Innovation is coming to construction, much of it funded by venture capital. Venture capitalists are comfortable with risk, and spread that risk across multiple investments across multiple companies with high growth potential.
But how comfortable should contractors selecting construction software be with emerging, venture-funded startups? We discuss this with the former CEO of a venture-funded startup, Raffi Holzer, now onto new ventures helping construction technology companies with funding and growth and construction organizations with technology adoption.
Holzer intimately understands constractors being conservative when it comes to venture-funded startups.
IRONPROS: This is a fascinating time in construction technology. We have advancing mobile and cloud technology. We have a greater ability to ingest data from edge devices that give us a lot of capabilities with things like reality capture. That can then really close that gap between the suits in the back office and the plan and what is actually happening in the field. But when it comes to a lot of these more innovative companies, innovation is being funded by venture capital. We see some of these companies get acquired by larger companies. If you are the construction contractor executive, that CFO. And your team wants to adopt this technology, from the outside looking in, what sort of things should that executive be asking to determine what their trajectory and what their future is going to look like?
HOLZER: Before you even get there as an executive at a construction company as they look at whether they are going to scale up with a particular solution, is which of the dozens solutions should they even bother with? Having a process for determining which of these solutions they should trial, how to trial them and then assuring you can get to an answer on this trial rapidly is really the first step in that process. That is one thing I am helping companies evaluate today ... You raise a good point that a lot of these larger companies are hesitant to work with or certainly scale up with startups, particularly if you don't know how long or if they're going to be around. They're relying on venture funding, they may not be profitable yet ...
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