Lumber

“I hired an HDR on my payroll, and I asked her to set up about 200 interviews. So I spoke to construction industries, small and large, ah, just to understand what problems, challenges each of them face.”

“Today I firmly believe that my team should be running the company. I should be working on things that are one year down the line. I should be working on anything that's 10 x, the, brings 10 x impact to the company. If it's one x impact, it needs should be done…”

“Few things that I did differently in lumber is once I narrowed down the problem that I'm going after, I just didn't go out and hire engineers. I hired engineers, but I also hired a salesperson. I also had a marketing person with me.”

“I would say don't bring humility into storytelling. Be unapologetic about it. Present that grand vision and demonstrate passion.”

“So, to give you an idea, a construction company that has billion dollar revenue. They have about six workers who manually reconcile all the compliance and regulatory stuff that's mandated. They are dealing with about 40 unions.”

“We have an agent that takes in manual timesheets. And converts into digital record. And said, this is not a trivial thing to solve. The worker's handwriting is worse than a doctor's. And you know, they may capture the image in a in scenarios where there is poo…”

“My sales guy started out as a carpenter in the industry. My co-founder, he was leading Oracle Construction Engineering. So, he was not from the industry, but he had built solutions for the industry. Our first few engineers all came from Oracle.”

“Regulatory challenges, solving regulatory challenging, solving labor compliance issues is, ah, is a wedge that'll help us penetrate this industry, because it's a major, major pain.”

“At Lumber we were fortunate to get hold of a AI team. That unfortunately had not found success before. They were thinking about disbanding. We went and took over the team that has really worked well, right?”