After fires in the Palisades, most home-building startups failed to rebuild. Alexis argues the answer is modular panels, like Lego blocks, that can be arranged into different layouts instead of fixed whole-home designs. Cover completed a rebuild using this approach.
To see the Palisades in person is shocking. We were visiting about a year after the fires had ripped through this area. Some houses were left standing but still had cosmetic and smoke damage. A few houses had also been repaired. No one except for Cover, though, had managed to do a complete rebuild. We've been prefabbing homes for a long time, and it turns out that they don't appeal to that many people. And there are several disaster stories about startups that have tried new takes on prefabbing and on modernizing home building. As in, this is a genuinely terrible business to try and get into for myriad reasons. Alexis, though, is a sadist, apparently. He's convinced that these companies went about their prefabbing all wrong. They either got too big too fast, or they focused too much on trying to build entire homes.
I looked at other companies that had tried to build homes in a factory. A lot of them had a set of pre-designed models and you pick one of, you know, 5 or 10 or whatever it is. And it just doesn't work well for that property or that person's preferences. Well, the thing that you need to scale is not like the whole home as a single layout. It's the panels, the Lego blocks. Then how many of those you put together doesn't really matter. Yeah, yeah. When you lay all this stuff out, how many options do the people have on how they want to arrange different things? It's practically infinite. You can do a courtyard, you can do an L-shape, you can do an S-shape, U-shape. Okay, all 90-degree angles.
