financial aspect   • 17:26 Understanding that failure is a part of innovation   • 19:54 Key innovation trends in the next five to seven years   • 21:06 The future of 3D printing in the construction industry   • 23:32 Adopting innovation: The difference between the United States, Europe, and Asia   • 25:34 The effect of the American business system towards innovation in construction industries in the United States   • 27:20 The characteristics of a highly effective company when it comes to innovation   About Our Guest:   Brian Potter is a structural engineer and formerly worked at the construction startup Katerra. He is the author of the "Construction Physics" newsletter.   Resources: • Episode 131: Katerra: The Rise and Fall of a Billion Dollar Construction Start Up: https://www.constructiongenius.com/podcast/katerra-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-billion-dollar-construction-start-up/   • Subscribe to Brian's blog: https://constructionphysics.substack.com/   • Another Day In Katerradise https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/another-day-in-katerradise   • Follow Brian on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-potter-6a082150/   Do Your Project Executives Need to Become Better Leaders? • Book a 10-minute call with Eric Anderton to see if/how he can help (https://10minutes.youcanbook.me/)   Connect with me on LinkedIn. For more podcast episodes, you may also visit my website. Tune in and subscribe to the Construction Genius: A Leadership Master-Class Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.   Thank you for tuning in!

Jess Harrold returns to EG's weekly round-up podcast, inviting editor Sam McClary and head of content Emily Wright to talk talent. McClary airs her views on the importance to real estate of understanding the wants and needs of the best-and-brightest from all walks of life, and Wright shares highlights from this week's Talent special - including the advantages of embracing neurodiversity and her must-read interview with four inspirational execs rising like phoenixes from the ashes of US tech giant Katerra. Plus, excitement builds for next week's EG Future Leaders event – but, as their skills are put to the test, will Sam or Emily triumph in a closely-fought quiz of the week?

Our host Gareth McGlynn sat down with AEC Technology Innovator Nick Papadopoulos to discuss: - Young people taking RISKS in construction - Giving back the construction space while helping it move forward - Tech companies not understanding the construction industry - What happened with KATERRA? Why it didnt work out. - The challenges of adapting historical DATA - The furture Preconstruction org chart - Mellenials coming through, what they need from construction - Automating from the 2D world Nick touches on his 25 + years in helping companies in the AEC/O industry implement cost estimating technologies so they can work more efficiently. Nick strives to continue to create better solutions for process optimization along with developing software for benchmarking and predictive analytics. If you are interested in contacting Nick please email nickp@eosgroup.com. Enjoy and please share like and comment. EOS Group, Construction, Preconstruction Technology, Estimator, Estimating, Construction, Preconstruction, Assemble, Building Information Modeling, BIM, VDC, Virtual Design Construction, Commercial Construction, Estimators, Preconstruction Managers, Design & Build, Niche Specialist Staffing Partners, Niche SSP, Nick Papadopoulos, Gareth McGlynn.

This topic is on the youths perspective of relationships,is there still committed people do the youth still feel marriage is a option --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

The Agenda

Katerra seemed to be the perfect company in terms of what we've been talking about on this podcast: it had huge growth momentum, dozens of high-profile projects, massive funding, and more. So, what happened to it? Was it a matter of execution? Was it leadership? Operations?  Rarely have we seen a first mover (think computers and smartphones) knock it out of the park the first time around. A lot of these examples end up in history books and serve as examples for the next company in line that's trying to do the same thing. In this special episode, join hosts Christopher Riddell and Jackson Sensat as they take a deep dive into what happened to Katerra, what we can learn from the company, and a possible path towards Katerra 2.0.

In the weekly update, Construction startup Katerra has told employees it plans to shut down, people familiar with the matter said, marking the collapse of the SoftBank-backed company that had raised more than $2 billion to slash the cost of building apartments. Katerra is expected to let go of thousands of employees and is likely to walk away from dozens of construction projects it had agreed to build. Michael Green said, I was hopeful that Katerra could provide a path, though certainly not perfect, to changes that would reduce the cost of buildings, make buildings more environmentally responsible, improve the quality of construction and speed the process of building to the betterment of society. The world needs climate solutions that come from major disruption as well as smaller scale adjustments in how we live and how we build. The world also needs affordable, accessible, safe buildings for humankind. In other news, Hines begins construction of its Melbourne T3. Production by Deeelicious Beats Music "Game Play" by Quality QuestPodcast is a Mass Timber Construction Journal Production www.masstimberconstruction.com  Rotho Blaas Solutions designed for building in wood that are easily accessible adapting to the needs of all. Sponsor Wanted Here Looking for global sponsorship opportunities in the mass timber sector? Why not consider sponsoring?

The Agenda

KATERRA has an ambitious goal to transform the way we build. KATERRA's mass timber facility is a significant part of the transformation, yet over the last few years a transformation has occurred. Now KATERRA enters a new phase of working with industry in a different way and standing with partners to support a true collaboration and assist others to drive a better way to build. In this episode I speak with Sarah Smith who has the fantastic job of making mass timber mainstream across the US. We  talk about 'plugging into the supply chain' and how the mass timber transformation is as much about progressive R&D as it is about finding and developing new markets. Sarah speaks about a number of projects and provides some important updates about the advances in KATERRA's evolution. Production by Deeelicious Beats Music "Game Play" by Quality QuestPodcast is a Mass Timber Construction Journal Production www.masstimberconstruction.com  Rotho Blaas "Build the [Im]possible" Solutions designed for building in wood that are easily accessible adapting to the needs of all. Sponsor Wanted Here Looking for global sponsorship opportunities in the mass timber sector? Why not consider sponsoring?

Sustainable Building at Heart of Collaborative Project. The South Landing project in Spokane, Washington, has been called “the five smartest city blocks in the world.” The development is said to feature “the most sustainable large building in North America.” Known as the Catalyst Building, it is intended to anchor a planned “innovation hub.” The five-story, 150,000-square-foot building features two wings around a light-filled collaborative atrium. Catalyst will host dry labs, offices, classrooms, and common study areas. The Catalyst design team reportedly emphasized sustainability as a core value. The building features cross-laminated timber (CLT)—a mass timber building material made of laminated wood panels—for major structural elements. The design reduces the buildings environmental footprint by reducing energy use and prolonging the expected lifespan of the building. The Catalyst Building connects to Spokane's growing University District by way of the Gateway Bridge, designed to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists. The South Landing project is a joint development of Avista Development and South Landing Investors LLC. Other stakeholders include Katerra (maker of the CLT), Eastern Washington University, McKinstry, and Michael Green Architecture. The sustainable features include an energy-efficient radiant heating and cooling system throughout the building, heat recovery of all exhaust air, high-performing building envelope design, LED lighting, sun shading in the lobby, and a smart building management system to maximize building operations efficiency. Heather Rosentrater, senior vice president of Energy Delivery and Shared Services with Avista Utilities, and Ash Awad, Chief Market Officer from McKinstry, were guests on The POWER Podcast. They explained why the project is important for the community and the many ways all the stakeholders collaborated to make it a success. “As a utility, we recognize that a healthy community creates a healthy utility,” Rosentrater said. “And so, that's at the core of being involved in this kind of a development is recognizing the value that it can bring to the community in terms of attracting businesses and just providing economic development in this area. So, that's a big piece of why we're involved.” “Typically, when a development is happening, the developer and the general contractor and the architect are really working from a top down perspective,” Awad said. However, the South Landing stakeholders worked together in atypical ways. He said Avista and McKinstry collaborated “to think differently about how energy moves.” The two also worked closely with Katerra to bring CLT strategies into the building. “But then, we actually worked with the community, and we thought a lot about ‘What does this southern part of the University District need?' and working quite closely with the higher ed community and the greater Spokane area to think about some of those elements,” Awad said.

From long payment cycles to antiquated processes on how to bill workers, the hefty inefficiencies of the construction industry are long overdue for innovation. Enter startups such as the large venture-backed Katerra and recently public companies such as Procore. Still, independent contractors or workers from small family businesses often can't afford hefty fees from SaaS platforms promising better management. Or, they don't have a parent company behind them to foot the bill.

In this episode, host Randy Goruk and guest John Kostaras, VP Material Sales for Katerra, recap their favorite moments of Season 1 of The Leadership and Learning Podcast. Hear the highlights from the brilliance of leaders like: Tom Corrick, CEO Boise Cascade John K Smith, CEO Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Company Jim Sobeck, CEO New South Construction Supply Brad Southern, CEO Louisiana Pacific Building Solutions Hardy Wentzel, CEO Structurlam The areas covered include: The role of listening in decision making. How to learn from others without experiencing the pain. Why leaders must continue to learn. Why you must love doing what you do. How to get ahead in your career. What competitive advantage really is. Understanding ‘value destruction'. The characteristics of exceptional teams. Now we are ready for Season 2 of The Leadership and Learning Podcast.

Deano Roberts is the Senior Director of Global Workplace and Real Estate for Slack. In this conversation, Ian and Deano talk about the building of better workspaces, why your best work is done in eight hours, and the value of learning to work within a community. To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake are co-founders of the award-winning architecture firm KieranTimberlake. They are also co-authors of the book Refabricating Architecture. In this interview, Stephen and James told us how prefabricated architecture will reshape cities of the future and how incentives will need to change in order for innovation to take place. To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

Craig Curtis is the head of architecture at the construction start-up, Katerra. He has an extensive background in innovative architecture. Craig talked to us about the housing crisis, bringing down the cost of construction, and sustainability in architecture. He also told us how innovations in construction could revitalize resort towns like Jackson Hole. To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

Clark Manus is the CEO of Heller Manus. In this interview, Clark shares how to plan and design cities when new variables continue to be added. He also shares how building materials are impacting city planning To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

Marty Kooistra is the executive director of The Housing Consortium for Seattle and King County. In this interview, Marty explains why we need to build 96,000 more houses per day, and how we can build more affordably. To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

Will your future hospital stays be more like staying at a luxury hotel? That is something we heard from Grant Geiger. Grant is the founder and CEO of EIR Healthcare, a startup that brings modular construction techniques to healthcare facilities. In this episode, Grant also talks about how healthcare will be different in cities of the future, and how better hospital construction can actually improve patient outcomes.  To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

On this episode of The Future of Cities, Ian is joined by Zach Scheel. Zach is the CEO of Rhumbix, a data-driven construction technology startup. Zach discussed why buildings cost so much, and how companies like Rhumbix are aiming to lower those costs by reducing waste. He also talked about how technologies like robotics and smart city connectivity will change construction in the future.  To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

Laura Tam is a policy director at SPUR, an organization which focuses on planning and urban research in the San Francisco Bay Area. Laura leads SPUR's policy work on water, energy, climate change, and resilience.  Laura talked about what it means to be a sustainable city, how to educate the public on sustainability and affordability issues, why urban forests need to be a part of our future, and more.  To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com.  This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

Ryan Popple is the President and CEO of Proterra, a startup that designs and produces electric buses. Ryan worked at Tesla in the early days and was a partner at Kleiner Perkins where he led clean tech investments in mobility and transportation.  Ryan explained why public transportation might be free in cities of the future, and how Proterra wants to be a part of that shift. He also explained why some buses are worse for the environment than driving.  To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com.  This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit Katerra.com.

Trevor Schick is the President of Katerra Materials. In this episode, Trevor talks with our host, Ian, about sustainability in building, how to incentivize change in stagnant businesses, and why you need to be optimizing your materials.  To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com.  This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com

Over the past ten episodes, we have heard about technologies, innovations, and ideas that will make cities smarter, happier and more productive places than ever before. So how do we make sure it lasts? In this episode, we explore how cities can interact with the natural environment around them in a positive way.   (2:25) What it means to be a sustainable city. (4:30) How building materials impact sustainability. (11:10) Measuring embodied impact. (14:20) How location and density affects sustainability. (15:38) Trees as keys to unlocking environmental benefits. (17:15) Singapore as an example of greening a city. (19:23) Why we need to rethink our city infrastructures.    To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

Technology is changing at a faster pace than ever before. So how do cities keep up? In this episode we explore how cities can use technological innovation to provide better services for their citizens, and how some cities are already doing so. We also explore why many cities are hiring CIOs for the first time.   (1:58) Why many cities might want to hire a CIO. (5:54) How cities are technology platforms. (8:53) How cities use technology to prioritize resources. (10:48) The ways that technology can make cities more responsive and interactive. (15:00) Blockchain and smart cities. (16:30) Wrestling technology to be of service to us. (17:35) How technology is connecting smaller urban areas to megacities. (19:05) The importance of building an open world.    To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

Fifty years ago, Lagos, Nigeria was little more than a village. Today, it is one of the five most populous cities in the world, and it is still growing. Accelerated urbanization is creating a situation where megacities like Lagos arise before formal city plans can be laid. In this episode, we explore how city planners are coping with the unprecedented challenges of modern urban planning. (2:48) Why any city takes time to become great. (6:40) How elected officials interface with city planners to create a vision for the future. (9:51) How to create coalitions to champion radical concepts. (15:20) How do cities plan and prepare for disasters?  To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

Currently, more than 50% of the United States population lives in suburbs. So what role will they play in the future of cities? In this episode, we explore how the suburbs arose, what it has meant for our cities, and how they might change as cities do.  (3:35) The history of suburbanization in Detroit (8:10) Why people are moving back to cities (10:15) How cutting down on commutes can transform cities (13:30) How to nudge people away from car ownership To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

Traffic creates pollution, makes us miserable, and even harms our health. And yet most of us accept it as a part of daily life? In this episode, we explore how transportation will change in the future of cities, and what it might mean for the future of traffic.   (3:15) How public transit, and buses specifically, will change. (10:35) How electric bikes and scooters change the way we experience cities. (13:05) How ride-sharing changes cities from car-focused to human-focused. (15:40) How self-driving cars will make our roads safer. (21:40) Why we are about to see a “Cambrian Explosion” of transportation options.  To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

We speak with experts from technology, construction, urban planning and more to find the answer to one simple question: What makes a city great? Answers from:  (2:35) Deano Roberts (Slack) (3:55) Grant Geiger (EIR Healthcare) (4:31) Craig Curtis (Katerra) (5:06) Trevor Schick (Katerra) (6:06) Emily Warren (Lime) (7:24) Laurie Johnson (Urban Planner) (7:56) Di-Ann Eisnor (Google) (9:08) Michael Green (MGA) (10:14) Laura Tam (SPUR) (11:25) Zach Scheel (Rhumbix) (11:45) Chris Lehane (Airbnb) (12:09) Ryan Popple (Proterra) (13:20) Padden Murphy (WeWork) (14:07) James Timberlake (KieranTimberlake) (14:35) Stephen Kieran (KieranTimberlake)  To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

Nearly 90 years ago, the Empire State Building was completed ahead of time and under budget. Now, the average large construction project is 20 months behind schedule and 80% over budget. What happened? (2:09) How complexity contributes to cost (5:07) Measuring inefficiency in construction (7:22) How construction can learn from the tech sector (11:40) How unique contract structures can encourage collaboration (16:26) The importance of bringing down cost in operating a building To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

Over the past few hundred years, technology has improved at an unprecedented rate. During the same time, construction processes have largely remained the same. Now, that might finally be changing. (1:34) What is prefabrication and why is it so cost effective? (3:40) How much prefabrication can decrease cost (4:52) How prefabricated architecture can change contractor relationships (11:39) How prefab can reduce regulatory burden (13:44) How modular construction can improve health outcomes in hospitals (17:16) How prefab can be unique and beautiful (19:25) Where innovation will come from, and why To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

In the last 100 years, we have gone from the farm to the factory line to the cubicle to the open office plan. What is next? (2:19) Why workplace design needs to follow from human needs (3:10) Why workplaces should be beautiful (5:35) The problems of the open office plan (8:49) How offices can integrate with the community around them (14:12) How technology can increase human connections To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

There is an unprecedented global housing crisis. How is it affecting our cities? And more importantly, how do we solve it? (2:23) Measuring the scale of the problem (4:45) How the housing crisis affects smaller cities (6:50) How transportation, density, and education affect the housing crisis (9:00) How housing can lead to fixes in other urban problems (16:36) Why the next few decades will radically alter cities (18:29) Why are there empty homes in the middle of a housing crisis? (20:13) Innovations in housing to make them more shareable (21:20) How we can be forces for positive change To learn more about The Future of Cities, visit FutureOfCities.com. This podcast is presented by Katerra. Better, faster, lower cost building projects are long overdue. Katerra is applying technology to optimize every aspect of building design and construction. To learn more about how you can join their growing team, visit katerra.com.

In the last two months Michael Marks has turned down a dozen offers to make keynote speeches at conferences. His company, construction startup Katerra, is three years old, but the attention surge is very recent. “Construction technology has gotten kinda buzzy,” he says. That may be. But more likely, interest in Katerra has spiked because in January, the company landed an astounding $867 million in venture funding led by the SoftBank Vision Fund.