Building Beautiful Homes with Robots: The Future of Construction (Salar al Khafaji, CEO & Founder of Monumental)

We're trying to make construction faster, more affordable, and more beautiful. We want to be able to build a beautiful house within a day in the future, which is not something we can do today, just to be clear. Right. But that's the vision we're striving for.

How did you land on deciding to take on construction, which is not an industry that has been super friendly to venture capital?

I think when you're in software, everything seems to be about technology, right? And then when you zoom out and think about what is the economy made of, literally think about what is GDP made of, it's actually like such a tiny part of it. Energy is obviously really big. Construction infrastructure is really big. Education is really big.

When you get a subcontracting job, what robots are coming into the process? What does that process look like?

We would actually deploy today 4 systems at the same time. When I say system, it's actually like 3 robots working together. One brings the bricks, one brings the mortar, and then the one that actually does the bricklaying. But we still need operators today for a bunch of things. Instead of having to get 100% perfection with technology, we're just already delivering value and just increasing automation along the way.

Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Each week, I sit down with the founders, investors, and visionaries who are living in the future to help you see what's coming next and understand it more clearly. Today, I'm speaking with Salar Al-Khafaji, the CEO and founder of Monumental. Monumental builds robots to assemble buildings, starting with its autonomous bricklaying system. Salar's goal is to shake the construction industry out of its decades-long stagnation and empower humankind to create beautiful buildings faster and more efficiently. In our conversation, we explore why Europe's severe bricklaying shortage has created high wages for skilled masons, how the pursuit of beautiful architecture disappeared after World War II, why Salar chose to build his robotics company in Amsterdam rather than Silicon Valley, and how Palantir's cult-like culture taught him that getting access to interesting problems is a privilege worth fighting for. I walked away from this conversation with lessons on picking truly ambitious problems, why the best robotics companies solve specific issues rather than building general purpose machines, and how to balance structure with productive chaos as you scale. If you enjoy today's episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing and joining us for the incredible conversations we have coming up. Now here's my conversation with Salar. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, Strava, Hinge, and Linear to leverage the voice of the customer and build best-in-class products. Interpret unifies all customer conversations in real time, from Gong recordings to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads, and makes it available for your team for analysis and action. What makes Interpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT. If modernizing your voice of customer program is a 2025 priority, like it is for customer-centric companies such as Canva, Notion, Perplexity, and Linear, reach out to the team at interpret.com/mario. That's enterpret.com/mario. This episode is brought to you by Brex. Fred Adler, the influential venture capitalist of the 1970s, was known for displaying decorative pillows in his office that featured a signature business philosophy: corporate happiness is positive cash flow. In today's post-SERP environment, Adler's wisdom feels particularly relevant. As founders need to make every dollar work harder. That's exactly what Brex delivers. Their modern finance platform was built specifically for startups like yours and designed to help extend your runway when capital efficiency matters most. With Brex, you get global corporate cards with up to 20x higher credit limits and no personal guarantee required. Their banking solution has no minimums and no transaction fees. While letting you earn high yield from day one with same-day liquidity. Best of all, Brex knows you were born to build, not juggle spreadsheets and finance tools. Their AI-powered platform brings cards, banking, expense management, and travel all in one place. It's simple, scalable, and designed to get you back to what you do best— building. More than 30,000 companies, including 1 in 3 US venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help make every dollar count toward their mission. Join them at brex.com/mario. I'm so glad to have you on the podcast. I feel like a lot of times I have folks on who I'm meeting for the first time, but you and I, Salar, know each other quite well. Dare I say we are even friends?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm so happy to be able to do this with you.

Amazing. Well, I've looked forward to it a lot because I think you're building one of the most interesting companies in Europe and beyond. And today we'll talk a lot about Monumental, your company, building in Europe, and the pursuit of beauty that you are undertaking with your business. Maybe to start, you can tell us a little bit about what Monumental is and what you're trying to do.

Yeah, so what we're trying to do with Monumental is we're trying to make construction faster, more affordable, and more beautiful, right? And we're doing it by making autonomous construction robots. That's kind of like the approach to get there. The long-term vision, the kind of like very one-sentence pitch for the company is we want to be able to like build a beautiful house within a day in the future, which is not something we can do today, just to be clear, right? But that's the vision we're striving for. Today we're focusing on bricklaying. So we picked one trade that it's like a big deal in Europe at least, where like the biggest shortages out of all types of work in Europe are actually bricklayers. So we picked that one and that's what we're automating today.

I remember the first time someone told me about your company, I think it was Wouter from the Hummingbird team sort mentioned it. He was like, exceptional founder, but also this fascinating idea. And then a few months later, I got to see some of the first videos of these robots in action. And it is sort of like a pretty mesmerizing and magical experience to see a robot build a wall, let alone a house. Uh, and so, yeah, excited to go into all those things, but I'd love to maybe even start a little bit earlier in your journey. Uh, because you had a successful company that you sold to Palantir, and then you decided to sort of take some time and think through like, what your next big mission was going to be. And there's a lot about that sort of act that I think is interesting to founders because I think a lot of people find themselves in this position of wanting to build something and wanting to make sure it's worth their while. So yeah, maybe we can talk about that a little bit. How did you, after selling your business, land on deciding to take on construction, which is not a, not an industry that, uh, has been super friendly to venture capital historically?

I decided to take like a year, year and a half off, travel, take it a bit easy, honestly, also right after having a company and then being at Palantir. But I also decided that that period would also be kind of like a self-funded MBA. That's kind of how I sold it to myself, in that I would also use it to not just vacation all around the world, but go into a few topics that I was interested in. I think the way I approached it was I started thinking about 2 different directions. One is, big industries. So I wanted to work on something big, like that was something meaningful. And I literally started looking at like, I think when you're in software, everything seems to be about technology, right? And like you only think about technology, you only think about like SaaS or whatever. And then when you zoom out and think about like, what is the economy made of? Like you literally think about like, what is GDP made of?

Yes.

It's actually like such a tiny part of it, right? And then you see like, you know, energy's obviously really big, right? Like construction infrastructure is really big. Education's really big. Healthcare's like, these are like the actual like kind of like double-digit percentage chunks of like, And also the ones that actually I'd argue need the most attention right now, right? Like in our world that need more like productivity growth. So that was like one lens, which was just like learn more about these industries. Why is technology not working there? Like why are different companies, why is it hard to start a company in those industries? And then the other one was, the other approach was just try to learn more about like different technologies, different like things that were happening, right? Like when you're building a startup or when you're at a company, at a big tech company, crypto was a big thing back then. And I was like, I knew some things about it, but I was like, I'd like to learn more about it. I wasn't deeply into it, but it was just something I wanted to learn a bit more about. Same about biotech. I had a couple friends who were really getting into, from software, getting into biotech. And I was like, maybe at least I want to learn a bit more about it. And then third one, which is obviously very relevant for what I ended up doing, was I knew some things about machine learning from a data science perspective, which is very different from autonomy, like what Waymo is doing. So I was like, I need to learn more about that. That was really interesting to me. And so I think those were the 2 axes that I was exploring.

This is maybe too practical a question, but I think there are a lot of would-be entrepreneurs that find themselves in this interim period. And so maybe I'm being a little practical here, but how did you tangibly structure your time? Did you think of it like chapters where you're like, okay, now for this month, I'm going to really go down the biotech rabbit hole and try and play with ideas as part of that? Or was it more just like following your curiosity from more moment to moment or day to day?

I would argue it was not super structured, but I think I just like, I'm pretty good at going deep into topics. So once you pick up 2 books, you're just going to read the book. I'm not going to go through 8 books at the same time. So you just pick up 2 books. I try to get intros through people I knew, like founders or people, so I wouldn't just get passive information, but I would like, I tried to help not really consult, but like try to help a few founders on the side, just see if I could just like to get some practical experience, like talk to people that were in the industry in some cases. So I think it was like a mix of those things. And then on a very practical level, I think I was just like trying to do things like where every day I was like spending maybe 2, 3 hours on like, you know, let's call it like, you know, learning stuff and then maybe taking it easy the rest of the day. And then if it like rabbit hole into like spending the whole day into a topic, that was also fine.

Was it difficult to like manage your mindset during that or was it Did you have enough sort of break time that you were sort of also, you know, you'd just come off of selling Silk that you were sort of like, it's okay for me to take it easy? Or did you feel like some sort of pressure to find this next thing? Like how do, you know, I imagine it's difficult to be in that position of uncertainty for a long period of time.

Yeah, so a friend of mine actually told me something that was really good, which was when I started this trip or around the time I left Palantir, which was in his view, the biggest mistake that founders would make after like their, you know, when they were like basically in that position, is to basically start doing this and then 3 months later get bored. And then somewhere between 3 and 6 months, basically pick whatever the best idea is at that point in their mind and start that company. And that was in his view a huge mistake because in general, you basically are still picking— in most cases, you probably will end up with a mediocre idea, right? And now you're stuck with it for 5 to 10 years again, especially if you're building out a team, raising money, doing that stuff. So his advice was basically, If you find something you're excited about in like 3 to 6 months, or you find yourself being bored, try to like hold on for like at least another half year and see if you're still excited about it, because that's like such a worthwhile investment. I think most founders would probably like find themselves getting bored or like wanting to start, you know, going back into like kind of action mode again. I did feel that it's not like pressure, but you do get like the feeling like getting excited to like start a company again.

Yes. I think, you know, there's, I've heard some investors talk about, you know, the antsiness you can get when maybe you haven't done a deal for a while and you have this, you need to just wait for great. And I think that same sort of principle, although it's a bit of a bumper sticker, I think really applies to that period of time because there are so many ideas that you could possibly come up with and there's this need to resolve the uncertainty in some respect that you just sort of jump at something. But you, I think, especially held out for something that was like, extremely high ambition, right? Which is building houses with robots and like revitalizing an industry that had really hit a crazy amount of stagnation. Actually, maybe we can talk about that next. Like, when was it that you started to realize the scale of the problem in construction specifically and start to think about like, you know, actually there's something to be done here that could be turned into a business?

So I think this, the problem I've been obsessed about for a long time, like before this whole, like before starting to think about like what would my next company be? I think it was just like, it felt just like, how do you even start thinking about it? So I have like different ways to think about this, but the visceral way is just like you walk around like, you know, nice, we're in London right now, right? Like a nice European city or like old parts of the US, like downtown New York or something like that. And you're like, why don't we build this stuff anymore, right? Like I just, just like it's impossible for me to be in a place like that And now wonder why are we not getting better at building this stuff instead of worse? And then there's obviously all the productivity metrics, and you can look at endless numbers to see the raw data behind this. So I think that's been clear for a long time to me. I think what is interesting for someone like me is even when I was thinking about construction initially, my initial thoughts were, what can I do with software?

Yeah.

company could you start, like whatever, some like productivity app for construction businesses, like that kind of stuff, like maybe some project management app to like— and then I think if you're brutally honest with yourself, you discover that it's really unlikely to make a dent, right? Like maybe you're gonna make these companies whatever, like 0.5% more productive at best.

Yes.

But like if you zoom out, it's like impossible and you really need to like solve the really hard problem, which is doing the work. And then once you start thinking about doing the work, you're like, I need to physically move things around to build a building. And that's a really kind of scary leap to make. And then once you go into that, you basically have to think about things like factories, prefab modules, or robotics, right? You end up with a few directions, and they're all kind of big leaps from just starting a software business. So I think that's the big kind of leap of, can I do this or should I do this, that you have to make at that point.

Yeah, and your prior business was more pure software, right? Like 100% software.

That was just like a B2B SaaS company, just to be clear.

Yeah. Tell me about that scary feeling, because I think that's kind of interesting. What was that like to be like, hey, I'm actually thinking I might not be a guy who's going to build another B2B SaaS product. I'm going to try and move bricks around and figure out how to build beautiful buildings. Did that feel like you had to sort of almost rearrange your conception of yourself or what it meant to found a company?

I think for me it was like 2 things. One is I think I was comfortable with being the kind of founder that would do this. I never thought of myself as like, a software-only founder. But obviously you start thinking about, do I have the skills or what do I need to learn basically to be able to pull this off? Obviously everyone will immediately tell you, every VC friend, every founder friend is going to be like, don't do hardware, don't do robotics. I think actually the same friend I talked about, he also told me friends don't let friends start hardware companies. So that was the kind of advice that I got back then. And then I think the other part, which I think is interesting, is I wasn't sure even if this if this idea was like a good one, if I would be able to like properly like fund it. Yes. Both with my own money initially, and then like after, you know, kind of like maybe self-funding initially, like it didn't seem like a VC, it didn't seem certain to be like a VC fundable kind of like bet yet. And so there was also a version in my mind where I was like, is this the kind of thing where you have to like, you know, to draw like say an Elon Musk analogy where you have to like first found a PayPal kind of company, have another like much bigger outcome where you can like fund what, like, you know, put in $100 million. Yes, several billion bucks. Yeah, like something like that, put hundreds of millions into, And I think that was another kind of thing I had to think about, which was how much money will you need to actually make this work? And is that something I could raise, or do I need to do something else to get that money initially? And I think that was another leap that I needed to unlock in my mind.

How did you resolve that? What convinced you, okay, either I can get this money now, or I can get to enough amount of traction bootstrapping myself that someone will take a bet on me?

There's this narrative, right? Everything with hardware, everything with robotics, and maybe construction also, is going to be capital intensive. And then I actually discovered, I have this framework now, which is I think the whole kind of capital intensive, non-intensive framework doesn't make sense to me. I think it's actually like, again, you can look at software companies, all the big ones, they've raised billions of dollars before they went public, right? So that framework doesn't really make sense. So the model I have in mind that I basically ended up with was what are the gates you need to clear? Is there a gate where you need to you must raise, say, $300 million or a billion because you need to, say, build a factory or build a rocket or something like that. And if you don't raise that money, you're just never going to achieve the next step. And I realized that for what I had in mind, for the types of robots I wanted to build, the scale I wanted to achieve, you actually never had those scales. The Series A I had in mind was actually maybe a relatively big one, but it wasn't a crazy number. It wasn't like I needed to raise $100 million to get to that milestone. And then once I got comfortable with that, I started to actually try that narrative on some VCs I knew, and I could see that it actually resonated with them. If you actually explain to them what your capital needs are going to be like, why you think this would work, why this would actually perform like a software business with maybe software kind of dynamics, you could kind of tell that maybe this is actually going to work, and maybe I'll be able to raise funding similar to a software company.

So you'd really thought through hurdle after hurdle in a way, like the company journey such that you were like, okay, Here's this set of risks that I can sort of try and address at seed, Series A, B, so on. And obviously knowing some amount of it will change, but you had done a little bit of that mapping.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think if you want to think about hardware robotics, something kind of unusual, especially when I was thinking about this 5 years ago, this was pre the whole kind of American dynamism, hard tech renaissance. It was still kind of nascent. I think it seems very obvious that one of the main reasons to not do this is Access to capital or not being able to like clear like say C to Series A. So I was definitely thinking a lot about that.

Really interesting. You talked about you know the fact that construction doesn't build these beautiful buildings anymore, and I think that's something that in many ways like you know there's lots of things that are wonderful about America, but one thing is true is that like Europe really spikes when it comes to architectural beauty because of all these old buildings, and so it seems almost natural that it had to be a European company that would like come. to this problem set with like that sort of spirit in mind. But why fundamentally was it the case that we stopped building these types of buildings? Like, why has that been lost as an art, as an endeavor?

Honestly, I think this is like a big open question. I don't have the answer. I've tried to read a lot about this. It seems somehow it's all, you know, it all happened after World War II, right? So there were like obviously movements before World War II, you know, the Bauhaus movement and whatever, like where we went into kind of like modernism. But it's something happened where some people would argue it was like cost. Like we just had to like, you know, build a lot of housing very quickly. Cars were clearly part of it. Like just like what we were. But there's also a theory that it was people after the two big wars literally were like in a mood where it was like, we, you know, why even build beautiful things, right? Mm-hmm. I'll honestly say that I don't even know what the answer is. I don't know if I care at this point. I just wanna bring it back. Like I just don't care. Like it's a, And the other thing I'd say is if you look at early 20th century America, what is left of that, the US built beautiful buildings, right? If you think about the Art Deco buildings in New York City, even Detroit, right? People think about Detroit as kind of like a rundown town. But if you go to downtown Detroit and see the old buildings that were built in the kind of heydays of, I guess, the '20s and '30s, it's just magnificently beautiful, right? So I think it's really a timing issue. And obviously Europe has more history, so more buildings. Totally.

There's been more time. But it is true that in Europe, I feel like you can pick like an, an almost random city and find something where you're just like, wow, this happens to be quite magnificent. Um, but yes, they have the advantage of time on their side. How did that sort of, you start to narrow down towards, okay, I want to bring beautiful buildings back. I want to make that commercially viable. Robots seem like the right way, but there are so many different flavors you might take. Like you could have done a humanoid robot, which is not the case. You could have, you know, focused on cement rather than bricklaying? Like what was sort of the idea maze to get to the current iteration?

Yeah, so it's really, honestly, it's not easy to like replay the whole thing, obviously, right?

Yeah, it's like that.

I would mention that I also thought for a while quite seriously about infrastructure, like building infrastructure, because it also blows my mind how expensive and inefficient we've become in building infrastructure. So just literally like roads and railroads and those kinds of things where costs are, you know, They're like, most countries are like in the order of $100 million per kilometer or mile at this point, which is just like crazy money, right? Like just like the analogy, when I actually talk to like investors, I try to like, when you hear like $100 million, you just think it's just like—

Per mile of rail?

Yeah, yeah. It's actually like, that's kind of like an average number in most industrialized countries. And the way I actually like, it's such a big number that even for people who deal with a lot of money every day, you kind of like can't, gauge what it means. Yeah. So the way I actually try to help people think about this is think about a fund size. Maybe you have a $300 million fund or $500 million fund or a billion-dollar fund, and think about if you give it to a government and ask them build infrastructure with this, how many miles of highway or railroads will you get? It's literally a couple of miles, right? And then think about the innovation you could do. If you're funding startups, what would happen with the same amount of money? It's actually insane to think about this in my mind. So anyway, I thought about that direction for a while. The go-to-market, I would argue, is really challenging because you basically have to win tenders, work with governments. It's hard to start with a small scale. The nice thing about normal construction, residential construction, is you can do it at very, very small scales as a startup, right? You could start with a tiny wall, you could do a shed, you could scale up to a house, a small house, then you can do a small development, small—

You can't really do a small mini railway.

You can't be like, let's do maybe a couple feet or something. doesn't really make sense. No one's going to likely let you do it. So that's the nice thing I think about residential construction. It's also more meaningful because the housing crisis is a big problem in almost every industrialized nation at this point, again, in Europe and the US. And then at some point you have to pick a trade, right? You have to pick something to start with. And I think that's where maybe we are based in Amsterdam. If you look at, I think, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Belgium, probably like most European countries. And then you start talking like contractors, it immediately like bricklaying pops out every time, right? Like it's literally in the top 3 of every country, I think, of like the—

The most common contracting jobs?

No, the ones with the biggest labor shortage. So the jobs with the biggest labor shortages. Again, I'm not even talking about construction specifically. I'm talking about all job categories. That's how bad it is for a bunch of reasons. And it seemed the nice thing about bricklaying is it's in line again with our vision of building aesthetically pleasing buildings because bricks, most people think they're beautiful. They allow you to build the way we were building for hundreds of years or actually millennia. And with robotics, you're able to basically build every— you could build a whole development where each house will have a different pattern or even use different bricks without making the construction more expensive, right? So you can actually have variety and designs and all of that. which you wouldn't get with most prefab techniques. So it actually is aligned with that vision. And then finally, there's a very clear kind of like next act after it, right? Because once you nail bricklaying, it's ultimately like picking and placing dimensional objects on a construction site. That's not 100% of all tasks on construction, right? Like clearly, you know, pouring a foundation or like doing electrical work is really different, but most things are actually like some version of picking and placing and processing like a dimensional object. So it's a very good kind of like starting point, I think, for— so that was kind of like the high-level kind of like thinking behind it.

I remember you telling me at some point that the shortage, the labor shortage on bricklayers was severe. I didn't really, I don't think I recalled that it was quite that severe, but such that it's an extremely high-paying job, right? Like, isn't it the case that it's like a euro a brick or something like that? that folks get paid for it such that because of that shortage.

Yeah. So that's basically what you get paid in the Netherlands. I think the UK's actually higher, at least the London area is probably like £1-point-something per brick, which is kind of insane again. So hourly wages at peak times can go up to €80 an hour, which again, it's like for someone who's unschooled, basically most bricklayers we know are being paid as well or better than most people who went to college at this point. Which is telling.

Which also sort of opens up the business model that you guys have, which is like literally acting as a subcontractor, right? Like, how did you think about that as the right approach? Because I imagine you also thought through like, oh, should we sell robots? Should we, you know, do XYZ? But was that sort of the opportunity because of that dynamic that you were like, you know, we should operate in this way?

I don't remember when this was clear to me, but this was actually one of the first insights I had, maybe even before the robotics apart. And I think there's like 2 reasons for this. So one is, I actually, one of my biggest learnings from Palantir was that Palantir had this very kind of like, I'd argue unique business model, which is it wasn't really a SaaS company. It wasn't like, oh, you pay some licensing fee. There was this model which was like understanding the value you bring to the customer, being very embedded with the customer, which allowed you to price in a very different way, basically based on the outcomes you're delivering. And so if you're delivering like outsized outcomes with your software, It wasn't like, well, we're charging whatever, like, you know, $10,000 per seat or something like that. It was just like you were actually like connecting yourself to the outcome that you're delivering. And that was so powerful to me. Like, it was actually like really impressive to me to see how that worked in practice, that I basically became obsessed with that idea. And then I realized that it actually makes so much sense to apply it to construction specifically, because construction is this industry where everyone subcontracts the work anyways.

Mm-hmm.

There's no vertically integrated player in any case. And people, this is very peculiar to the construction industry, but even if you're a huge contractor and you might have billions of revenue, contractors absolutely hate paying money that is not project cost basically, right? That basically goes from their very thin margins and it's really hard to justify that even if it's a good ROI to them. It's really hard to make that sale. Whereas they're actually used to spending billions, if you're a big hundreds of millions or billions to contractors because that's the way the industry works. So if you're just picking up one of those jobs and you're delivering the outcome, they're very comfortable with funneling that money to you because that's, again, that's how the industry works anyways. So you're not even convincing them of something really hard as long as you're delivering a service.

That's really interesting. Yeah, it's like you're creating this revolutionary offering that actually fits very neatly into the existing buying flow such that it doesn't require them to take some crazy new risk or exhibit this crazy new behavior. This is such a naive question, but why is it the case that no one's vertically integrated in construction? Why does that simply not make sense?

Again, I actually don't really know the answer to this despite having tried to study it a lot. I think a lot has been written about this. So a few peculiar things about the construction industry is there's almost no consolidation in this industry, right? So I think, again, you could pick any country you want, but I don't think there's any country where the major player has more than 5% or maybe close to 10% market share. There's definitely no country with one player that has like 25% or 30%. market share. There's usually no point in consolidation. They basically have no real CapEx and they're not vertically integrated, right? All these things. In the US, for example, you have nationwide players that are, some of them are publicly listed, but in reality they have local subcontractors that are doing most of the job that are different in each metro or region.

Interesting. I want to talk more about the idea maze and some of the different Paths not taken. At the time that you were starting Monumental, you'll, you'll remember better than me, but from my vantage, I was starting in VC at the time. The businesses that I saw trying to address part of this problem were like some version of prefabs, right? Like, you know, very modularized, uh, houses that you could sort of put together almost like Lego blocks. That was sort of one approach. And then the other sort of thing you would see every once in a while were like 3D printed houses. There's obviously an aesthetic reason why that didn't appeal to you because you don't get the sort of real classical beauty of brick and stone. But were there reasons beyond that that you were like, I actually fundamentally don't think these make sense as approaches to address like the stagnation I see in construction?

Yeah, so I think there's like 2 answers. So on the 3D printing part, that one's really easy in my mind, which is, it's actually in my mind, a very exciting technology. But I think it's, you know, you have to take a realistic view to like, how the market's going to develop, it's a really conservative market. And so again, it's so unlikely that you're going to get to see double-digit percentage point changes in the way we do construction, right? Think about, I'll give you a very simple example, right? People have tried to do bricklaying robots before. I think everyone that has tried to do this before has made custom mortar because it's easier to extrude basically to make custom mortar. Oh, interesting. We decided against that. Just like that tiny change, like it doesn't even look different, right? But like that simple change is so important. As soon as you change anything in construction, my analogy is basically that you're doing enterprise sales where you have like all these stakeholders, but every stakeholder is actually like different every time. So you're not even like, so imagine if you would be selling to like a big company where you have to convince like the CEO, the CIO, whatever, like legal procurement. And then the next week it's gonna be a different group of people again. And the next week it's gonna be a different one again. So any change you make, you have to convince the developer, the general contractor, maybe the subcontractor you work with, local regulators, right? Construction's heavily regulated, especially materials, right? Is it fire, structural integrity, right? And every market you enter, you have to do this again. And who's going to bet on this, right? The building has to stand for at least 50, maybe 100 years. Are they going to bet on your new technology or materials? So I basically took a very conservative approach here where I was like, We're not changing anything in the supply chain, like anything, which actually makes it a harder engineering problem. But I think that is actually the price to pay to be able to enter this market and potentially become really big. I think on the prefab side, it's a more nuanced take, which is I actually, when I was at Palantir, I actually saw some really big factories, including car manufacturing and Airbus. And I actually got kind of real inside access into them, which was really exciting. And I realized how insane their scale was, but also how important it was for them to have a huge footprint, footprint in the sense of the market they serve. I don't think there's any prefab modular factory that can claim that even long-term that they will be able to serve an entire continent, like all of the US or all of Europe, right? Most of them are literally doing a 100-mile area around where they are. And in my view, that actually gives you the worst of all worlds, which is you're always going to achieve subscale as a factory. You can't actually serve a big market. And then at the same time, you get all the downsides of having a factory, like the cost of retooling if you want to change everything, the CapEx of setting it up. So it sounds like, to me, it just seems like a kind of bad setup. And by the way, one interesting data point that from what I could gather is even in China, which has really nailed prefab, by the way, it's actually not cheaper to do prefab. So it's faster for them, but it's not cheaper.

How can it be faster but not cheaper?

Because prefab, in a way, The word fab implies fabricate. I think people think of factories. In reality, most of prefab is you just have a bunch of dudes in a shed working, right? It's actually not automated. In almost all cases, there's maybe a cleaner production line, there's maybe slightly more process. It's in a building that's air-conditioned or whatever, so you're less dependent on the weather, but it's not that much more productive. However, you actually have to have Like do bulk transport. You need like very big equipment to like actually move this, like cranes and stuff like that on site to then like move the parts together. So you actually trade off a lot of like things for more cost in many cases to make it work.

So you shift, you're basically just shifting the cost from one place to another essentially.

Exactly. And there are cases where, by the way, it does make sense, right? Again, if you're trying to compress site time on like your construction site, for example, weather reasons or disruption to minimize disruption, it can make sense.

Really interesting. Because of the timing when you started, like much of, or essentially all of the modern AI renaissance had, had not really taken flight yet. I mean, we're talking about 2017, ChatGPT in 2022, another year plus before Google started to show some of its, you know, interesting robotics, uh, papers and stuff like that. To what extent were you banking on like improvements with AI? Did that need to happen for Monumental to really take off in the way that you hoped it would? How did you start to think about that part of the technology?

So I definitely did not predict that we'd be in this world. Maybe that would be the honest starting point. I think the bet I made basically was, if you think about the period, I'd say 2018, '19, which was when I was seriously thinking about this, my insight, my kind of main thing I benchmarked against was self-driving cars, like autonomous kind of vehicles. Which was, and they actually were still not proven, right? Like today they're driving like in a couple cities, it seems to work. It's still not, I think compared to the promise of like, I guess like 2012, 2013, we're still not where we want to be. So that was clear to me. But it will also seem that something was working there. And my insight was the num— like in a way construction is also unstructured, just like being on public roads, but it's also like a more constrained problem where you can also like Pause and brake if something goes wrong, which is a key difference, right? If you're on a highway or on a public road and you're like, whatever, your algorithm is stuck, you don't know what to do, you can't really just stop a car and just see what happens. And that's one of the big challenges with autonomous vehicles. Whereas on a construction site, you can just stop and you can just wait for an operator to intervene. And it's already kind of like, it's still a constrained, closed-off environment. There's actually safety protocols there, right? Like, people wear safety hats. So it's not like you can introduce something crazy dangerous, but like the acceptable kind of risk, there's already like heavy equipment there. So my bet was basically autonomous technology doesn't have to get much better compared to where it was at that point for this to work. At the same time, I did make a bet, which definitely turned out to be true, which was sensors and like all the kind of hardware will definitely come down in price, right? Which was already happening, right? So like, I think, I don't remember, like the initial LiDARs that Waymo used probably were like, I think hundreds of thousands. And then they were already getting to like, I think sub-10,000, but still like thousands. But like it was clear that different cameras, IMUs, computers, obviously like all of that was just like plummeting in price. So I think that was maybe the more obvious bet I was like looking at.

Really interesting. You mentioned Palantir and we've talked a little bit before about some of the lessons from Palantir. You talked about this deployment model. One of the things that I loved hearing from you is that on the— and Trey Stephens from Anduril also said this, that one of their recommended books is this very obscure book on sort of improvisational theater called Impro. I wonder if you can tell me some of the unusual parts of the Palantir culture that maybe you've picked up on or tried to bring with you to Monumental from that vantage.

I thought I took culture seriously before Palantir, and then because of Palantir, I was like, I didn't at all. I think that's maybe the most important takeaway I would I think people used to say, I mean, it's been years now, right? But used to say that Palantir was almost like a cult at some point, right? Which I actually think there's like a—

By design.

By design, right? And I think that was actually like, I was so impressed to see what that actually meant in practice. There's also this saying, which is like culture eats strategy for breakfast, which is meaningless when you just hear, it's just like, you know? And I think I really saw what that meant in practice, right? On a micro and a macro level, right? You get all these young graduates coming into the company. They hear these stories, these phrases, these books. All these things are repeated in a very— it seems in a very natural way, but there's clearly some logic behind it. And then somehow, without a lot of policies, without a lot of rules, you're able to steer most of them in a really good direction. And that was really eye-opening to me, how effective and how scalable that was. And that also allowed the company, like Palantir, to be kind of almost an anarchy in many ways. I think most people, again, I'm talking about the period of 2016 to '18, maybe '19. So this is pre-IPO, to be clear. There were no performance reviews. There was no travel policy. People just had— and it was like, how does this even work with 2,000, 2,200 employees? But it actually worked. And it was really, really kind of impressive to me to see how effective that model was. I think that was like the biggest learning for me that I took away from it. So that's kind of like the meta point I would actually make. I think the other point that was really interesting to me, also related to what we're doing, which is everyone focuses on the forward deployment model, which is obviously like a key innovation of Palantir. But I think one of the things that was said a lot internally was it's actually a privilege to get access to interesting problems. And I really love that framing, right? So like one way you can think about this is just like in your normal life or like whatever, you might be like, oh, whatever, like the government is doing, like there's this stupid thing, whatever, you're standing in line at the DMV or like something like that. It's like, and then you're like, I know how to solve this, but no one's gonna let you solve it, right? Like actually getting access, like being allowed to like contribute to that conversation, being allowed to contribute to solution can be a privilege. And that's, it's almost separate from like the business question of like, are you, going to make money off it. And I really love that framing, which was Palantir was a unique company in that, or is a unique company in that it got access to interesting government problems in the time that most startups or technology companies didn't, or access to interesting problems to big industrial conglomerates. And I think about that the same way. You could almost imagine a company like Monumental today paying money to get access to construction site, to be allowed to run pilots or train their robots or their people. And being able to, like, having the trust of our customers to like try our stuff or like build our stuff while we're still learning is a privilege. And I think that framing is so powerful if you embrace it.

Did it change your relationship with ambition being at a company like Palantir, or do you think you always were sort of ready after Silk to do something a couple orders of magnitude bigger?

Yeah, I would honestly argue that I think I'm a high ambition person. Like, I don't think that changed because of Palantir.

Got it. We're talking about impro and sort of the reading list at Palantir and also, you know, the sense that this is a cult or a religion of some kind. Durkheim has this concept of the ingredients that make up a religion, and one of them is that, you know, every religion has sort of sacred objects, which I sort of think of these reading lists as examples of in a sense. For Monumental, do you have your version of that, like something that everyone has to read or everyone has to do or buy into that sort of like serves that same purpose?

Yeah, definitely. I think you definitely want to have a kind of like us against the world kind of like mentality at some level, right? Like you want to be like, we are different. That's the whole point of a startup. Otherwise you don't need that company to exist. I think for us, we also have a reading list. I think one book that's on it that I think is, in my view, really inspiring, but also like really is Liftoff, which is about like the early days of SpaceX, which I'd say is like the most inspiring hardware, like modern hardware company out there, right? Like there's like a lot of learnings in there. And I'd say the kind of like the big conceptual, like the main thing that I think is like so different about us compared to like what most people expect is, you know, people talk about like speed and like, which is a really important value of our company as well, to be clear. But what it actually means is you have to get really comfortable with almost embarrassing, like pushing embarrassing things like on the field. And almost embracing the kind of duct-taped-together, zip-tied technology, which doesn't seem professional, which maybe if you're doing diligence on us and talk to a robotics expert, they're like, these people don't know what they're doing. But that's almost part of our pride, right? People are almost proud to show how janky their design is, but they're like, I did this in 2 days and it works, right? It works on the field and we can learn from it. And maybe it already generates revenue even. And then like we'll figure out how to like productize it and clean it up later. Like I think that's a very core part of like something you want to embrace early on.

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Yeah, so we basically get a project, we reviewed, we don't say yes to everything, right? There's a lot like startups have like an ideal, most startups would have like an ideal customer profile, I guess. We have an ideal kind of project profile, right? What does a good project look like for us right now, given the opportunity cost? But once it's past that pipeline, we basically today, we decide on the number of robots it needs, right? Which is mostly related to the number of bricks that need to be laid in a week, for example, right? That's kind of like the cadence of most contractors, like some weekly planning.

What's the robot per week brick output in a project, roughly, if you're doing that calculation?

We have a target and then there's the reality, which is, I think, the big thing we're working on today. But the target is for that to be per robot system, basically, is to be in the thousands per week, right? That's kind of like, so basically on par or better than a mason. That's kind of the way to think about it. Okay. Most projects would have 4 to 8 masons, at least this is like, I'm talking about Dutch-scale projects. So we would actually deploy today something like, 4 or 8 systems at the same time. When I say a system, it's actually like 3 robots working together, which is actually one of the mesmerizing things you're talking about, right? Because seeing robots work together for some reason looks like, I don't know, there's like the orchestration looks really nice. So we have 2 that do the supply chain basically, right? Like one brings the bricks, one brings the mortar, it keeps it agitated, like mixes it. And then there's like the one that actually does the bricklaying, and they all work in tandem together to build the wall. We have operators that work with, that we send with the robots. They're part of basically the product we're selling to the contractors, and they drive the robots to site. They drive them to the wall, but then once they're at the wall, they become autonomous. So they drive, they can drive alongside the wall. They know where to go. They know I need to skip this part because there's a doorframe. So I'm going to whatever, move another meter to the left or something like that. That is all kind of like the autonomy part. But we still need operators today for a bunch of things and edge cases. And that, I think I'd argue again, is a key part of our model, which is instead of having to get to 100% perfection with technology, we're just already delivering value and just increasing automation along the way.

And it's really cool to see these robots in action and to see the output that they create because they are capable of creating brick walls of different patterns, for example. How complex is it to actually create a robot and a system that is capable of Yeah, putting together these different patterns with the level of precision that is needed, because that was actually another thing that surprised me. You sort of think of laying bricks as like perhaps something that wouldn't be hyper high precision, but when you're actually taking on a job as a subcontractor, like folks are really exacting about like this amount of, you know, uh, extrusion with this pattern, so on and so forth, really down to like a millimeter level.

Yeah. So this is. Honestly, one of the surprises to me as well in this industry, which is there's a part of the industry where they really don't care about tolerances. And it's like, we go to construction sites. It's actually one of the advantages of our technology is, unlike, say, if you work with, say, a prefab component, you design it to some size. And then in many cases, it actually does not fit because, say, the distance between the 2 window frames was not what it was according to the drawing. And there's like a centimeter level difference, and that's accepted. That's totally accepted in construction. No one seems to care. It's not noticeable, right? So there's a version of this where people don't care about tolerances. You can be off by a centimeter or 2, and it's fine, right? You're still going to buy the house. You don't really care about the exact distance between them. But then as an example, let's take that if the alignment between the top of the window frames is off by 2 centimeters, you'll notice, and it looks ugly. and it doesn't look good, right? So there are some things that matter a lot and some things that don't matter at all. I think with bricks, there are some things that you don't notice. You could be, again, off by multiple millimeters and you don't notice. But one simple thing that we discovered basically is if your brick is rotated by just 0.1 degree, it's so noticeable to the human eye. It's immediately noticeable, and it creates shadows, and it seems like a horror, just like it sticks out. And that's a very subtle thing. that you really need to get on top of if you want to get to the same quality as a mason.

Wow, that's super interesting. What have been the other sort of maybe surprising challenges that when you were thinking about this back in 2018, 2019, you maybe didn't have on your radar of like, this is actually a really hard part of this problem?

I think you start thinking about this from a technology perspective. Obviously, from day one, I think our whole company and its outcome kind of obsessed. So we were thinking not just about the robots, but the end result, the walls we're delivering, the buildings we're delivering. I think the part that I completely underestimated is the importance of the human part here, right? So if you think about how does a general contractor decide if their subcontractor is good or bad, obviously a big part is just like the end product results, right? Like, are you building a proper wall? Are you doing a good job? But a huge part is actually just like their opinion of your people. Like, how do they behave on a construction site? And that's also true for us, despite being a robotics company. The general contractor just looks at our people and just decides, their opinion of us is a big part of just like, if our guys are late, if they leave a mess on site, which happened a lot in the early days, right? Like literally coffee cups, just like leaving them on the ground. Like you think that those things don't matter, but they matter a lot to their opinion of us as a company and the product we're delivering. Yeah. And it's actually something we never thought about initially. I think it's not our natural kind of strength to build that kind of discipline in a team. And that's been both probably the biggest surprise and also one of the harder things to get right.

What's the sort of state of play for Monumental today? How many houses have you built? What have sort of been the most challenging builds? I remember you guys talking about doing a quay wall at one point on all these sort of things. But to give listeners sort of an understanding, where are things right now?

Yeah, so let me give you a mini timeline. So I think 2 years ago, we probably did our first— our company exists for less than 4 years right now, right? We did our first successful build, tiny wall, just like that, that still stands, I think 2 and a half years ago now. I think we started doing bigger and bigger pieces since then. Last year we started doing, so this is like 2024, we started doing entire walls, almost like multiple facades, but still hadn't completed a full house, like all sides of a house, including corners. We started doing more and more, but nothing was done. Since the start of this year, We have finished, I think, like 34 full houses, which is like really kind of gratifying, right? Yeah. We actually have photos now of like the first houses we started to deliver, like the brickwork, to be clear, right? The brickwork of the houses, like in January, February. People started to move in this summer, which is like really nice to see people actually, like, you know, families coming into their house that we partially built. We built 2, you know, we started building much higher as kind of our new project, but we built like a 12-meter-tall wall for a hotel building. And then actually like more canal walls, which I also love for some reason. It's like a very Dutch thing.

Something pretty amazing.

But there's something like very amazing about that also because their lifecycle tends to be in centuries. Like they get like, I guess like renovated or like redone every like 200 or 300 years. So there's something really magical honestly about building something that you know is gonna be there for like at least, you know, like for 200, 300 years, right? Like your great-grandchildren might see it or something like that. There's something very special about that to me.

It's interesting. I, you know, spend a tiny fraction of the time thinking about this than, than of course you do. But I remember just visiting your office and the feeling afterwards of you find yourself just absolutely mesmerized with brickwork. You're like, oh my gosh, it's incredible to see how that came together. And you start to think about these things in a totally different way when you are seeing it happen in the way that Monumental does it. How have you thought through what comes next? Because right now you're doing the brickwork. Obviously, that's a very important part of building a house, but it's not sort of completing it all together. How do you think about the staging of what comes next?

Yeah, so I think there's probably 3 axes you want to consider, right? I think this is kind of a generic framework that you could apply to many things, right? So one is you don't want to start from scratch with your technology, right? You want to use as much of the kind of like unique technology you built up and reuse it. So from that perspective, like doing any kind of dimensional pick and place type of task makes a lot of sense, right? Versus like say going into plumbing or, you know, which is completely different, right? So that's like very obvious. The other one is you want to be able to sell to the same type of customer and like the same, right? Like you want to sell into your existing channel that you're starting to build up. So, you know, we could easily do like say cobblestone roads, which are very popular in Europe and like a big market, But that's a completely different customer profile, right? Like, it doesn't make sense for us to go into that, even though I think it's like kind of like cool thing and our technology would support it. And then I think for construction specifically, you also, there's like value in having it be adjacent to your current process in a very literal way, right? Like where you can start combining things together in the same process. So for us, the obvious, like if you take all those things together, the very obvious things you want to do are do the whole facade basically, right? And doing the whole facade in most countries, like in the UK and the Netherlands and Germany, is doing an interior wall, which is not bricks, but blocks usually, like concrete blocks, limestone blocks. Like there's different variations of them, but basically just like ugly blocks that you don't see because they will have beautiful bricks on the outside and then plaster or something like that on the inside. Insulation, which goes usually like on top or like on those interior walls. There's usually like some air cavity or something like that for insulation. And then like the brick wall we're doing. If you do those things, basically those are very small adjacent products, right? If you basically do the bigger blocks and the insulation, you've almost done the whole facade. And then if you do window frames and lintels, the things that go on top of window frames, you've basically automated the entire facade. And that's actually a really meaningful part of an entire building. I think that's the really exciting thing to me. It seemed so far away a couple years ago, and now it's like— you can actually think about the roadmap and be like, this is really kind of like getting close. We're getting close to that vision now, which is still not an entire house, but again, doing the facade of an entire house completely automated, which also means that you might be able to remove scaffolding altogether, right? It actually allows you to change a huge part of the way you do construction. That's very kind of exciting to me.

In the years since you founded Monumental, we've seen so many different robotics companies come to the fore. There's companies, robotics for fishing, there's robotics for factories, all this sort of stuff. One of the sort of movements has been more of this like humanoid robotic, which you see with 1X and, uh, I can't remember Tesla's, you know, Optimus. Optimus. There we go. Yeah. Like, is that something that you ever sort of considered made sense for Monumental? Why, why not? And like, how do you think about that category of robots in general?

It definitely did make sense to me as a founder. So if you think about founder, like technology fit, if that's even a thing you can think about. I don't think that it doesn't make sense to me because the main critique I'd have of the robotics industry is, just speaking in very general terms here, is most people who are into robotics are, I guess, like technologists that are building technology for the sake of it and then searching for, I guess, some problem to solve afterwards. And I'd say that if you start with solving a problem, I don't understand how you'd ever start with a humanoid, right? Like you could start with a subset of a humanoid, You could be like, for this problem, so it could be like bricklaying, you could still start with a humanoid dish design, but you probably don't need, I don't know if you need all the fingers in the hand or if you need full dexterity to walk or something like that, right? And you could also have completely different use cases. Maybe it's like folding laundry, fine, you could pick that. But I think if you start with that, it seems unlikely to me that you'd always start with a full humanoid. All humanoid companies, as far as I can tell, start with a humanoid.

And then

there's trying to figure out something like, oh, we're going to do manufacturing, we're going to do domestic. I think that's just generally, it's such an unlikely way for things to ever work in technology. I would caveat that by saying, if you take my perspective, you'd probably never invent GPT, right? So I think it's true for 99% of the cases. I guess the kind of steel man case, I guess what I'm saying is maybe that 1% could be a revolutionary. But I think it's just not the way I would want to do it. And the other part that I would emphasize is if you want to take that approach, it basically means you're going to do research, like real research for many years. You're going to burn through a lot of investor money, which is just not the kind of company I wanted to found from day one. That was just very clear to me. That doesn't excite me for some reason.

We've talked a little bit about Monumental being based in Amsterdam and obviously sort of the European flavor of what you're doing in the sense of these beautiful buildings and the heritage Europe has. But both of us, I know, are very interested in Europe producing more hyper-ambitious companies than it does today, and that there's sort of in some ways a lack of that American ambition in the startup ecosystem here. How have you sort of navigated that as a founder here? Like, how do you ensure you're building a sufficiently ambitious culture in Amsterdam? How do you find the people who really want to be on that journey?

So I'd say it's hard and easy at the same time, right? Like the easy part is you're just building your own company, right? Like you could just be in your— you could make your own bubble at some level, right? Like, and I think like the, if you're just like recruiting internationally, right? Like we have people from all around the world, you can just pick the most ambitious people and it's kind of like self-selects into the, you know, clearly we're building this ambitious company. Clearly the founders are ambitious, the goals, the problems we're solving. And so I think in a way, on a company level, it's not, I don't wanna say it's easy because just recruiting is hard, right? Like it's probably the hardest thing we're doing every day. But it's also like people self-select into what we need, at least as a company. And I think as founders, I don't need to navigate anything because I'm like, I know what I want. So it doesn't really matter. Like you could put me anywhere, I'm probably still gonna be as ambitious with my own personal goals, right?

I mean, just to push back on that, and to some extent I feel like Your ambition can be amplified or dampened by the people you're around. And so I imagine it takes extra effort that if you either to find other founders in Amsterdam who you're like, actually, these people want to build $100 billion trillion-dollar businesses also, or to like fight against the culture that is maybe more surrounding you, or the friend set or the peer set that you have who are like, no, I'm look, I love to work in tech, but I also love to clock off at five and. That's how I live.

I think that's a really good point. I would say, again, this is kind of more of a personal take. I think it's both true and not true. So for me at least, I would say it wouldn't matter to me what my founder's friends do. Like for example, I think most of them are not running a hardware company or like, that's fine with me, right? Like whether they're taking it easier, but also maybe they're like taking off much faster because they have crazy valuations with their SaaS company. I'm okay with both. Like that doesn't really affect me or my ambition levels. But I think where you're right, for example, is I think if you're like a hyper-ambitious founder, you're based in Europe and you only talk to say like local VCs, like continental European local VCs, I think on a practical level you will constrain your ambition, right? Like if you can't fundraise or if they all tell you like whatever, like work towards this exit or try to get this deal or do this corporate partnership, like I could totally see how those kinds of things will affect you. So I think that requires you to both be aware of that, I guess, and be able to cultivate a network that doesn't have these kind of influences. I think that's also true for the kind of employees, like you could hire probably ambitious on paper or at some level employees, especially maybe executives, but they would still kind of push you down into a very narrow form of ambition, which is not gonna be the next whatever trillion-dollar company that's gonna change the world. I do think that is actually a very Good point. Like, you do need to filter for that, probably.

Hmm. How do you think because of your time at Palantir, you had sort of already broadened your horizons enough that you sort of understood there were other VCs out there or knew some of those VCs out there who like were thinking about things at a different scale? Or did you sort of have to proactively do some of that, I don't know, networking for lack of a better term, to broaden your horizons?

No, I like one common pattern I see actually, like, I think I imagine you've seen this too, is I'd say that every, probably every really ambitious European founder I know has had some exposure of a couple of years to the US in US companies, right? Whether their first startup got acquired, they were working as whatever, like, you know, some role at like a— but I think that exposure seems to be important. I think everyone I know that's doing something really interesting right now in Europe has spent like at least 2 years in like the Bay Area at some point, right? And I think that Gives you like that, maybe like that, just like the kind of like cultural baggage that's helpful there, like resets kind of recalibrates your ambition levels. Also like what you could expect maybe from like your team or like, and it naturally just like also helps you build a network, right? Like you probably just know some people there. They will help you with intros. Like I think it's all those things coming together.

Do you find that there's sufficient robotics and hardware and software talent in Amsterdam or within Europe for you? Or do you have to end up, like, I don't know, having folks come over from the States or having folks come over from Asia?

I don't know the percentage, but I think we've, like, more than half of our team's foreign. So, like, I don't know the exact, like, I can't remember right now which country, but, like, it's not just, like, from the US. I think the majority of our team is actually from the UK, interestingly. We definitely don't only, like, we hire globally. We try to find the best people. We're not trying to find the best Dutch people or anything like that. And it's not even part of our calculus, like it's like whatever cheaper to not relocate them. That's obviously not part of any of our thinking here. I think when people talk about talent, I think one interesting thing that people say to defend Europe, which I partly agree with, is there's enough talent in Europe, which is true, I think, on a skills level.

Yep.

But it's not true on maybe a cultural or ambition level in many cases, right? I think the place where I see the biggest difference is the hardware part. So I'd say that a lot of software people in Europe, in Amsterdam or like other European, they've had exposure to startups. So they read Hacker News, they've read some books on startups, like they know the kind of ecosystem. I think almost every software engineer that I interview, if you talk about whatever, like equity, they will ask you, what's your vesting schedule? Like they know something about it, right? And then we interview hardware people from Europe and they know nothing about this stuff, right? Like they've just not been exposed to

it. Because they've been at like Boeing and Rolls-Royce and whatever.

Exactly, right? Like they might be like, they're excellent, like whatever mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and they're like, how does this work? Like just you have to literally explain the basics to them, right? It's obviously equity is an example, right? But it's more like the exposure of like, what is this company going to be like? What is, they'll say things like, I'm excited about startups because they're like, I want to work in a small team. And then you're like, but that's not the point, right? Like, we want to grow very quickly. It's going to be very chaotic. Like, do you know what you're going to get into? Like, is that a fit for you? And that's actually like, you know, even their conception of like, what is a startup going to be like is not something they're like aware of in many cases from day one. And I think that's kind of like the hard part where you need to do a lot of filtering, selection, or in some cases, just relocation.

One thing that I've also seen with a decent number of European companies, which I hope happens less over time, but some of the most ambitious ones, either VCs will be like, hey, we're going to fund you, but you kind of have to move to the US, or they'll sort of decide to do it of their own volition because they want access to a different talent pool or a different capital pool even more, more so. Did you ever like think through that for Monumental of like, maybe, maybe this company should be an SF company or should be a, you know, a Chicago company or whatever it might be? And why was it like the right choice ultimately to say, no, actually it should be in Amsterdam, it should be a European company, and that's the right way for us to scale?

Yeah, so I think I actually definitely considered like basically going back to the US after like, because I had spent time there. So it was definitely an option in my mind. And basically there's, you know, my take is basically this. There's like the market and the talent market, like the, you know, the talent side of it. I basically think that talent in Europe, again, is fine if you're willing to relocate people. I think there's also things that people don't consider when they compare those, basically like the US and the most, I say like European kind of like talent markets, which is retention in Europe is much better. Like one thing that always shocks me is how quickly people kind of just like move around, even in hot companies, right? Like there's a version where you look at like great engineers and they're just like, almost like building a portfolio of stock options, right? Like every 2, 3 years. And you basically never see that in Europe, which is, I think, a good feature once you've hired these people. I think on the market, just like the kind of like BD market side, right? The thing that is, I'd say, unique to us, but maybe true for other hard tech startups is the biggest advantage of the US, which is this like big, massive market that you kind of get for free. Like when you're doing, say, a SaaS company, And you're just like taking one type of credit card, like, or two types of credit cards, and you know, and you could just do one channel of marketing, like all that stuff, that stuff that's really hard to like replicate in Europe. It's not true for construction, right? Like there's no one single construction market, right? Like building codes are actually different, like county by county, like state employment, like employment laws, like unions are just different in every US state. Obviously the US is so big that the way construction happens in An earthquake area like California is completely different from, say, in Arizona or Florida or whatever.

Interesting.

So it doesn't function as a single market in any way. Whereas in Europe, like, say, in the Netherlands, the density is so insanely high. I don't know if you actually can get a higher density per whatever metric you want to use, like square kilometer or hours driven from our headquarters, from our office, and the number of houses being built per year. That number is very, very high in the Netherlands because it's a very dense country. And that is actually a big advantage to us.

Huh, that's really interesting. Taking sort of Monumental out of it, how do you sort of gauge the state of European tech today? What do you feel like needs to happen for the ecosystem to take the next step?

I think it's obviously getting better, right? Like, I think there's like a lot of exciting stuff happening in the last couple of years and maybe last year specifically. Like, I think there's like multiple kind of like positive trends. I think the general kind of like challenge, I think you've talked to Torsten, the founder of Helsing, about this at some point. There's, I'd argue, 2 versions of like the culture ambition problem, right? Like one is the founder one, which is there are great founders in Europe, but you could still, especially maybe for their like second act or like at some point, there's still, you could still be more ambitious and we need more of that level of ambition. So I think that's one part of it. And I think the other part is basically like the, let's call it like the talent pool. So I think we definitely need more people engineers, whoever like that are willing to take the bet on different startups that are excited by equity, that are excited by the chaos, and that are not looking for kind of like the normal path of going into like a corporate company or like some consulting group, right? I think just like the concept of joining a startup is already so much more mainstream in the US versus most of Europe.

Yes, definitely true. It feels like that it's still more high status and more common to say like, I'm gonna go to McKinsey or a bank, and rather than say, no, no, no, like, why would I bother?

And I think people really underestimate this part actually. Like, it's, by the way, like, it's a big difference within the US, right? Like, it's probably like in the Bay Area, it's really easy. And then you go to like, I bet that if you go to like Chicago, it's like slightly harder. But I think people underestimate how hard it still is to make that kind of like convince people to join startups, like maybe 2 or 4 years out of college. Versus going into a normal tracked path.

Yeah, it would be interesting to compare the numbers of Stanford versus Harvard versus Oxford versus some of the great other European universities and Bocconi or whoever.

But then take the other continental European, like the good ones, but that are not like Oxford. And I think you'll get a very steep drop.

Yeah, I bet you're totally right. I'm sure someone's done that. We should look that up. Yeah, we should talk about that. That's really interesting. The other piece on the sort of European founder ambition, it's one, I think, doing some of the work that you actually did after Silk, which was like, okay, things went well last time, but I want to do something so much bigger this time, which I think is just hard for anyone to do. But 2, as you mentioned Torsten, we co-published this piece together about a lot of the time a European founder, there seems to be more of a desire to be like, okay, I made it. I got a nice sale off the books, and now I'm sort of going to be an angel investor and relax a little bit and spend half the year in Tuscany rather than going back into the arena, so to speak, and saying like, no, I'm really good at this. I should try and build my next thing. How do you fix that part, do you think? And I guess, do you agree that that part is even a problem?

Yeah, I totally agree. I don't actually like, I don't know what, I've never had this desire myself. So let me start. So I don't really know what the, what, like what dynamics Kind of drive it or like, my sense is that there's some form of a status game here where peer influence matters, right? So I think basically if you're in the Bay Area, it seems to me that if you sort of semi-retire and you're just going to spend most of your time vacationing or whatever, you're just not going to get invited to the interesting dinner parties or the kind of interesting conversations. You're just going to kind of like, I think part of that is also that American friendships are actually driven by work, which a lot of Europeans think is like fake friendship, but it's not like, it's a very kind of like inverted way of thinking about like what friendship is probably. And I think like in Europe, it's really easy to basically just like not be relevant from like a professional perspective, still have a really fun life, still go to like interesting dinner parties surrounded by other people that are kind of like well-off or something like that. And then maybe your family. And I think if you would end up with a dynamic where there's like a lot of interesting stuff happening, and you're not invited to it, and people are almost— you don't need to be looked down upon, but you feel it's just like, oh, I can't contribute anymore. My whatever, $50 million exit is not that impressive in that peer group. I can't kind of be part of that anymore. Maybe that changed things, but I'm actually not sure.

Yeah, it'll be really interesting. I think to end on an optimistic note, this part of the discussion, you and I have together talked to really interesting founders from Europe who are building really ambitious projects across like industrials, energy, defense. And it does feel like that American dynamism movement that is clearly taking hold in the US has really like got a version of it happening in Europe in a way that I think some exciting things are going to come out of it. And so I hope that remains the case. To wrap up, I always like to ask a few philosophical questions. One is if you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, What is an experiment you would like to run?

I think maybe one of my random craziest ideas, I don't even know if this makes sense, is I would like to see if you can basically try starting mini societies every decade. So the kind of maybe practical, this is not even really practical, but my practical version of this is, could you found a small town or city every decade where you specifically ship off, ship off sounds like you force them, but where you let Let's say like 15 to 25-year-olds build up that new town or like that mini society from scratch. And it could almost like, if you think it through, it could almost be an alternative to like modern education even if you— because my sense is that it allows people to build up like a real form of agency, whatever they want to do, whether they want to literally do construction or they want to like set up like a mini kind of, you know, you have to collect taxes and you have to like— maybe have like a police force and like do all these things. But I think like if you build up a small society from scratch and let young people kind of like get involved there, I think you let them do non-fake work from an early age, that allows them to build up agency while kind of like building up like tacit knowledge. To me, one of the kind of like biggest mysteries is like, look at the founding fathers of the US. I think they're all like in their 20s, right? Like it's kind of a ridiculous, kind of like incredibly crazy, like, you know, how could they achieve that at that age? And how is it possible that today we think that If you're whatever, like under 40, you're not fit to be an executive.

Weren't they really in their 20s? Now I have to look that up. That's crazy.

I think, and there's many of those versions, right? If you look at whatever your politics, but if you look at early Israel, right? It's like they literally are founding a new society from scratch. It's all these young people. And then they're literally like, we need someone to whatever, start a police force. We need someone to just figure out infrastructure for this country. We need to set up education. And they're all young people. They're hyper-ambitious, but it almost seems to create a different type of society for the first century, maybe. And then at some point that kind of peters out. So I think the question is, can you just figure out a way to get that on repeat? And if I could run a random experiment, that would probably be it.

And just see if you can create— give people the opportunity to extend their capabilities in this extremely compressed timescale where they're given this massive responsibility.

One other way to think about this, by the way, is The only way I think you could do this today as a young— if you're like a very ambitious 18-year-old, I actually think the only thing you can probably do is start your own business, like a startup where you have like full agency, which is great for like us basically, right? Like for people like us. But I think like it is kind of weird that if you want to do something like more normal, like maybe you want to go into law or like the only— like all you can do is just get into this like very slow track path, right? Yes. Like go into college, become an intern, like maybe you're like, insanely smart, maybe you're, but like there's almost no like escape valve from that route for most professions, for most things that people want to do. We should figure out a way to like help people like escape all these kind of like pathways if they can.

Yes, there's this famous blog post, I would imagine you might've read it, by Derek Sivers, which is the, I think it's called There Is No Speed Limit. And it's the story of how he, when he was a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston, saw some number at a record store and called it. And the guy was like, hey, I'm a music teacher. And he was like, oh, wow, I'm, you know, at Berkeley, you know, studying. He was like, oh, I can teach you the entire first year of your prerequisites in like a couple months if you just study with me one-on-one. And he was like, how could that possibly be true? That doesn't make any sense. But he did. He had this incredible teacher who would meet him, I think for free, and teach him, go through all the prerequisite classes such that he was able to just like pass the tests and not have to take literally a couple years worth of work. And the sort of takeaway is, as the title suggests, in the right environment, there's no speed limit. And all of these things like curriculums and stuff like that are built with a speed limit in mind. You have to take 4 years to get through college. You have to take 10 years to become a partner at a law firm. When in reality, if you're that talented, there really shouldn't be that cap on you, right?

Exactly that. Yeah, completely agree. Yeah, that's it.

That's such an interesting point. I love that. Okay, last question. If you could assign a book for everyone on Earth to read and understand, what would you like to assign?

So I think the book that probably has had the most profound impact on me, which always like, I don't know if you can extrapolate that to other people, is Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. I actually love everything he's written. Like all his books are just like amazing to me. And I think there's like, but it's actually hard to convey like why I think it's interesting. There's like, so for me, like the big framework is I think a lot of people today are almost like too used to this like frame, this framework that he calls legibility, right? Like seeking legibility. Like you want to have like, it's about states, right? It's about how like states structure their environment. Like everything has to be kind of like almost like fit in a database, fit in a grid. Like have a number, but that actually influences like the world in a very profound way, right? But there's also a company version of this, right? Where if you want everything to be like measurable, if you want to have performance reviews, if you want to have like, it has a specific impact on your company as well. And you can like apply it, I think, to everything, like to architecture too. And I think that book influenced me a lot. And I think if you read it and if you kind of like, I guess, take away from it what I took away from it, It almost lets you become more comfortable with anarchy. I think he's basically like a sort of like proto-anarchist at some level. And I think it's like understanding the balance that we might have like in many things in society, like, you know, we looked for too much structure. And I think like being kind of like, you know, understanding the cost of that structure, I think it's kind of like a hidden cost to a lot of things. I think understanding that cost is probably like the main thing I would take away from it, where you become more comfortable with slightly less structure. And I think the version that I give to my team, for example, is I think the main reason companies end up with, startups end up with, say, like management layers, middle management, the kind of thing that makes them go corporate. I actually think it comes from the employees where they start saying things like, oh, like our comms is a chaos, or like multiple people are working on the same stuff. We need to make things more efficient. And like there are these things that are kind of, they're actually true, right? Those are not like, those things are, but I think it's like understanding the cost of like fixing all of these problems is actually like a, it has a high cost to it, which is you create these management structures, everything has to fit in a box. You suddenly can't employ these interesting journalists anymore. Now you have to suddenly have like, it's like, this is your role. This is how I'm going to like measure your output. If you're suddenly doing this thing that doesn't fit into that framework, we don't value it anymore. And now we're losing all these like talented people that were so important to our success in the first couple of years. I think all these things happen and they're like hidden costs that either people don't understand or they understand them but think they're just inevitable, like there's no way to grow out of them. And again, I'd actually like going back to Palantir, I think Palantir is one of the companies which to me showed that there's a different balance than I think the consensus balance that most executives or even VCs, like board members would say is acceptable at different scales for startups.

You said legibility, which I'm interested in there. Is the idea that that structure adds legibility, and then by giving that legibility, you sacrifice some of that flexibility or some sort of similar synonym there? Or what is the role of legibility in that construction?

So the role of legibility is as soon as you reduce something to some set of numbers or some set of metrics or some set of identifiers, you're only going to, at some point, even if you don't want it, you will actually be forced to look at the world, that becomes your lens to measure things, right? So if I assign some metric to your output, I could be like, when I'm setting it up, like, no, no, I will still have casual conversations with Mario and I will— there's countless examples of this, right? Where maybe my favorite kind of nationwide one is there's a book called— of someone who came up with the metric GDP. Half the book is about how GDP should never be used to measure—

Oh, wow.

It's kind of fascinating. Half of it is just talking about This is just like a proxy. It's interesting to measure maybe some time series, but it's never like a real— and then of course we immediately ended up using it in exactly all the ways that the people who came up with that metric were like, don't do this. And this happens over and over again. And again, I think this is also true on kind of micro scales or company-level scales or team-level scales. The book is full with, by the way, crazy examples of, I think, Prussian forestry techniques. Oh, wow. Tanzanian villages. It's absolutely fascinating and like kind of eclectic in the way it's written.

That sounds amazing. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. It was great to see you. And I'm glad we got to turn one of our conversations into this podcast.

Such a pleasure, Mario. Thank you.

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