137: ‘Accelerating Tech in AEC’, with German Aparicio, Jr.

welcome to the Troxel podcast I'm Evan Troxel a little bit of housekeeping here before I introduce my guest for the episode I'll be at Autodesk University next week and if you're going to be there too please reach out to me on LinkedIn and send me a message I'd love to meet you you can find the link to my profile in the show notes for this episode at trxl doco okay in this episode I welcome German apparicio Jr German is the program manager of early Innovation and partner development at Trimble Ventures where he is focused on advancing early stage Innovation and collaboration leading Outreach efforts and expanding their Innovation portfolio through the identification of promising early stage companies he has a decade of Consulting experience working with Trimble Consulting providing strategic advisory and advanced project delivery services to Leading owners Architects Engineers Builders Fabricators and other industry professionals worldwide German previously co-founded trimble's 060 accelerator program focused on design and technology for trimble's core Industries to help startups build and scale Innovative products and services prior to joining Trimble German worked at some of the world's leading design engineering and technology companies including Gary Technologies which is also known as GT in this episode we discuss Trimble venture's new Venture fund program to stimulate innovation in aec the importance of connecting the job site with design mentorship and the value of real world experience the use of AI and machine learning in the aec industry and the potential of multimodal models and the natural language interfaces in the latest AI tools so without further Ado I bring you my conversation with German apparicio [Music] German welcome to the podcast great to see you again thank you likewise Evan thank you for having me yeah we're we're gonna take two here because we we just had a recording hiccup so we we've already we've already chatted through this but I I wanted you to maybe tell a little bit of the story of where we met and what we were doing back back in the day as we called this segment of the show yeah so I was mentioning I was thinking about this uh I'm thinking about coming on the podcast and I I think first time we met was back in my cply days when I was a student there so early two early 2000s and I was mentioning that uh I took one of your courses and it was focused on forz which was the 3D modeling software at the time it was kind of The Cutting Edge technology and uh I was very excited to take this course because I was kind of frustrated with the existing tool sets that that we had um and and yeah I was looking forward to learning more form Z Circa 2003 it was 3D modeling was a different animal back then right like we were we were working in wireframe all the time and it was big desktop bound computers we had the Mac lab we had the PC Lab at calpoly and I remember that very well also and and that was really before we started teaching Bim at calply right uh it wasn't too long after that that I recall teaching aryad and then we transitioned to Revit and I know for me always teaching kind of Technology on the technology side of the architecture program I was just constantly having to adjust my curriculum I was just telling somebody this story just a few days ago like every quarter technolog is moving moving moving moving whereas the professors in Design Studio which of course get all of the attention from all the students it's what everything R you know it's all built on Design Studio those those courses never change right they're they're probably still doing the getaway house in third year they're probably still doing the infill project in second year they're probably you know and it's it's really interesting to me because I always felt like I had to meet the demands of what the studio professors wanted technology-wise for a Whole Decade and their courses never changed I just thought I just kind of reflecting on that and it was it's interesting to see how technology is affecting the profession but it's amazing how much of the profession is also got its heels dug in and it's not going to change technology or not otherwise you know it's it's it's really kind of an interesting Paradigm and this this whole Foundation of our of what we do as professionals you know I it's just kind of interesting to think about yeah I think our industry has always been slow tailed out in Technologies right so it's kind of interesting to think about yeah what technologies existed when I was a student there at C paully and uh like I mentioned form Z was kind of Cutting Edge and I think back then it was you know every I don't know two and a half to five years that a new technology was um came to Market and kind of a new skill set that you had to learn yeah today that that time has uh gone down right to you mentioned the quarter uh universties on the quarter system but I think even even a shorter time frame now we're seeing new developments like I don't know six months is kind of a long time frame now it's like every every three months or every every other month year or something here it's incredible it's absolutely incredible and with all of the you know the AI hype cycle that we're living through at the moment right is every week There's you know now it's multimodal Ai and it's that's going to be forgotten in a minute and we're going to move on to something else but it is it just feels like gets moving so quickly um it's absolutely astounding the pace and I'm sure that you're hyper aware of what's going on in the space so maybe you can before we get into the the tech of today and and what what is really interesting to you let's go back and and give the story of what you've been up to for let's just say the last decade maybe more but since since we you know we're we're 20 years out of cowply at this point you you were in my paths crossing right and a lot has happened too much to talk about but but talk about your role at Trimble and where you're coming from on the incubator accelerator side I I want you to kind of paint the picture of of what you've been working on for since you've been at Trimble yeah so I joined Trimble by way of acquisition back in 2014 uh when I was working at Gary Technologies and I joined Gary Technologies uh by way of an invitation by then my um you know formal thesis adviser from MIT Dennis Sheldon invited me to join the team after we had taught a course together at uh UCLA and so I was kind of excited to leave the corporate world and join and atique firm focus on you know Advanced product delivery using uh cutting it Technologies and uh the idea of you know working on some of these amazing projects that U great Technologies had the fortune of of by way of working with franker and other Architects um little did I know that the company was going to be acquired by by Trimble um but to trimble's credit you know since 2014 it kind of uh left the Consulting Group as as is for for many years and had the fortune to work on a number of very exciting projects Pro S as part of that team worked on on projects like the uh new airport in Mexico City I got had a chance to work on a number of uh wdi projects over at Disney uh across the world in Tokyo and Florida chance to work on uh you know a number of projects uh around the world that are well documented uh online but uh during that during that period you know having worked in Consulting and developing thepoke Technologies for every every project and then at the end of the project kind of throwing it away uh quickly realized that it was a very sustainable model and how do you drive uh real change in the industry if you're not able to kind of develop these products uh in in further further detail right ready for Market uh we decided to kind of launch a accelerator program progr and so in 2018 uh co-founded an accelerator program called 060 and worked a number of startup companies many uh whose Founders you've had on your podcast right including um teams like for companies like hiar testfit tonic DM all really really great uh products and and teams that are contributing to driving that change in the industry and I was kind of very excited to watch the accelerator program and and play a role in in helping drive that change and so from from that success based on those early Partnerships with these companies uh more recently I've uh had the opportunity to join our adventures team and so the idea behind Adventures team is to create create a role uh under the ventures umbrella to help grow and scale this accelerator program and also focus on our uh portfolio companies so for those that don't know Trimble Ventures is uh a corporate Venture arm of Trimble and uh they manage a $200 million fund which is you can think of fund number one that invest in um in companies startup companies more closer to series a through D and uh the idea behind my roles maybe to focus more on the early stage companies right so pre- series a think preed and see stage companies to help develop their ideas and and develop Partnerships over time so uh yeah I'm excited to announce that I'm currently uh left the Trimble Consulting team and joined the Trimble Ventures team to focus on this new role there's a lot of little pieces I want to go back and pick out yes we have had several we've had your past colleagues on the show you guys lectured in my class at calply so this is other kind of touch points along our paths that we've had and it that talking about emerging technology you've always had this drive toward technology and making the profession better and I think it's interesting now you know you were with the 060 accelerator you mentioned high power test fit um r tonic DM was on the show I'll put links to all of these back in the show notes for this episode so people can kind of connect the dots um Robert euan from monograph as well right um and and there's this really interesting take by Trimble which is like you don't just go out and acquire these companies maybe you try I have no idea right but this this idea of investing I think is so interesting because it's different than what we see other large companies in aec trying to do right and so can you just talk about it from that point of view here just why why that approach why the investment approach why the mentoring approach because I think we want to talk about mentoring as well why why are you not just investing dollars but you're also like like the idea of an accelerator program is not just money right it's it's expertise it's lessons learned it's all of these things so from from your perspective can you kind of bounce off of those kind of ideas and tell us where you guys are coming from that's a great question yeah I think there's there's many uh investment vehicles right that you mentioned so that or efforts right there's the the m&a the mergers and Acquisitions I think trimol as a as a company as has uh done a great job by yeah acquiring various companies like G Technologies that's how was introduced to Trimble and uh really leaves leaves them you know for a long time that to do what they're best at and uh brings them under that Trimble umbrella as uh what we call one Trimble the other area where Trimble invests in is in um it's part of the the ventures arm right is in these uh startup companies here's a through D so there's a whole fun kind of focus on uh to that uh as was historically in some of our um partner funds like uh Iron Springs investing kind of uh and some of those companies uh the the one that I I can speak closer to because I'm part of is probably from a acceleration standpoint right the focus on the earlier stage companies and the idea behind that was to partner with um some of these existing companies that maybe were uh pre-revenue or had had uh you know under a million dollars in revenue and and uh some of these companies had different needs and it kind of goes back to the motive for starting to accelerate in the first place right is to partner with these companies help Drive change in the industry uh but as well realizing that um you know if you look to adjacent Industries like the tech industry there's very mature accelerator programs that offer uh cheero mentoring and finance and access to resources to these companies to grow and scale uh I felt like in 2018 when we launched this accelerator program we didn't have that for architecture engineering construction specifically if we did you know it was maybe uh yeah one of the existing tech programs or a very small program and I thought uh trimbo was uniquely positioned to set up an acceler program and have a lot of value to offer to these companies so as part of the accelerator program yeah we we kind of structured it similar to other accelerator programs in the in the tech industry where we have uh you know series of of demo days uh Mentor days and then we end with a graduation event so it's a three currently set up as a three-month Equity free program but the meat of that program is really focused on workshops training and mentorship and so the workshops really help companies who need help in specific areas right such as marketing or uh finding that product Market fit or just getting um introduced to strategic clients so trimo is uniquely positioned that it works with the number of uh Innovative you know customers right or clients that that we have as customers that are doing really amazing work and um you know we had the opportunity as part of this accelerator program to have you know dedicated we call them open closed demo days where we invite a number of our participants come present the Strategic clients and get that kind of early feedback which is I think a big value add but in addition to that you know uh industry specific training so we would we would offer as part of this program access to hardware and software and then kind of any any needed training Associated to that um back then we had a few apis but maybe not a central location where Vel opers could find that information and so part of the acceler program uh experience was to facilitate those connections and at you know access to documentation for potential integration to the products but that wasn't necessarily the focus the real Focus was on on mentoring right these companies and providing a help where they needed access to resources whether it be introduction to potential clients marketing opportunities by inviting them to specific events uh um or or networking with um industry professionals and internally with folks that uh have have built and created their own companies in the past and found themselves to be acquired by Trimble or or you know this was yeah come of the next evolution of of their careers that provide come back and provide that um feedback to these these uh participants I I think I caught you saying Equity free it's not like I caught you red-handed or something but is that what you said is it you said that this was like an equity free investment correct the the program was initially set up to be a equity free program right and and the idea behind that was like I said in our industry we didn't really have a program accelerator program set up to help these companies build you know a lot of these companies are are bootstrapped you know they might have one or two uh customers or they might have uh you know their own investment that they're using maybe Fam Family Friends money to get them up and running and so felt like uh being part of a large organization didn't make sense to take equity in these companies and that really wasn't the goal right the goal was to help them grow and scale in the in the various ways that they were looking to do that uh again to hopefully help Drive change in the industry I I just think that super interesting German like the that just sounds completely amazing and I as the VC kind of landscape has changed I think everybody's way more aware of it than we were 10 years ago or five six years ago when you guys started this to be looking for the unicorns right looking for the 10x 100x returns uh it's a ult landscape for startups to navigate especially if they're coming from architecture right like this is not how people were trained they're not trained in finance they're not trained in this all these you know series a series B series C they're not trained in and and that is like a a foreign language it's a it's a foreign concept to a lot of them to a lot of every us I should say because we're I'm coming from architecture as well right this is we we we barely even had a business class we probably didn't have a business class in architecture right right and so for you guys as Trimble a big company who's been there done that you've acquired firms you've invested everybody wants a return on their investment and I think what's interesting from what I'm hearing from you is that the return on investment for you as a stronger profession as a stronger industry and I think that is wild that you're actually doing that I mean really that that's what you're doing that sounds incredible to me yeah I think it comes from our own experiences right like like yourself I am also trained as an architect when went to calpal architecture school didn't have the opportunity to take uh business courses it wasn't really until grad school that I was kind of exposed to this idea of uh startups right and kind of spinning out companies out of labs right and kind of what what resources it would take to to do that to achieve that and and uh I had the fortune to yeah spend some time at MIT where I learned a little bit of that but also wasn't until uh I had the opportunity to teach in the Bay Area and spend time in in San Francisco teaching at uh CCA and at UC Berkeley where I was kind of exposed to the idea of accelerator program and served as a mentor uh to some of the companies there and just learn kind of some of the the behind the scenes right of of that world and so that that also kind of inspired right U me to to help start this accelerator program and then also taking the The Experience from being acquired right as gear Technologies uh and to tremble and the idea that you know a company which in its own was a was a startup out of uh Frank G's practice right as his kind of a sister company to realize his buildings that could develop the technology back then such as uh G team that came out of you know working on projects now Trimble connect and be acquired by a large organization like Trimble I thought I thought was really interesting and so kind of going back to why why make it Equity free you know program like that didn't exist for for our industry and so one it didn't make sense to take equity in in these smaller companies who are just you know trying to build a product or a service didn't have that background but but I thought again Trimble was uniquely positioned to offer that knowledge that skill set uh access to resources mentorship to be able to to take those products and services to the next level I just think about the mindset difference between startups that are building something for the short term to get acquired by somebody bigger versus the ones who are building something to last that is much more of an architectural practice point of view building a pract a lot of people start their own practices right and they want to build that practice for decades they want to build it they're not starting a practice to get acquired typically right it does happen there's a lot of m&a in aec right but I think most people start a practice because they want the freedom whether that's the freedom of expression or the types of projects or they see a niche that they can go after and and what you're talking about is investing in companies to help them build something that lasts and of course I I I can't imagine that you're putting some kind of clause in there that says you can't get acquired right of course some people are still going to you know do that but I think that that's just kind of an interesting an interesting perspective to take to do something for the industry I mean funny enough that that's why I do what I'm doing at the podcast right I I want to see this industry get better I want to share the things that typically happen in private conversations with everybody so that we can all get better together and it sounds a lot to me like that's what you're doing with Trimble and I I like how you take it back to what you were doing at GT when you were Acquired and and I remember when you and Lucas and ali uh were all working at GT I thought of you guys as like a a Skunk Works team who was or like a SWAT team who would go into different projects for different Architects all over the world and like do a job right you were the a team and then you would you would go back out and then you would go do another job and I think it's interesting that you said that you would kind of start from scratch every time and you saw that as being really wasteful and we we kind of do that on architectural projects as Architects throughout the entire industry and it it's amazing to me to even think about your first cohort that you had at 060 with Ian from hiar and one thing we've talked about on this podcast is how his goal was to make it so that Architects never had to start from a blank page which is exactly what you're talking about when you're talking about what you were doing at GT even right so all of these things are kind of swirling around and informing each other and creating this kind of clear path forward and I think again I think it's just incredible that Trimble kind of sees this as a a zero Equity of course I'm sure there's an option at some point where it like you could not try to acquire a firm if they were if they were interested in that to be part of the bigger trimbo Eco Trimble ecosystem but but for the most part you're just saying no like we're doing this to strengthen all of it and because you working at GT you saw the incredible power of what technology could do you mentioned the Mexico City Airport I mean I I you guys came into my class and talked about that project Ally did she talked about that project and she talked about what you did there and that these projects could not happen without what you were doing I mean it's absolutely um just table Stakes that they could not have happened without what you're doing and I think you're applying that view back to the industry indry and saying well that's what technology has the power to do we've seen it firsthand we're going to empower others to do that more and more and more for our industry yeah AB absolutely yeah definitely informed from our our previous experiences like said my time at caly my time at MIT and my time at GT kind of informed the motivation behind La the acceler program but also from those experiences realizing yeah not not having been trained in these areas and um just learning from having spent time in the industry and and working with others um so that yeah the early parts of the of the accelerator program were really exciting because we were also learning from right the startup companies about how to how to run an accelerator program you know what what is the the best way to structure it what uh value we could provide to these these companies and it you know wasn't the form of access to resources whether it be uh again technology Hardware software or marketing opportunities introductions to to customers those sorts of things but I think that the biggest value that uh we had to offer that came out of uh maybe a lesson learned that came out of that experience was this idea of mentorship that's also been kind of a a theme throughout my uh career in education right uh kind of going back to the beginning of of the podcast we're talking about time cowply you know people like yourself like to yeah thank you for that time and and learning about various software technologies that you brought to the university uh you know other other professors at calply that serves as mentors for me people like Axel P Smith sprigger uh Michael Fox you know dral number of other faculty there that help in Inspire and kind of uh drive right my my career I think very very similar um idea is what we're trying to push as part of the accelerated program the idea of mentorship and how because the number of uh people who decide to start their own companies right don't have that background how do you uh bring them up and running or up to speed in a short amount of time and that's kind of the the idea behind having this three month window excuse me three Monon window to be able to bring your product and service and and scale it up through uh through this program and connect you with various mentors whether it be in marketing where it be in uh software development or or other areas that you have a need and so as kind of a a result um this this year we decided to run a pilot program with our Trimble Tech labs and our Trimble Tech Labs is is a program with our University partners and so uh we launched that uh this last August and currently have a number of students that participate so the idea was to Target undergrad graduate and uh maybe even faculty who who have idea maybe researching ideas as part of the labs and how do we Leverage the resources they have available to them as part of the lab should develop their own business model and value propositions so in parallel I've also been teaching a course at calpo pona uh as as a part-time faculty there shout out to uh to George and and other faculty for allowing me to teach this course but it it teaches students about yeah the business model we use the business model canvas as a tool right or lean methods the same uh yeah business principles that are taught in like a NSF I corpse type program to help uh develop your own business models and value propositions and we do do that through a series of exercises and and doing customer surveys uh currently running that that uh curriculum as part of this uh pilot program that we have with our trimal Tech Lab Partners and so we have a cohort of uh students from various universities including Washington State University Purdue Texas A&M uh Florida interational University they've been a great partner in developing this pilot program to see if we can't help right the various uh participants develop their own business models and uh potentially spinoffs uh out of out of these Labs I think that's a another exciting space that kind of gr build on top of the ideas that that mentioned before the idea of teaching basically entrepreneurship in architecture I think has been lacking for a long time it's awesome to hear that that's what's going on I had a conversation with a previous guest Jeff Eckles who teaches a propractice class at Ball State University Indiana and a big piece of that is entrepreneurship as well in kind of Designing business models that typically it's going to be around technology the students are immersed in technology it's how they deliver all their projects and so often times I think they can see opportunities there or holes right that they might want to try to fill with with an idea it's really cool to hear that there's an Avenue to develop those skills because I think you know going to school when I went to school it was like you're getting trained to go work in an office and it wasn't really that you're getting trained to go run a business or start a business right you would learn how to to do that by working at some other office right schools did school stuff businesses did business stuff and they were kind of separate they still kind of are right so it's really interesting to me to hear that this is actively being pursued with these University Partnerships all over the United States can you give some ideas of just the kinds of ideas that students come up with because we look at design design courses the ideas are wild right they're all over the place and that's encouraged like that's what you do when you're in school is it the same for this kind of a course or is there like limits that you put on students or I would I'm really interested to kind of hear the kinds of things that you're experiencing through this process yeah I think I think it goes back to my Consulting days right having spent a number of years on projects and identifying specific pain points areas where Technologies didn't speak to each other and develop this book technology to solve a specific problem or um yeah I think I think that kind of fed into this concept that students uh face similar aha moments right when doing their own research that there are uh pain points in the industry in which that know they realize Technologies don't talk to each other and uh they're working on idea that could help solve those those challenges so that aidea behind this pilot program was to work with those students that were researching those type of things in the labs and develop their own uh business models and value propositions and so we have we have essentially four teams at the moment that are participating in part of this pilot program from those race universities I previously mentioned and some of them are focused on uh taking maybe construction safety training as a as an idea Crea kind of certificate program but what what would a uh certificate safety training certificate program look like using emerging technology like virtual reality or augmented reality headset right how do you take and I think this this idea is interesting because I think it came up out as a result from uh the co era right so like a lot of a lot of students and and just people in general found themselves that they couldn't do their jobs because they couldn't access Labs or uh yeah the the facilities to achieve their specific goals and so this idea that uh you could kind of extend the lab into a headset and train a labor force at scale uh using these emerging Technologies it's really interesting so this team is looking at developing a construction safety course uh using virtual reality and uh as part of this program they're looking to develop that on a on top of a product that that we have a trimble called trimo virtual world it's kind of this uh really neat uh virtual environment that allows you to build What's called the quest right and the the idea behind uh Trimble virtual world is to create these kind of uh training experiences to help uh trained various labor forces because that's that's currently uh a challenge specifically in the construction industry right is to find enough people to to build projects right and train them up I think there's also a big disconnect between those that have the knowledge in the industry right they maybe more senior uh individuals versus the the incoming kind of uh Workforce right at of school and so the idea behind this platform is to help kind of build a connection between those two groups and have kind know a virtual environment to do that type of training so this team is looking to take their construction safety course and uh implement it on our trimo virtual world platform which is a very exciting uh you know project that that they're currently working on we're currently about halfway through the accelerator program just had a very successful Mentor day and uh getting ready for at demo day here at the end of October and then a graduation events in uh end of November but that's just that's just one team another team that's out of uh the Sweden area is developing a uh a wood sorry let say this correctly yeah a wood uh structural system a building system that allows you to assemble and disassemble buildings uh on demand and so uh this particular student has developed a product and is looking to patent that product and uh with part of the accelerator program looking to take that building system and uh essentially take the logic and encode it into one of our products that's called Trimble Creator which is essentially you know very similar to I would say like a grasshopper Dynamo uh Force for SketchUp or uh techla for example to be able to build a building configurator right so you think about taking her library of of Parts whether it be a floor system wall system Roof System encoded into this uh software that that allows a designer to build a design and then kind of automate the instructions for assembly and disassembly of that project that's the second the second project that currently working on the third one is focused on uh cost estimating tool so we have a student at a Florida International University that is kind of looking at the this old age problem of cost estimating and using models to for quantification and so we're taking his research work and build it into a product of ours called Trimble connects so they're able to automatically upload a model and kind of extract those values in the back end and uh you know potentially use something like AI to uh give you cost estimating values so that's that's our third project and maybe the the fourth project is focus on indoor mapping um they've partnered this is out of Texas A&M they partnered with another startup company that's developed uh indoor positioning system uh that is a technology that's come out of NASA and they're looking to collaborate to build um yeah a a new product to help visualize that information to help First Responders and so they're taking the data that's collected from that system and maybe uh create models on Trimble connect sketch up then kind of uh visualize in real time some of that sensor data using these Technologies so a lot of really you know a lot a lot of our labs are based out of the civil engineering departments and so kind of a lot of projects uh you know in these in these various spaces for everything from training to building configuration to uh Endor mapping and processa just to slav of projects that come through the program and some of these things maybe if maybe all of them are not things that are traditional focus of architecture school right these are not design problems and and so you said civil engineering departments a lot of that that's where this action is happening but like the the kind of well there's two things I want to talk about here one is like approaching this as a design problem right we we as Architects are trained to focus on design problems as design problems but we don't necessarily think about our businesses as design problems and we don't think about our practices as design problems and I think that there's a lot of room for that um the other the other thing though that I I I think is interesting that you're in a position to deliver here and I'm interested to see if you are is students don't have all the experience needed to do cost estimating they don't have all the experience needed to do the kinds of pro you know when you're talking about a building system for Deployable uh buildings that that can get assembled and disassembled and so are you because Trimble is such a big entity are you able to connect those students I mean we talked about mentoring so I kind of assume the answer is yes but are you connecting them with people in the industry whether that's Trimble or outside of Trimble to make informed decisions as they develop these ideas so that that they can go farther faster right because I think something we all I don't want to say suffered from but but the thing that we saw when we were in school was that a lot of our professors didn't practice architecture they were career academics right and and that was a bit of a disservice for knowing what it was going to be like to work in the industry and a lot of times you go through school then you get out of school and it's like you didn't learn that how how we do that because we just didn't have that connection so are you making those connections for these projects these people who are leading these projects in universities so that they get that exposure and that experience as they do it yeah absolutely I think that's right that's kind of the goal behind this pilot program as part of this accelerator is to take like I said the the research that's coming out of the labs and help develop them business ideas and uh various participants are at different stages in that right in being able to achieve a uh product or service or actually a business model value proposition as a product and service that they can go in and uh sell or turn into a business right and and kind of put in front of a customer so as part of the accelerator program you know we try to pair them with uh mentors either internally with uh leaders in our org organization who have started their own companies and can provide that type of mentorship or uh technical expertise right matching them with um a lot of our development team or business units that focus on similar products that they can build on top of right uh introducing them to other programs that we have in existence uh for example we have a trial developer program that is is is being created that allows um yeah these participants to access uh apis or sdks for example we have a triple partnership program that we introduce them to addition to that uh other learning resources we have a platform called learn. trimble.com where they're able to access uh various um learning products think think of uh LinkedIn learning or for these other platforms where you could kind of subscribe to a course anything right but this this gives you access to specific uh Trimble software uh learning curriculums you also have uh yeah other resources that we make available to them so that hopefully they can they can leverage that and not just internally but also trying to make the connections externally right a number of our folks you know uh partner with with external organizations and I mentioned strategic customers so uh when the when the time is right right we try to introduce them to somebody these customers to to get that kind of feedback or in the case of um the student that's working on the project for and say the uh the the building system introduce them to specific trades trade organizations and leaders and trade organizations to see what what kind of uh yeah opportunities might exist there or feedback they could provide uh for their project so I think that's that's my my biggest challenge and uh if I had a call call to action right for this podcast would be to if you're interested in mentoring like please feel free to reach out and uh join right the the accelerator part of the Metro because there's a number of people who could use your expertise whether it be industry expertise subject matter expertise or if you started your company right uh entrepreneurship expertise these are all kind of uh things that we could use more of and I think uh yeah I listen to a recent podcast you you did with Clift and he his call to action was to have more startup companies right more uh investment opportunities more spin outs out of tech companies but to get there I think we need we need to have uh greater mentorship and that's my goal as part of the seller program is to provide that for for industry and for uh you know graduates coming out of University that who are interested in uh starting to own companies I would assume that also while you're creating those connections that the students through the kind of interview process with those experts not only are they getting the Insight that's domain expertise but they're also identifying what I would hope is a whole that the person who's been doing it for a long time also recognizes and and they're able to kind of tailor what they're doing toward an actual potential customer in that in that way how how many startups how many ideas have you seen where there's this idea but there's no validation of the idea and they may even go through the entire process of building that thing spending all the capital and the time to do it and then not finding a customer with it right it happens all the time and so is that validation also happening through this process so that we create the connection from here to there before it's too late before they spend all that time for nothing yeah absolutely that's that's kind of the the idea behind having demo days Mentor days right and it's graduation to get those feedback but um specifically the demo days they get the feedback from potential customers right on developing their products and getting that product Market fit and so customer surveys is a big component of that and I love accelerator programs that will take for example uh participants their their applications like they won and have participants burn those applications and you know to realize that what they thought they were going to bring to Market might completely change by the end of the accelerator program based on that based on that feedback and Lessons Learned and uh I think that's a that's really good in a first lesson is that uh it's it's important to be open and iterate and take that feedback right to be able to achieve that product Market fit uh that hopefully will become a product and service that people will find Value in right and that's that's not something you're going to get for me you're not going to get from the accelerator program it's up to the market to determine you know what that looks like what it is and and hopefully uh through the the process that we try to uh create as part of the Accel program uh is is how participants get there it just makes me think of a few other things that other guests that I've had on the show uh and on on other podcasts that I've been on as well one one that I think of is was a researcher and she does qualitative research with with Building Product manufacturers for the most part and she listens to what they're saying and then does does market research to see if it actually is is playing out because I think the idea of assumptions untested assumptions is something that uh in what it doesn't make sense to me because we're we're trained to test and iterate and do all of these that's why we have critiques in architecture school right is to get is for the feedback loop to be in full effect but there's so many times in technology in product development where there's a a core set of assumptions made early that are never really tested against the market and it's only through that testing that you get the feedback whether there's product Market fit or not right it's there's kind of this initial idea where we assume that of course there is like I see the value in this why doesn't everybody why everybody's going to see the value in this but it actually only through testing of those assumptions that it happens and I I think about my research friend because there's so many times where it's like the the dots aren't connecting there the the the message isn't Landing uh people are seeing things in a very different way than you think they're seeing them um and yet as Architects we are trained on every project to do exactly what you're talking about doing we don't think about this as the same kind of a problem as that though maybe um so I I think that that's just kind of an interesting again position that you're in to help people test those assumptions with these um product demo days with talking to people in various domains that could Connect into what they're proposing um and so I think that's all excellent to hear yeah I think a lot of that comes from uh my time in Consulting right I think why organizations like G Technologies are so successful because there are boots on the ground you know uh the business model was to work at a client office and uh live the the same pain points that um our customers did day in day out and unless you were boing the ground and on a on an existing project you wouldn't have an understanding right of how how things are done kind of the various workflows and how you could plug in various Technologies to uh make those workflows more efficient right and so often that would require developing like I mentioned B uh Solutions it's up to your point people who work in Labs people who work you know by themselves without getting that customer feedback um I think sometimes you have to develop products and services that that often fail and hopefully through this um structured program right we're able to provide uh participants with enough opportunities to get that feedback from potential customers or industry experts from uh people who have understanding of the the actual challenges on products to be able to to build that into their existing products and services so are there internship opportunities in this kind of a thing as well so that people can get that experience by under like living through the that pain or that circumstance or that process with potential people who would end up buying whatever they're coming up with so we don't have any internships as part of our accelerator program know our our parent company Trimble has uh has internship program and that's to develop yeah we have we have a couple programs so we have a uh a rotational development program where recent graduates come into the program and kind of spend some time with various uh business units to to find kind of their yeah their their passion and and kind of the best fit within the organization so they get exposure to various parts of the company get a general knowledge so when they find kind of their final landing spot they have an overview of the entire organization and then uh hopefully find yeah their dream job we have also an internship program which I believe is a summer program so a student is able to you know fulfill their uh University requirement and uh spent some time in our organization and learned some new skills sets and that hopefully they will take it throughout their career as part of an accelerator program there's no specific internship per se but you know the whole experience is about kind of getting getting that education uh being put in front of uh potential customers getting the feedback uh also I think our graduation event and uh yeah Mentor days are also great great times where we invite industry professionals right feedback right so they get it they get it in different aspects not necessarily being on an active project but they get it um yeah from from various uh users of these Technologies and and people who work work on projects on they and they out there's a big lack of in our industry there's a big lack of connection to the job site like it's interesting to hear that there's projects all around the construction side of things um and maybe that's because it's coming more out of the civil engineering side I don't know but but I think we've all seen how there's a disconnection between practice and even what actually gets built in the field in the feedback loop that does or doesn't happen because of that disconnection to the drawings and the modeling and all that kind of stuff um it is seems like a a natural fit for these students to try to spend time or and maybe they're not all students I don't know what the age range is any but you could be any age and be in University right so it seems to me like there's an opportunity potentially there to walk a mile in their shoes right that as this old saying goes so that you actually understand the problems better than you think you understand those problems right because you'll have lived experience by doing it and you'll if you've walked a mile in their shoes you'll be a mile away and you'll have their shoes right so you can you can always you always have that going for you but it does seem like a a way to kind of again connect the dots and and and make it so that these these projects really land because there is an understanding of the customer's pain and the that the value proposition is always around that right it's actually solving someone's problem like what are the understanding what the problems truly are for the businesses so that then you figure out how you're going to go back and build something to solve that problem it doesn't really necessarily work the other way around yeah you you mentioned a couple uh good points there you know the connection between the construction site and design I think that's something that is a a unique value that trimo as organization brings it the table right it was company founded in Hardware Charlie Trimble and that geospatial GPS green GPS technology to the Civil industry and today's um software is is really focus on that connection between field and the office and in facilitating uh communication between these various groups uh so hopefully there there's a better connection between yeah the site and the design team uh through these various uh softwares and so if I were speaking to a potential applicant I would I would say that uh that's one of the values that Trimble brings and the software it brings and uh the value of building on top of that uh ecosystem or Trimble platform would would bring to uh their own products and services and why they should consider uh joining the accelerator program and going through the through the process because they would they would be getting access to those resources the mentorship and uh hopefully uh opportunity to uh you know put their products and services in front of potential customers for for uh gaining that product Market fit I want to go back and touch on something that you mentioned in passing which was your grasshopper like product and I bet there's a lot of people in the audience who have no idea that Trimble has something like that uh Tom kkin who I think is the product manager on that has been on this show and maybe you could just give I I'd love to give Tom a shout out he he was introduced to me by harness of testfit and I he's an amazing guy and so I want to give him a shout out but maybe you can just give a quick overview of what that is so that I'll put a link to it in the show notes so people can check it out I don't know how much of it's out there yet or anything so maybe you can you can just talk about it for a minute yeah I want to say it's a product you know it's not in beta just out of beta uh point it's a l by Tom and his team out of New Zealand was an acquisition I believe it's company called Materia and uh yeah it's very very similar to uh Grasshopper And Dynamo that is it was uh initially it's it's a geometric engine right essentially with the graphical user interface and so I think when originally required by Trimble the idea was to embed it into uh a number of products I think today it's it's a a stand Lo product but it's had some Integrations with tools like SketchUp the 3D Warehouse there's this idea of um of uh components that uh called adaptive components that you can build intelligence into objects and uh yeah use parameters right to to uh essentially uh build parametric relationships between various elements and you can download them via 3D warehouse and uh embed them into your your 3D models whether it be in SketchUp or techler or other other um softwares but uh essentially a geometric engine that offers similar capability to like a grass operate and and Dynamo yeah so it is like a visual programming graph on the screen and you connect nodes together to build the linkage that you need to create geometry right that is parametric yeah it it's it was kind of the next Evolution right if you kind of go back to uh the beginning of our conversation is the next Evolution after uh form Z where we just had 3D modeling software and then we we had people like mcne release Rhino and on top of that we had grasshopper and the idea of computational design and being able to not have to uh yeah code or encode logic using uh text based programming language right you could actually just use uh nodes and components to string logic together but since then we've seen kind of the evolution of of that develop into uh products like hyar right be able to use reusable uh reusable scripts that you would encode logic to and and you could just call now now with the Advent of AI we're seeing now even the next level that we uh you could you could just use natural language right to uh to build build your scripts in the logic and and uh may become even easier than the existing tool we have today yeah I think there's a lot maybe less trial and error I think uh what there's a there's an upcoming guest on the show Nick catellier he has a a YouTube channel called Bim pure live and he recently had an episode on there where they were doing exactly that it's basically chat GPT inside of Revit I think was the case because a lot of the stuff that he's doing is around the Revit product and and Bim and one of the things he said was like like the code's really bad and the guy who was was on there showing it was like yeah but it still works right and I I think we're going to see a lot of that right which is like because people don't have the patience to try to rework their visual scripting uh to get it to do what they want on many levels it's way easier to type something in to chat GPT say write me a python script copy that python script throw it into a node and it does the thing that for the most part you wanted it to do and we just move on right and and these a lot of these visual programming scripts are throw away anyway they don't back to your GT stuff right it's like I'm going to use it on this project there there are very few scripts that get reused in major ways in in useful ways right most of them get thrown away just like most of the design process gets thrown away and that's okay um I think it's going to be an interesting next few years with AI and scripting and and coding and image generation and you know business use cases as well so I I I'm I'm actually really excited about it uh I've kind of gone through my own hype cycle of of AI and and you know what it what it could or you know could do for us both both good and bad but um I I'm interested maybe from your point of view and maybe we can we can wrap up here is just what are you excited about with the future what's coming in aec with technology what you're seeing right now and and I'd love to to hear your thoughts on that yeah I'm excited for this this next evolution of tools you know with the Advent of AI and machine learning uh these are these are technologies that we explore as part of a course that I teach at Kai kimono called advantage of design I think that's maybe the same course where you were teaching archicad and Revit it's kind of evolved uh you know to include that was Ancient Ancient digital design at this point I think is continuation yeah continuation right of uh right of these evolving Technologies so I'm kind of exciting about excited about the next level to your point the ability that these models allow at least the uh our language models to be able to to write code without even having understanding for code and kind of just using natural language to go back and forth test things out whether they work or don't work and and feed it the uh errors that you're getting and uh debug right your scripts using this this uh this interface I think is really exciting what I'm really excited about maybe is that next evolution of of these uh models and how they might play with um you know other other models generative design models uh I'm really excited about the approach to multimodal models and that using the idea of using various inputs I think there's there's limitations to just using text based large language models uh but being able to use right a 3D model as an input use a large language model to describe what it is you're trying to achieve uh some of the new um yeah multimodal models that are coming out such as uh gp4 uh Vision I think is really exciting because you could even uh use a sketch right as as your your input so I can imagine uh yeah a world where you're just able to write the logic or sketch out the logic uh you know by hands and use kind of the vision capability to build out that U script scripting logic and then kind of go back and forth with a with a copilot to to develop that idea into a working um script to automate a task or I think some of the more exciting things uh like the Hort team is doing right is being able to encode that into a reusable script that you could just use a a large language model to call upon an API and execute right and it kind of happens on the back end and you just get the thing that you need uh to to as part of your workflow so stringing stringing these various things together these different models you know um to kind of answer your question I'm I'm more of a a glass half full person I um maybe because of my uh yeah biases and Technology I have a positive outlook versus others who as yeah yeah yeah more optimistic versus the idea that we're GNA have um yeah AGI one day that's going

2023-11-14 03:11

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