Digging into Construction with the Co-Founders of Rhumbix | Greymatter

Hi, everybody. This is Jerry Chen. I'm a partner at Greylock. I'm here with co founders of Runbix, Zach Scheel and Drew DeWalt. Zach and Drew have been two of my favorite founders in the portfolio. We led the series A investment in runbix about two years ago, and it's a great company in the construction software space, attacking labor productivity in this multi trillion dollar vertical. And today we're going to talk to Zach and Drew about the Rumbix story, about the two of them, how they created this company and why, and talk a little bit about trends around construction, construction SaaS and how technology is going to change what has been historically a pretty sleepy industry. So, Zach and Drew, thanks for being here today.

Hey, thanks a lot, Jerry.

Thanks for having us.

So maybe first of all, let's talk about the rumbix inception or creation story. Every great startup has a great creation myth or backstory. And it's not like you guys started this in a garage or lab, maybe introduce yourselves and how you guys both met each other and how this story first came to be.

Yeah, so my name is Zach Scheel. So I spent five years in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps, managing construction for the Navy in the Pacific Northwest and Northeast Africa. Went to Stanford for business school. And that's where I met Drew. He's a fellow Navy veteran. So we got to know each other through the Veterans Club. And then in the summer of 2013, we both found ourselves down in Northern Chile in the Atacama Desert. I was working at a copper mine on labor productivity, and Drew was doing his first startup, which was building a non co located solar and pumped hydro power plant in the same remote region in northern Chile. And Drew was trying to estimate labor costs for construction of this new power plant. And that was the exact problem I was dealing with. So really, the company started over beers in Santiago, both of us looking at the same problem through two different perspectives.

It's one of those stories that it sounds like we planned it from the beginning. Both Navy vets. I drove submarines. He obviously was a CB doing construction, met at Stanford Business School. But I think the part of the story is that we didn't necessarily come into the thing thinking we were going to start a company or be entrepreneurs, but we went into an industry that desperately needed some help of sorts. And we were living the pain point and had learned enough to know that we might be able to do something about it. And so it was over those beers in northern Chile saying, hey, I think we have an opportunity Here, and we know enough about this problem to do something about it. I think we were also naive enough to think that we could do something about it. But through the constant effort to get there, we've really created something compelling.

I think that naivety or that passion is kind of what you need sometimes. You don't know how hard these things are. But just on that point, startups are hard. Maybe it helps that you were naive enough to say, hey, I can change this multi trillion dollar industry. But you guys had plenty of opportunities coming out of Stanford to go join either consulting firms, banks or other technology companies to actually say, I'm going to take no salary or very little salary and start a company at high risk, even with families and a young child. What was that passion that actually said we're going to jump off the cliff? Right, because you have to keep coming back to the same idea and be obsessed with that idea. This itchy had to scratch to actually be crazy enough to start a company. How did you guys go from chili over beers and that's just beer talking to deciding that, okay, we're no longer in Chile, we're no longer having beers. How do we go from that to saying, we're going to do this? Say no to all the offers you have on the table and start a company with the two of you?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I grew up around construction. My dad sold construction equipment throughout the Midwest and then was working in construction for about eight years professionally before starting Rhombics. And I, I love construction. I love being out on job sites, love the people more than anything, and really just saw how antiquated technology was in the industry and being immersed in Silicon Valley and Stanford and being surrounded by it and having a lot of classmates start companies really gave us the kind of the inspiration that we needed to say, hey, let's do this. Let's take that leap of faith and really take what we've learned both from our military backgrounds as well as from experience in the industry as well as the graduate school business, what they taught us about starting a company and apply that to try to solve this massive problem in the world's second largest industry.

The way I think about it is really actions express your priorities. And we didn't start the company over beers and Chile. We started talking about what would become the company. And I think it's one of those ideas that seem so obvious that we actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out who's solving this problem right now and digging in and digging in and doing research and over the course of about six months, we were realizing we were spending a lot of time on this thing that wasn't a business right now, was an idea, but our passion was growing for it, and the opportunity seemed more real. And then when we finally turned it into a business, was actually over. Whiskey and Alameda about six months later.

I detect a trend here, but it really was.

It was that time between, hey, this could be something, to doing the hard work of figuring out, is this a real opportunity, that we have some sort of unique insight into that we can really attack it. And then we. It took that. It did take that leap of faith at the end to say, we've done enough and if we're going to go any further, we need to fully commit. And that was that moment where we said, looked each other in the eye and said, let's do this. And I think a bigger thing is really, you talk about what we would do, starting a business, and it's risky and everybody talks about the risk, but it really is how you define risk. And there are all sorts of risks with going a more traditional path with a bigger company that nobody talks about. And the thing I think Zach and I got really comfortable with is this is an opportunity. It's an industry we're already working in that we both like. If we go down this path, will we learn a lot about something that's really important to us and the world economy? And will we have better opportunities at the end of this if the normal startup statistics play out and we got to do something else? Fortunately, with support like from Greylock and yourself, we've come a long way since then, but that's how we identified the risk and the fact that we didn't feel like it was that risky in the end.

I think that's a great statement. Two things. One, how you define risk varies from person to person, and how a founder and an entrepreneur defines risk is very different than the person who doesn't walk this path. And we always find that the best founders a have a passion for the problem, be it construction or be it something else. And also they're intimate with the problem as well. And you're familiar, so you have an insight that someone down the street doesn't. And so the combination, the passion, the insight creates a great founding team. So I want to go back to runbix in a bit, but maybe let's talk about a topic you guys both mentioned. You're both Navy veterans. That basically created both a bond for the two of you at Stanford in the veterans club. But also a common language, a common set of experiences for you guys to communicate and work together as co founders. Maybe talk about being veterans and being Navy veterans. As entrepreneurs, I want to talk about two ways. One, how did it prepare you to be a leader and an entrepreneur? And number two is, how do you guys run runbigs as a company? How does that culture impact the people you hire, the people you lead, and decisions you make?

Yeah, I can take the first part of that question. So the military, I think, is a great training ground for any entrepreneur. The things you learn from day one are small unit leadership. You learn to have a bias towards action and especially doing overseas deployments. You get comfortable making decisions with incomplete information in a rapidly changing environment. And I think that kind of sums up with limited resources that in and of itself is a startup. So going to war is a unbelievable preparation for being an entrepreneur. And then, Drew, you want to comment on how our company culture has developed around bits and pieces of the military?

Yeah. When you look at company culture, it is the most important thing at the end of the day. And I think that's what we realized. In an environment, when you have limited resources, you want people fully bought in being creative and trying to work towards a solution because you don't have everything to work with. And so I think it's one of those things that when we think about it, and one of the things that the military instilled in us was a constant, consistent, thoughtful focus on culture. It's a realization that if you don't pay attention to it, you'll have a culture. It just might not be one that you really are happy with. And so you think about it as this multiplier effect. Your product's going to be better because you're going to have more empathy. If that's a cultural value that you espouse, your customer success is going to be better. Your sales are going to be better. All these things are empowered further by a strong company culture. And that was one of the things that we didn't have any hesitation with on day one when it was really just the two of us. We were already talking about a company culture.

I think it was Drucker, one of the management gurus, that said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I always think about companies as a combination of hardware and software. Right. Being a technology myself, the hardware, I can say, is the technology, the IP and the product. But the software is the culture, the people, and how you communicate. And you really need both the hardware and the software of a company to work Together in unison to really have a healthy, functioning organization. And just two more sentences on veterans in startups and technology. You guys have at least one other or how many other veterans do you have on the team?

We're 25% veteran.

That's great. And it's probably helpful because in construction, there are probably veterans out there on the customer side. But maybe talk a little bit about more veterans in startups, more veterans in technology. What can we do to have more veterans or use folks that serve in the armed forces more as entrepreneurs or even executives?

Yeah, I think it's one of those that we've actually seen this trend move in a really positive direction over the three plus years that we've been doing rhumbics. And it really is. I think we went from a stage where it was nice to have and if we could support veterans, we'd like to do that. And that wasn't just in the tech community, that was generally in America. But what we have seen happen is folks are starting to understand it as a competitive advantage because we have had veterans take leadership roles and be very successful. And we're seeing more and more of that. So there's a momentum building and I think a recognition in startups within the Valley and I think in the investing community as well. That. Right. If you're, if you're trying to find somebody who is the most knowledgeable on a very specific thing, go to PhD program. If you're trying to find somebody who can succeed in a variety of roles and wear different hats, go talk to a veteran. And that's what we're seeing people realize.

Yeah. In a world where the average tenure at a job is sometimes one to two years, veterans come out of an organization where we didn't have an opportunity to quit. There was no quitting the job. You get the job done, you take the hill. And I think that's an attitude and ethos that they bring to the companies and the organizations that they join. And I think there's tremendous opportunity for tech companies to learn how to teach veterans the skills that they didn't acquire in their early 20s when they were out in the military, but then harness the best parts of what they did pick up from the military to really empower them to lead organizations.

So, yeah, Jerry, a lot of the talk about veterans, and I know Zach and I have a strong perspective on it, but I'd love to hear your perspective on it as the investor and veteran co founders. I would imagine this is probably the first investment in veterans you've made and Potentially Greylock and maybe how your thinking around it has developed over the investment.

Well, for me for sure, this was the first investment I made with veteran co founders. I believe Greylock over the history we've invested in other veterans at least, if not founders, at least executives in our companies for the past 52 years. I was lucky enough to work with several veterans at VMware as well. So in exec ranks we had a gentleman who ran our professional services, was also a Navy veteran as well, so I think he flew helicopters. So I've worked with veterans before. I've seen their ability to build teams, lead teams and run large organizations. So I was definitely comfortable with that. I think Runbix isn't your stereotypical investment where you find a PhD that's working on some deep IP or deep technology. I'm always looking for ways to build companies and I think intellectual property isn't always code or new invention. Intellectual property is also a method or process or workflow or knowledge of a customer pain point that you can solve. I think what I saw in runbix and the two of you is the intellectual property or the moat of the company is a familiarity with the problem space, the industry and the ability to combine your domain background with your entrepreneurial background. Being here in SF and Silicon Valley and and then hiring your early talent. You're attracting good technical talent around you to solve a very real problem with all startups. If there's a large enough market, I believe you can build a big enough company as long as you prove value to the customer. I think you guys had the kernel of something great and that led us to lead the series A. So next topic on leadership and team building, veterans and non veterans. It was the two of you when you started and so going from like 2 to 100, 100,000 employees one of these days. Talk to me about lessons you've learned around recruiting. Recruiting talent, managing talent, nurturing talent. So tell us what you've learned over the past couple years around recruiting talent, attracting talent, leading and nurturing talent in a startup that was maybe related, unrelated to your experience in the Navy, but just as a founder, CEOs and COOs in general. What are some lessons out there for other founders around talent? Because really we are a technology company, a technology industry, but really we're a talent industry.

Yeah, I mean there's a very real war for talent out there. Very, very competitive to hire the good people. And what we found has been very successful is that prospective hires are very attracted to the mission and the vision of the company, which is to continuously improve the way the world is designed and built by delivering technology to workers first. And we found that that vision resonates with a lot of high quality software engineers and designers that aren't wanting to just work on the back end of another software product, but really design and build something that touches the hands of the men and women building the physical world that we interact with every day.

I think the only other thing is they're looking for a mission and vision in a big way. Something hopefully a little different than you see around a lot of the Valley currently. You're also seeing, I think, a transition where there was a focus on getting on a rocket ship and being a part of a unicorn. And what's happened is you've exposed kind of the dirty underbelly a lot of these institutions. And so there's a reversion back to a focus on being a part of a great organization that clearly has great opportunity, but working with a team that you want to be with day in and day out. And that's one of the things that we focus on first and foremost when we bring folks in.

Let's talk about the mission and vision of runbix next, specifically attacking labor productivity or just cost in construction. Let's talk about global construction in general. Historically, it hasn't been a vertical that spends a lot of technology. What is it about 2017, 2018, 2019, this next set of years that got you guys excited about using technology to change construction. What inflection point do you see going on right now?

Yeah, absolutely. Construction is a historically thin margin industry. Typical project net margins are 1 to 3%. And as such, construction has very low investment in it, roughly 1% of revenues. And so a lot of the software has really been software that's built for the home office, the engineers, the architects. The last five years, with the ubiquity of mobile devices showing up on job sites, as well as wireless connectivity, you're starting to see new category of software, which is really software for the field. That's something that the first couple companies that have been building software for the field, Plangrid, Procore, are starting to have very, very powerful ROIs by being able to bring the technology to where the work happens out in the field. And so that is, we're in the early days of that shift in the industry away from software built for the home office in the field, in the field trailer and designing software for the workers out in the field. And that's something that we saw coming and as such decided to Go out and learn from the foreman what they needed in order to do their jobs better and build a company around that.

Well, Drew, maybe talk more about this evolution of construction. And so now you guys been selling the product for a couple quarters now. What's been one of the biggest challenges, either technically or culturally or organizationally you've seen in selling software to the construction industry?

Quite frankly, it's a gift and a curse for our company that we are inserting technology in a place where it has never been. It has never been in the field of construction. It's been in the trailer, in the home office, but not actually out on job sites. In fact, a lot of job sites for the longest time banned construction workers from having cell phones on job sites, from having powerful communication computer devices in their pockets. And we're really bucking that trend in a big way. Before Rumbix came along, the closest it got was really on a large tablet in the hands of managers in the field. And we were taking the next step of delivering a smaller form factor so that it's easier down to the worker level, where the work's actually getting done and the boots are getting dirty. And so that provides a huge opportunity. But it's a challenge because you're dealing with the human issues of tech adoption, learning a new system, asking folks to do things a little different than they've done for the last 20 or 30 years. And so I think that's probably the biggest challenge we face every day. But we're seeing the market move towards us from a demographic perspective, from just a general embracing of this idea at a corporate level for most of these construction contractors. But it is still a merging point, and we haven't hit that quite yet.

If I can add onto that, there's also a lot of macroeconomic factors in the industry that make it more resistant to change. The average age of an equipment operator is 46 years old. Most of the executives and the companies we're selling to are baby boomers. Within five years of retiring. They've operated the company on paper for the entirety of their careers. And so sometimes they don't see the need to change. But there's still early adopters out there. It just makes them a little bit harder to find. But we come across them, and they're awesome to work with because they see the vision of what technology can do, and they're not scared of it. They're not scared of what are my workers going to think. And they've built companies themselves around being innovative and trying new methods, methods in A very risk averse industry. And so it's finding people like that that are able to be that beachhead that we grow the company and really show the industry a new way of doing construction.

I've seen the past couple years that rate of change accelerating. I think you have some in any market, the laggards, if you will. You talk about crossing the chasms. There's always going to be the late majority and the early minority. But I think you've seen signal that a lot of these small companies and obviously larger companies, larger GCs, are actually adopting technology at a rate we didn't see three, four, five years ago.

Yeah, no. I think the writing's on the wall where if you adopt technology you can increase your operating margins. It's a highly competitive, fragmented industry. So competitive bid process for projects where the awards are almost always given to the lowest bid technically capable of building the project. And so the larger construction companies with the resources see this as a huge strategic advantage for them both being able to increase their operating margins, but also being able to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the market to owners. The people paying for the projects want to see technology in the hands of the workers because they know that they're going to get a better product out of that.

So Drew, maybe for the listeners in our audience, you're not too familiar with runbigs, can you share a little bit about what runbix does, namely what's the pain point you're trying to solve and then talk about the product? What does the product itself do?

That's a great question. So Rumbix digitizes the last mile of data collection in the construction industry. Folks are still managing billion dollar portfolios of projects or even billion dollar individual products. And the raw data that's collected on construction job sites starts out by somebody writing it on a piece of paper or fat fingering it into an Excel spreadsheet. And so we digitize that last mile. We provide best in class deep analysis with our data science team on that data and you can get it into existing ERP type systems. Clearly that's table stakes. But we also go further to provide that feedback right back out into the field. As data's coming in, it's being analyzed and fed right back to the field. So you can create a much more agile and proactive environment on a construction site. And that really leads to stepwise improvements in productivity.

So tell me a little bit more about that. What kind of data are you collecting? Is it labor hours? Is it material? How are you organizing the data? And Then what tangible actions can you, can you do or decisions can you make day in, day out or week in week? Week out. With this data.

Right. We put a, as discussed before, we put a mobile device in the hands of the workers doing the work. We allow them to give us great information. We also tap into more ambient sources of information as well. And really we're collecting the core data that drives construction job sites. Who was on your job site? How long were they there for? How long were they there for? What tasks did they complete and what quantities did they install? What work did they complete? And that drives everything in construction. On some level, equipment supports that, materials support that finished product. But the core data is around the labor data that we collect. And then we also bring in information around materials and equipment, but the focus is on the people. Equipment doesn't move. Materials don't get installed unless there's a human involved. And we focus on the human first. So it's that core data and then we use it to drive insights around things like profitability trends over time on individual task levels, as opposed to waiting a week or two to gather information to realize you had a problem two or three weeks ago. And so we can drive those sorts of insights and then you feed it right back down in the field. So those workers that are actually at the work face doing work can take small interventions from day to day to improve their job site, improve their performance. And when you aggregate that over a three to five year job, the gains are massive.

So this is data and visibility that no one had before. Right. So the general contractors, the subcontractors, they were basically driving blind beforehand. So in many ways you're collecting data at a level and a detail and a speed that didn't exist two years ago. But I'd love to just hear kind of some real life case studies on how customers are using runbix to save money, increase productivity, or just really improve the quality of their projects overall.

Yeah, absolutely. So as Drew talked about, we collect the data, but currently on paper, the data is unilateral. It's recorded on paper, it's slow, it's cumbersome. And the workers are never given any feedback on their performance. We provide feedback to them on their performance and what that does is that sparks conversations, it brings them into the feedback loop and it allows the worker to say, hey, we were a little less productive today because I didn't have an extra forklift. So we were sitting around waiting for that. Would it be possible to get an extra forklift? These are conversations that don't currently happen today in the absence of not having the workers as part of that feedback loop. So one specific example is working with Skanska number seven builder in the United States. And we were working with them on a hospital project in Southern California for building out the bathroom pods for all of this new hospital expansion. And on that scope of work, we were able to reduce the headcount 50%. We started out at the beginning of our work with them, it took four workers 58 hours to build one bathroom pod. @ the end of our work with them, it took two workers seven hours and 15 minutes to build that same bathroom pod. So that was a 50% reduction in head count and 88% reduction in task duration. This is on a project where 50% of the total project cost is labor. The savings are tremendous.

And so who are the user and buyer, you think? Is it the foreman, the actual laborers, the project owners, the subcontractors, the general contractors? There's a whole hierarchy here. So let me understand who touches runbix, and then how do you think about it? Like, do the laborers care? Do the unions care? Do the owners care? I'd love to understand. Runbix is one. When we did our diligence on it, it's actually loved by both sides, right? The individual craft workers and the owners and the managers love runbigs for different reasons. So love to hear more about who uses it and what value each person is getting from it.

We sell into the specialty subcontractors and the trades. Really, that was the underserved bottom of the pyramid. When you look at the general contractors, and the owners do have a lot of software being developed specifically for them, the workers are spending two to three hours a week on paperwork. The foreman are. And so we reduce that to 20 minutes or less. So immediately, immediately within our first week of usage, we're able to give the foreman two to three hours back of his or her day. These are folks that joined construction and went into the industry because they don't like desk jobs, they don't like doing paperwork. And so that was a very real value add that we were able to deliver just by getting rid of the paper. But beyond that, when we talk about that feedback, we found that workers are saying, thank you. I've been doing this job for 30 years, and nobody's told me how I'm doing at it. All I get told is I have mandatory overtime and I'll be coming in on Saturday to catch up on work. And so they're very, very receptive to getting the feedback on how they're doing because they want to do better work. They don't like being delayed, they don't like being unproductive. So my previous job was more on the management, project management side. And it would typically take a week to get two weeks to get all the data from the time cards cleaned up and into the system in a way that you were able to use it. So you would have a once a week meeting with two week old data to try to, you know, problem solve on a job site. And so there's a huge need to have more access to better data sooner to be able to actually make decisions in real time that affect project outcomes. And so really it's a huge shift to moving to radical transparency because construction has a lot of contractual boundary layers. But we've seen throughout the value chain, from the subcontractor through the general contractor, to the owners, to the financiers, insurers and lawyers, that everyone agrees that having a more transparent data set leads to better project outcomes.

Really the design of the product is driven around the realization that you need better, more accurate data, faster and analyzed in a compelling way. And it's the old adage of if you put crap in the system, you're going to get crap out the back end. And so what you're realizing is a lot of systems delivered in the field provide very little incentive for folks to give you great accurate information and also then ask them to give you a little more richer information, some qualitative information. We designed the product with the worker in mind to really unlock the ability and the desire for them to give higher levels of the organization better, richer data, faster.

One of the hierarchies we talk about at Greylock for enterprise software is at the base layer you have a system of record, which the data and historically that's been been enterprise software. But the next two layers where I think runmix really shines is you have both the system intelligence, using the data to make recommendations on productivity and cost, but also what we also call system engagement. You actually connect the end user, the foreman, the actual worker to communicate back with the rest of his peers. Or up and down the chain, when you have that combination of communication and that engagement using mobile devices, plus the data that you can make intelligent decisions on, you have a pretty powerful tool that can really help every specialty subcontractor and really take a lot of the costs out of this industry. One of the things we've been tracking as investors is there's been an influx of new technologies in the construction industry, from software companies to people using drones or gps. How does rumbgus compare to some of these other technologies? How is it similar? How is it different? And in many ways, what makes you guys different or better than the competition?

Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of people that are building tools that digitize a workflow. I think what differentiates us is a few things. First and foremost, it's deep industry expertise. We have over 30, 40 years of experience working on over $40 billion in projects across five continents on our team. So we've seen the biggest construction projects around the globe. We combine that deep industry expertise with world class design, engineering and Data Science. Our third hire was a PhD in astrophysics that we've taught construction to. And it was this understanding that you can't stop at creating a digital data lake. It's not useful to the industry. You have to be able to draw insights from that and then deliver them back. And that really requires the combination of those four disciplines. Data science, data design. You have to have a product that the foreman engage with and use, which is not easy engineering and then deep construction expertise. And I would say the other thing that really differentiates us is our focus on workers first. You know, I think that if you ask us what are, you know, our Peter Thiel, what's the one thing we believe that few others do? It's that construction workers are honest, hardworking, want to do better work, but just aren't given the digital tools they need to succeed. We strive to deliver the best possible experience for the user, the foreman, not the management. We have to deliver value to the foreman first in order to gain the right and the privilege to collect this information that's so valuable for management. And I think that that is really what differentiates us. And it's not just platitudes. We walk the walk and talk the talk every day listening to foremen. And they love it because they see suggestions that they've made come to fruition and improvements to the design and the user interface. And so really when you look at software out there, and especially a lot of construction companies, we see making decisions without actually bringing the foreman and the workers in from the field to the office to try out technology. And those technology deployments fall flat on their face. We've really taken the reverse approach where we build everything from the worker first and then serve the office secondarily.

Everybody on our team has a hard hat, safety vest and steel toe boots and spends time on construction sites. This isn't an abstract problem that they're solving on some level, they've lived it, they've heard it from the end user and they're solving it.

It's interesting when you talk about your product that way. It reminds me how there's different axioms a startup or company can build around to drive decision making, be technology, competitors, customers, partners or pursuit of some goal. You read anything Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon. Amazon is such a customer driven culture. Every product decision, every marketing decision is how will this benefit their customer? In many of the same ways runbigs is thinking about the customer, but specifically is workers first. So every product decision you guys make, every marketing decision, every pricing decision, every company decision I've seen around the boardroom, around the table, you guys, how does this impact the workers, the craft workers, how did this make their life better? That kind of driving beacon has been impressive because when you think about the competition, we don't even talk about the competition really in the market. We talk about customers first, workers first. How does every decision impact that? And the rest has been falling.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it has to be. You can build stuff without software. We've been doing it since the pyramids and the Great Wall, but you can't build stuff without people. And the focus has to be there. Them and they need tools, they want tools. And that's what we're building to address a large demand in the industry.

So, Zach, the product sounds amazing. This philosophy of being very worker driven, customer driven is inspiring. How have your customers and the users reacted to the product and how's the market reacted so far?

Yeah, I mean the reaction has been great. We had one customer, Ken from Heatmasters out in of Chicago said, I've been trying to do this for 15 years. Thank you, thank you for finally doing this. We can finally operate our company the way that we've been striving to. That positive reception is seen through uptick in users and customers. We've been doubling users on the system month over month for about the last five months and continuing to see that increase and launching new pilots every week. We're currently working with five of the top 10 builders in the United States. And these guys are folks that do construction globally. Getting ready to launch on a project up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan next month. And so we're already active in four countries and seeing this thing start to spread globally before we even anticipated we'd be ready to.

That's amazing. So five of the top 10 largest construction companies and doubling users and workers on it month over month. With that momentum, I can't wait to see see what this company looks like in the next year or two years?

Yeah, absolutely. As we look at what we can do, there's so much white space in front of us for the product to be able to develop into. And on a higher level, what we're doing is we're connecting the workforce on a uniform platform. Never before have all the subcontractors on a project site been on the same software platform. And that's what we're doing. We're doing it down at SFO with Hensel Phelps, we're doing it here in Mission Bay with Skanska. And once you begin to standardize and collect Data across the 100 to 200 subcontractors on a project, the savings and the productivity improvements are even more profound. So we're super excited to have our first few full project wide deployments this year.

And the important thing is really it's focusing on what Zach just said. It's the standardization of input into the system so you can make project wide portfolio of project company wide insights that you can draw out from that information, but it's also the standardization of that output.

Drew, what's your vision for runbix as a product or a company in the next five or even ten years? Today we see this data collection, the last mile. What does this look like five years from now? Ten years from now? Yeah.

As we see the product developing, step one is to build that data set of construction and specifically around what does great construction look like. It opens up a whole lot of opportunities to better understand the more nuances of construction down to the unit level, down to the crew level, so you can make better decisions in the estimating process and the budgeting and then the execution process. And I think the other really exciting thing is there's a lack of really good industry wide information on what does good construction look like. And the ability, once you standardize that data set, to understand, you know, a baseline of this is how some of the best companies on average are doing. And you can look at your own operation and say, okay, we're better than most in these areas, but this is a specific area we really lag. And so now we know where to expend resources to make our operations better. That doesn't exist right now. It's tribal knowledge. It's trial and error without the data to measure if you're getting any better. And that's, I think, the really exciting next step of runbix.

Zach, where do you think construction as an industry goes from here in five years or 10 years will we have robots building our buildings, you know, self driving tractors and cranes? What does that look like in your mind?

I'm super excited for the next five to 10 years. In the construction industry, we're really at a tipping point in terms of technology that's being developed and deployed to job sites, fueled in part by the realization on the part of contractors that they need to digitize as a part of their future strategy, but also being helped by investors like Greylock, Spectrum 28, Glenn Capital, Brick and Mortar Ventures, who understand the huge opportunity there. So as I look at the next five to 10 years, I think you'll see a lot of robots and exoskeletons, a lot of tools that help augment the human workers. I don't think we're going to completely replace those. I think you'll have a lot more connectivity of the job sites. It's a perfect ecosystem for an Internet of Things deployment. You've got materials, equipment, and people on the job site. Those are three things that you need to track. And it's a highly dynamic job site. The copper mine I was at had 70,000 hours worked daily across 7,000 people. And so 70,000 hours of effort were expended daily to change that site from what it looked like in the morning. And so tons of opportunity to better understand and manage those operations by wiring everything up and having it talk to each other. And so, as I look at five to 10 years from now, I think we finally get to that fully connected job site where everything's talking to everything and that you do have in certain use cases, robots augmenting human effort as well as things like exoskeletons helping really just make the job site a lot safer for humans.

So this has been great. Last question before we wrap up, Drew. What do you want Rhombics to be known for in five years from now?

My answer's pretty simple, actually. I'm going to measure success of Rhumbix. By the time we start going out on any job site wearing our Rumbix hard hat, and we have foreman and workers coming up and thanking us for, for the product that we've built, that's how I'll know that we've arrived.

Yeah. To add to that, we've got a shortage currently of 250,000 skilled craft laborers in the United States and a pending trillion dollar infrastructure spend. We quite literally don't have the people in the United States needed to build what we want to build. With an industry average of C minus in infrastructure across U.S. cities. And so the average labor productivity on job sites today is 35%. If we help move that labor productivity up to 40, 45%, we actually can do more with the existing workforce that we have. And so I really see runbix having the opportunity to help improve American infrastructure by being able to help the US Taxpayers dollar go further than it is today.

Not just America. I mean, it's a global industry and you have global customers. The last thing I want to say is many startups and many companies say they put their customers first, but very few actually say workers first in the name and the motto of their company. And I think just that. North Star for you guys have been one of the most inspiring things as a board member investor. With that, I want to thank both Zach and Drew for spending today. With me, this is Jerry Chen from Greylock. And thank you very much.

Thanks, Jerry.

Thank you.