Young: Owner spent $14M on 3D BIM, but inspectors demanded paper 2D drawings
Tracy Young · a16z Podcast | Construction Under Tech -- Info Flows · Jan 2, 2019 · at 8:02
Tracy Young, former construction engineer and PlanGrid co-founder, illustrates how regulatory compliance and field inspection practices lag behind costly 3D modeling investments.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“On one of the projects I was on, the owner paid something like fourteen million dollars for us to essentially play Tetris inside the model. We went into the field, and the inspectors came out and said, hey, look at my stamp, look at my signature. It's on the tootie set of drawings. It is not in this model.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Tracy Young
Young: Top construction firms employ only 5% of all builders
“The top construction firms, the ones who employ over 10,000 field workers, hire only five percent of all builders. Whereas in services or manufacturing, the top firms, they're employing like 25% of the industry.”
Young: Construction labor productivity is lower today than 60 years ago
“We are less productive today than we were 20 years ago than we were 60 years ago, and it's completely unbelievable.”
Young: Traditional bathroom construction requires 10 to 20 separate subcontractors
“It takes somewhere between 10 to 20 different subcontractors that touches a bathroom, which is crazy, right? You only think of like, you know, maybe the plumbers but there's the concrete subcontractor, there's a mechanical subcontractor, the electricians, the …”
Young: General contractor margins are only 1% to 3%
“Their margins for a general contractor are something like one to three percent.”
Young: Global infrastructure will fail within a decade without productivity gains
“Construction is the infrastructure of this world, and if we're unable to figure out how to solve this productivity problem, we'll be unable to deliver the infrastructure that this world needs, not in the next 15 years, in the next decade.”