رونوشت 🔗
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It was created in the wake of 9-11. There was a pretty bold statement by our
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founders that they thought the attacks would have been preventable because
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the data existed, but it existed in siloed systems that were siloed both by
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kind of technological limitations, but also because, you know,
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you have the CIA, the NSA, FBI, they have different allowances of who can see what.
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It allows people the flexibility to build exactly what they need,
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as opposed to having to kind of conform themselves to what exists in the market,
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which has been very true in construction from the people I've talked to.
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Yeah. So Foundry is best thought of as a, you know, that's why it's named that.
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It's a foundry. It's a place where you build.
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And the only data you should be responsible for entering is the data that only you know.
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So when I pull up my time card, right, I shouldn't have to tell you what job I'm on.
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I showed up that day. Someone told me to be there. I didn't just wander in.
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First one is that we are going to be subtractive before additive.
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And the second promise I made is that nothing we build for the field is going
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to make a guy in that field throw his phone across that field. Like it has to work.
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Jesse, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you taking some time.
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Of course. Happy to be here.
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So, you know, I think I'm excited for this, you know, conversation in a couple ways.
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I think, you know, there is Palantir is kind of a name that I think a lot of
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people maybe know even before they, if they don't really understand what it
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does, right? There's, there's challengers in the news in a couple different ways.
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And I think even before maybe the McCarthy announcement and maybe the stuff
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that you're doing with Kavanaugh, there wasn't really an understanding that
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Palantir had an integration into the construction kind of industry.
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And so I think hearing from your perspective, your experience with Thomas Kavanaugh
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and what you've been doing with Kavtera after that, I think is going to be really interesting to see.
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And maybe just before we get into it, like looking at your background,
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you've had a pretty interesting kind of arc that has put you in construction.
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So when you were at University of Toronto, Jesse, modeling ice data, yes?
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Yeah. Is this what you anticipated doing in 2026, kind of knee deep in construction data?
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No, I think it's been a kind of interesting random walk. So the way it all kind
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of happened was I'd always wanted to be a professor.
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And so I did the undergrad, the master's, the doctorate.
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And then COVID hit. And I realized that once you kind of extracted away like
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the having beers at conferences with physicists talking around ideas,
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being part of that community, and all I was left with was like sitting at my
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computer writing papers,
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I realized I didn't really like that piece.
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And it seemed like a bad idea to go into like a 40, 50 year career that's hinged
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around a thing I don't actually like.
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It's kind of like ordering a steak so you can eat the mashed potatoes and the
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seasoned vegetables, but you don't like the meat, right?
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So I kind of made this mental decision. I guess I'm not going to be a professor.
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Well, what else do I do? And so physicists tend to kind of go into like quant
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or tech or something like that.
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And I swear, like a week after I made this mental decision, someone reached
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out to me from my network and said, hey, I'm at Palantir. We're hiring into Canada.
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I think you'd be good for the job. And I had like the smoothest transition out of academia.
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That was the one place I interviewed at. I got the job, started work,
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and then did the thesis on the side on the evenings and weekends.
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So that was an interesting time management problem. Yeah, I bet.
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All right, sponsor break. Lars, real quick, when was the last time you got a
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new set of drawings from an architect and they didn't cloud anything?
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Well, the one that cost me a couple hundred grand was back, I think, in 2017. So...
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Yeah. Lesson learned there. Yeah. So, you know, what I like about what Trunk
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Tools is building is they're looking at tools to help kind of remove the mundane from the job site.
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And, you know, I, same as you, every time there was a bulletin or an addendum,
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I would go
Load full transcript
back to designers and ask them to at least highlight or give me a
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cover letter on the changes.
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And that was always like pulling like teeth. But Trunk Tools is now automating
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that. So you get a bulletin come in, it automatically highlights the changes.
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You don't have to do a thing.
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Well, it's also hitting RFIs, right? It's also hitting submittals.
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And when we think about standardizing ops, right, and providing that,
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you know, sort of resource to those field operators, what I see it as, you know,
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it's sort of like this like mentor within the company that structure,
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standardizes, keeps it moving in the right direction, looks out for risk.
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And just this last week, you know, I had a QC manager just pass along the submittal to an owner.
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Without doing a review because he was too busy and it was wrong and and you
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know the classic owner statement is did you even review this right,
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so this to me is carte blanche we absolutely did and think about getting that
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first pass before your your,
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your your your field manager ever even actually has to do the first pass someone's
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doing it for him so to me it's about speed it increases accuracy and help standardize
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ops out in the field, right?
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Yeah. And this is the kind of AI that we've talked about on the podcast,
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really appreciating, right? Which is looking at ways to elevate the craftsman
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at the heart of project delivery.
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Give me time back so I can be out in the field managing risk, right? Yeah, 100%.
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So, all right. If you're a little curious, check it out, trunktools.com forward slash podcast.
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And if you mentioned construction conversations, you get a discount.
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Discount. Demos are free, and you guys get a discount, so let's go.
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So the title is Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir, right?
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Which also, like, we could have a whole podcast just about that title,
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because I think, you know, there's a lot of interest
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right now where you have all these different things that can be done with these
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models, but you don't always have maybe the organizational domain context needed
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to embed them effectively.
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And so the FDE in itself is a really interesting kind of growing job title.
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But so forward deployed engineer at Palantir and maybe what is the first thing
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as you start to dip your toes into construction?
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What kind of what kind of stupid questions are you asking to begin with?
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Yeah. So when I when I started with with Kavanaugh, I came in,
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you know, having never been on a construction job site.
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And so I kind of opened up to Joe and other people and said,
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you know, I'm going to ask a lot of questions that seem stupid,
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but they're also from an outside perspective.
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And so part of the value here is that I might challenge some assumptions that
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you have that have been had in your field for 40 years. I could be wrong 90%
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of the time, but if you walk me through it, we'll learn together and understand where those edges are.
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And so we kind of started in that vein of just sitting down and be saying like,
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okay, I think cost codes are dumb.
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And they were like, what do you mean cost codes are dumb? I'm like,
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I don't understand why somebody who's telling me that they're paving on a job
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and their job title is paver.
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Why do they also have to know this 12-digit number? That doesn't make sense to me.
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And so we kind of had this interaction where I'm like, okay,
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so the utility of a cost code is that you can map costs, but why does it have
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to be a computer-readable number?
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Okay, because all of this was designed in the 1980s to work with like Fortran,
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where it has a 12-character limit, and you've just kind of inherited that.
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It's kind of like that example of like, why are railroads the size they are?
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Well, it's because that's about the size of two Roman horses side by side.
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Follow the causality, you kind of end up with that locked in place.
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I mean, it's such an interesting example of the power of an outside perspective.
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I think, you know, whenever I'm hiring a new person, I really challenge them
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to ask a lot of questions and don't assume anything makes sense.
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And I think taking that approach with a bit of humility, like you did,
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yeah, can output some interesting conversations. So you start kind
of mapping
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and maybe before we kind of go into that whole endeavor.
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Sponsor break. If you spend any time running a project, you know,
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the answer is almost always sitting in the contract document somewhere.
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The catch is that it's almost never in one document. It's split across the contract,
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the specs, and some flow-down clause three layers deep that nobody connects
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until it's already cost money.
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That's the whole premise behind Document Crunch. That risk doesn't live inside
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any single document. It lives in the gaps between them.
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And most teams never look at all of them together until they're standing in a dispute.
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The average construction dispute in the U.S. now runs about $60 million.
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According to Arcadis. It's a lot of money.
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And the root cause they point to isn't fraud or bad intent. It's people not
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fully understanding what they agreed to.
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So Document Crunch builds a platform around closing that gap.
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Crunch AI reads the documents, surfaces the risks, and it cites the exact page and clause that's big.
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So you're not just taking its word for it. Project Assist lets your team act
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on it, ask questions across the entire project document set,
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hand draft your submitals, notices, and RFIs right from the chat window,
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and the whole thing runs on your own company standards.
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The office and the field are working off the same playbook for bid through closeout.
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No disconnects. It's live now across the U.S. and Canada. Go to documentcrunch.com
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forward slash construction conversations and book a demo.
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Like, let's maybe just talk about, like, what is Palantir and what is the foundry?
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Starting with Palantir, what is Palantir?
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Yeah, so Palantir is a company that's been around for about 25 years now.
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It was created in the wake of 9-11. There was a pretty bold statement by our
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founders that they thought the attacks would have been preventable because
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the data existed, but it existed in siloed systems that were siloed both by
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kind of technological limitations, but also because, you know,
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you have the CIA and the NSA, FBI, they have different allowances of who can see what.
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--> 00:09:46.583
So how do you kind of create a cohesive data model that brings that together
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while still respecting the privacy and, you know, the kind of access restrictions?
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From there, for the first kind of decade or so, our main customer was the US government.
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And then about 12, 15 years ago, I'm not exactly sure on the timeline,
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the realization was had that the same problems exist in the commercial space.
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So we got started with a few big companies, PG&E back in the day, BP.
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And really, it was a start of saying, how do you connect all of your
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different data sources, not in terms of making a dashboard, but in terms of
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making an operational layer that lets you make decisions based on that data
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and push those consequences out, either back to those systems or to the people who need to know.
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So it becomes a platform of action as opposed to just a data aggregation platform.
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So that's broadly speaking what Palantir is. I mean, we could talk about that
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and there have been people who talk about that for hours.
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But to get into what Foundry is, Foundry is our main commercial software offering.
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It's alternatively called AIP ever since LLMs came to the scene and we were
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kind of building agentic tools on top of that.
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I like to think of it as a collection of Lego blocks that are integrable by design.
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Anyone who's ever played with Legos knows that, you know, maybe this model is
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a spaceship, this one's a car, but you can mix and match them.
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Like by definition, any two Lego blocks can connect.
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And so by giving this powerful set of tools, as opposed to saying,
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like, here's how we're going to solve your problem, here's the tool that we're building for this
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abstract problem across your industry, it allows people the flexibility to build
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exactly what they need, as opposed to having to kind of conform themselves to
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what exists in the market, which has
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been very true in construction from the people I've talked to.
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So what I hear is kind of like modularized software with respect to data.
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And you haven't said ontology yet, which is impressive.
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I know, I know. I try to get to that point of the thing. That's one that people,
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I think, can bounce off of because it's a jargonistic term. But the ontology
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really is one of the secret sauces. I'd say the ontology and the forward deployed
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model are kind of two pieces that have become,
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adopted by other people as well other companies but the ontology,
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the simple way to put it is that it's the mapping of the
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business valuable concepts to the data with a system of action and accessibility
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access restrictions on top of that those are the three legs that i think of
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you can say the nouns verbs and and kind of access structure
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but what it is is a way of encoding not just data
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that can exist in a system but the tacit business knowledge that goes around
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that But in construction, you know,
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you can't just ask an estimator to say, well, tell me how you costed that.
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They're going to tell you, I've done it for 30 years. I know that's what it costs.
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I don't, I maybe don't even have like accessibility into my thought process necessarily.
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Maybe if I sat down for a while, I could tell you, but how do you capture that
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value and encode it into a system beyond where it would exist in a database?
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So it's a lot of different pieces there. And if you ask 10 different Palantirians,
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you'll get 10 slightly different answers on what the ontology is because it's
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a philosophy as opposed to like a tangible thing in some way i mean it.
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I feel like we've maybe we always needed the articulate clarity of an academic
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in our industry to like actually communicate some of these things in the way
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that we could consume them,
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that's helpful i think is it too large of a generalization to say that there's
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There's a couple of models in which,
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companies are approaching AI.
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It's there's a disaggregated set of data that we're kind of dropping a large language model into,
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and then the model you just described, which is like, hey, let's actually go
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in and do some mapping and understand the context and connections between these data sets.
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And then fit them into these modular pieces. It's an oversimplification and
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probably a terrible analogy, but like, are those opposing models?
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Yeah, I would say that there's the kind of naive approach, which is almost reminiscent
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of, you know, whenever a new technology comes out, people try to throw it against
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everything. You saw this with blockchain, where they're like,
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oh, you know, daycare on the blockchain, babysitting on the blockchain.
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You're like, why are you leveraging this tool?
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You actually saw the same thing with the steam engine back in the day with electricity.
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They're like, well, I don't know. Maybe if we just shock people,
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they'll lose fat or something.
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New technology applied broadly. So a lot of companies are like,
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okay, cool, LLMs are great. What if we just throw everything at clawing?
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It turns out that LLMs are not actually well-suited for that because they are
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generally trained. They're next token predictors.
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So the ontology, and this has been what we've been doing for the past couple
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of years, is you could think of it in a sense as retrieval augmented generation
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in that you're telling the LLM, hey, here's the version of reality you care
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about, and you have to return results that make sense with this.
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So people will say, oh, you're training the model. Technically speaking,
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you're not actually adjusting the weights.
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But what we've recently been doing, and Alex Karp has been talking about in
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CNBC and elsewhere, is leveraging open weight models to actually do the training,
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to say, hey, you're going to take an open weight model and you're going to make
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it your own by capturing all the pieces that are meaningful to you.
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And that's kind of that paired with the ontology becomes a very powerful way
00:14:51.464 --> 00:14:55.759
for you to maintain sovereignty over your underlying business process,
00:14:55.986 --> 00:15:00.104
your tradecraft that you've developed over 100 years in the construction industry
00:15:00.104 --> 00:15:01.953
and in any industry. Hmm.
00:15:02.861 --> 00:15:06.629
So what does a forward deployed engineer do within that?
00:15:07.162 --> 00:15:11.719
Yeah, so a forward deployed engineer, this concept kind of came out of our work with the U.S.
00:15:11.719 --> 00:15:15.379
Government, which was, as I understand it, because I wasn't at the company 25
00:15:15.379 --> 00:15:20.509
years ago, was a counter to the position of having software developers sit outside
00:15:20.509 --> 00:15:25.080
the problem,
get a list of specifications, and then try and design something to solve that.
00:15:25.405 --> 00:15:29.989
The problem with this is that any specification list is at best an imperfect
00:15:29.989 --> 00:15:31.702
map of the underlying territory.
00:15:31.836 --> 00:15:34.645
You're going to leave something out. It's going to be sanitized in some way.
00:15:34.930 --> 00:15:38.959
You're going to ignore some edge cases. And so by putting our engineers as close
00:15:38.959 --> 00:15:43.958
to the actual problem as we could, and this involves sending people to war zones back in the day,
00:15:44.539 --> 00:15:48.289
sending people out to the North Sea, me going out to Kavanaugh Construction
00:15:48.289 --> 00:15:52.716
every other week for three months in the winter of 25, I think it was,
00:15:53.227 --> 00:15:58.359
so that I can leverage not just my intellectual understanding and how I encode
00:15:58.359 --> 00:16:01.119
a problem into a map, but also just sit there and be like, oh,
00:16:01.119 --> 00:16:04.859
like I would have never realized these things about how this actually works
00:16:04.859 --> 00:16:06.602
if I wasn't there seeing them and living them.
00:16:06.811 --> 00:16:09.981
So that's what we do. We put our engineers as close to the problem as we can
00:16:10.149 --> 00:16:12.960
so they can own the outcomes for the client. Yeah.
00:16:13.602 --> 00:16:17.571
I mean, is that Kaizen, like the Japanese concept of like get close to the problem?
00:16:18.090 --> 00:16:22.485
Yeah, I think that makes nothing but sense. So like tactically,
00:16:23.122 --> 00:16:27.529
building an ontology, like day one at Kavanaugh, and we'll maybe talk more about
00:16:27.529 --> 00:16:31.169
what that implementation look like, but maybe walk me through the tools.
00:16:31.169 --> 00:16:36.719
Like in my head, that's like, it's a really complicated whiteboard. Are you using like Miro?
00:16:37.059 --> 00:16:40.709
Like maybe I'm just like oversimplifying everything, but walk me through how
00:16:40.709 --> 00:16:45.470
you start to map a hundred year old plus companies, you know, context.
00:16:46.137 --> 00:16:49.643
Yeah. So I would say day one, or it's almost kind of day zero,
00:16:49.858 --> 00:16:52.909
you start off with conversations to understand what the problem space is,
00:16:52.909 --> 00:16:54.647
you know, what matters to the customer.
00:16:54.931 --> 00:16:58.469
That's part of what I do in my day-to-day job is kind of sit down and say,
00:16:58.469 --> 00:17:01.471
hey, you know, I understand the toolset. You understand your problem space.
00:17:01.709 --> 00:17:03.044
Where is there some synergy there?
00:17:03.760 --> 00:17:07.104
And I think breaking it down into what are you trying to do,
00:17:07.353 --> 00:17:11.565
right? So construction, if you have to horrifically oversimplify it,
00:17:11.565 --> 00:17:14.010
and this is a quote I'm stealing from Joe Petra, actually.
00:17:14.902 --> 00:17:19.251
Put someone who's not sick in a truck that's not broken against a job that needs
00:17:19.251 --> 00:17:21.694
work. If you can do that, you're doing construction.
00:17:22.233 --> 00:17:26.081
And so once we boil it down to those pieces, you know, that's really the core
00:17:26.081 --> 00:17:27.356
concepts of the ontology.
00:17:27.583 --> 00:17:30.931
So you're going to have, you know, your materials, your equipment,
00:17:30.931 --> 00:17:34.581
your people, your contracts. In a hospital setting, it could be your patients,
00:17:34.581 --> 00:17:37.469
your doctors, your operating bays, your records.
00:17:38.311 --> 00:17:42.031
Understanding what those core pieces that you work with and how you interact
00:17:42.031 --> 00:17:45.230
with them is how you start to build the nouns and the verbs of the ontology.
00:17:45.561 --> 00:17:49.461
And then from there, you know, there's the piece of connecting to the data sources,
00:17:49.461 --> 00:17:50.936
which is a bit more technical.
00:17:51.238 --> 00:17:53.841
How do you make sure you're importing the right access restrictions?
00:17:53.841 --> 00:17:56.768
Very important in hospitals, obviously, with PII.
00:17:57.047 --> 00:18:00.981
Important in an HR context in construction. You don't want someone to be able
00:18:00.981 --> 00:18:03.038
to just say, hey, what's everybody make at the company?
00:18:03.722 --> 00:18:07.841
And then from there, once you have a starting ontology, and it's iterative,
00:18:07.841 --> 00:18:10.411
it's not like you connect all the data, then build all the ontology,
00:18:10.411 --> 00:18:13.752
then build the front end. It's really building the plane as you fly it.
00:18:14.211 --> 00:18:17.751
So you start from a point of like, okay, what's something that you can't do
00:18:17.751 --> 00:18:20.225
right now or that you're doing in an imperfect way?
00:18:20.358 --> 00:18:23.731
Let's build that out. And then from there, what's the next marginal piece,
00:18:23.731 --> 00:18:25.931
right? Because these businesses are integrated.
00:18:26.210 --> 00:18:31.511
They're not just kind of siloed. So when I approve an invoice, something happens.
00:18:31.511 --> 00:18:35.491
It maybe gets written to an ERP or it goes to the CFO for a further approval
00:18:35.491 --> 00:18:38.771
or it writes back to the project engineer to say, hey, this happened.
00:18:38.771 --> 00:18:41.562
It's changing your profit margin on that job.
00:18:41.852 --> 00:18:45.621
How do we start to map for every decision? What are all the consequences that
00:18:45.621 --> 00:18:49.143
can be pushed? What are all the necessary kind of outcomes of that?
00:18:49.486 --> 00:18:52.508
And how do we make all of that happen more rapidly and more clearly to people?
00:18:52.764 --> 00:18:56.641
Because in construction, it's really, I like to think of it as undoing the death
00:18:56.641 --> 00:18:59.480
by a thousand cuts that happens across a job site.
00:18:59.869 --> 00:19:03.660
You know, every five minute
delay, cause you had to pick up the phone is costly in some way.
00:19:03.885 --> 00:19:07.301
And it can be hard to identify what that is, but you know, that there's,
00:19:07.301 --> 00:19:10.411
there's fat to trim somewhere in the business. And this is what we've heard
00:19:10.411 --> 00:19:13.347
from everyone we've spoken to is like, I think this could be better.
00:19:13.527 --> 00:19:16.807
I just don't know exactly where to start making it better. Hmm.
00:19:17.736 --> 00:19:21.105
So, and maybe, I don't know if you can speak to this or not,
00:19:21.465 --> 00:19:26.745
but McCarthy and Palantir had a big announcement, and the word that I picked up there was pulse.
00:19:27.305 --> 00:19:30.925
And I think one of the questions that I had was, is that proprietary to McCarthy?
00:19:31.245 --> 00:19:34.645
Is that an offshoot of the Foundry? Can you speak to the difference between
00:19:34.645 --> 00:19:39.623
what McCarthy-Palantir partnership is working slash producing versus the Foundry?
00:19:40.235 --> 00:19:45.725
Yeah. So, Foundry is best thought of as a, you know, that's why it's named that.
00:19:45.725 --> 00:19:47.603
It's a Foundry. It's a place where you build.
00:19:47.934 --> 00:19:51.962
So what our customers build inside of Foundry is their own IP.
00:19:52.189 --> 00:19:55.730
It's based on their data. So they own what they build.
00:19:56.015 --> 00:19:58.695
Companies will oftentimes choose to name it something, right?
00:19:58.695 --> 00:20:01.875
So I believe Kavanaugh called theirs Tom after their founder,
00:20:01.875 --> 00:20:03.304
Total Operations Management.
00:20:03.670 --> 00:20:07.357
I believe Pulse is the name that McCarthy has chosen for kind of their platform.
00:20:07.601 --> 00:20:10.608
So effectively, it's a branding of what you're building yourself.
00:20:10.805 --> 00:20:15.095
Because at the end of the day, it's a marriage of our tools and your subject
00:20:15.095 --> 00:20:19.468
matter expertise and your business logic. and it creates something that you, so, yeah.
00:20:20.190 --> 00:20:21.881
That's helpful. So-
00:20:23.093 --> 00:20:28.313
As maybe Palantir has kind of started to get into construction and had some
00:20:28.313 --> 00:20:32.213
of these conversations and mapped some of these processes, I guess,
00:20:32.893 --> 00:20:35.633
what's the organizational view of construction?
00:20:35.633 --> 00:20:38.433
You know, I think there's like the McKinsey model, which is like,
00:20:38.590 --> 00:20:42.909
if we just all adopted tech 15 years ago, we'd all be much more productive,
00:20:43.327 --> 00:20:44.843
which is a bit maybe reductionist.
00:20:44.843 --> 00:20:49.693
But what is, has Palantir started to mine some different takeaways from these
00:20:49.693 --> 00:20:55.265
implementations to say like, wow, here is the true constraint of, of this industry?
00:20:55.842 --> 00:20:59.823
Yeah. So, I mean, I think the first thing to say is that the structure of Palantir
00:20:59.823
--> 00:21:03.365
is very kind of non-hierarchical in the sense that we do have a C-suite,
00:21:03.655 --> 00:21:06.573
but kind of within the company, it's more of an artist colony.
00:21:06.573 --> 00:21:10.903
So I have positions on what I think is valuable in construction are people who
00:21:10.903 --> 00:21:14.415
work in insurance. Maybe they don't have any thoughts on that, or maybe they do.
00:21:14.733 --> 00:21:20.773
But what I can speak to is that the takeaways that I've seen is that breaking it down by GC.
00:21:21.377 --> 00:21:24.093
Self-performing company, and engineering architecture company,
00:21:24.093 --> 00:21:27.893
some of the pieces I've seen is that for GCs, a big problem is that there's
00:21:27.893 --> 00:21:31.636
a black box at the center of their business operation, which is the subcontractor.
00:21:32.231 --> 00:21:35.823
Effectively, what a GC does is underwrites the risk of saying,
00:21:35.823 --> 00:21:37.380
hey, we're going to make this happen.
00:21:37.537 --> 00:21:40.427
You don't have to worry about the exact details. You don't have to go and find
00:21:40.555 --> 00:21:45.252
your electrician, your drywall person. We'll handle that. We'll project manage it.
00:21:45.711 --> 00:21:48.543
But then they have to go find those people and understanding,
00:21:48.543 --> 00:21:52.861
you know, one problem you can imagine is if a sub goes default, what's left to be done?
00:21:53.318 --> 00:21:56.773
How do you think about concentration risk of a given subcontractor,
00:21:56.773 --> 00:21:59.773
especially if you're across North America? Maybe your relationship with them
00:21:59.773 --> 00:22:02.351
in the Northeast is different than it is in Texas.
00:22:02.859 --> 00:22:06.623
So that kind of difficult problem that doesn't necessarily have a definitive
00:22:06.623 --> 00:22:10.609
answer because you're dealing with risk, that's one place we've seen a lot of value.
00:22:10.934 --> 00:22:14.140
The project management of just the communication of making it clear.
00:22:14.702 --> 00:22:19.174
Project managers in general, their job is to make things run because they're
00:22:19.174 --> 00:22:22.109
pulling from so many different places. So the more efficient you can make them,
00:22:22.335 --> 00:22:23.676
the more projects they can run.
00:22:23.978 --> 00:22:27.416
And then beyond that, you can start to extract information about how things have gone.
00:22:27.828 --> 00:22:31.774
In the self-performed space, the one that I think is most important is like
00:22:31.774 --> 00:22:34.506
closing that field operations gap.
00:22:34.860 --> 00:22:39.670
And over the last 20 years, as construction tech has gotten more and more capable,
00:22:40.059 --> 00:22:44.320
a lot of the burden of entering and capturing that data has landed on the people in the field.
00:22:44.753 --> 00:22:47.724
And so you have these situations where, you know, now half of a foreman's day
00:22:47.724 --> 00:22:52.244
is spent in a site
trailer, keying in invoices, keying in time cards,
00:22:52.244 --> 00:22:55.304
doing production tracking, and they're not out on the field making sure the
00:22:55.304 --> 00:22:58.704
job is actually running day to day, which is what they're trained and what they want to do.
00:22:58.976 --> 00:23:04.823
So how can we still get that data, which is valuable, without burdening the field to do so?
00:23:04.951 --> 00:23:09.444
A kind of trivial example of this that I like to think of is that any piece
00:23:09.444 --> 00:23:13.294
of data should be entered only once, and the only data you should be responsible
00:23:13.294 --> 00:23:15.537
for entering is the data that only you know.
00:23:15.728 --> 00:23:20.044
So when I pull up my time card, I shouldn't have to tell you what job I'm on.
00:23:20.044 --> 00:23:23.222
I showed up that day. Someone told me to be there. I didn't just wander in.
00:23:23.391 --> 00:23:28.124
So I should already know what job I'm on, who I am, what equipment's in my cache,
00:23:28.124 --> 00:23:32.124
all of that. The only piece I tell you is when I clocked out and when I clocked
00:23:32.124 --> 00:23:34.780
in, right? Because that's the net new piece for me.
00:23:34.885 --> 00:23:39.824
And it makes it seamless because I'm not going to make data entry errors because
00:23:39.824 --> 00:23:42.610
it's very easy and I'm owning the data that I'm creating. So that's,
00:23:42.865 --> 00:23:45.048
I think, one key piece in SPC that we've seen.
00:23:45.627 --> 00:23:49.774
I mean, I think you got at least a handful of cheers when you said that,
00:23:49.774 --> 00:23:50.564
because I think you're right.
00:23:50.564 --> 00:23:56.064
I mean, I think we have understood the power of data and I think at times not
00:23:56.064 --> 00:24:01.334
gone through the work to map the inputs of data well enough before we've set
00:24:01.334 --> 00:24:04.115
expectations around what should be recorded. Yeah.
00:24:05.222 --> 00:24:08.822
And I think, you know, because of what's happening with AI and some of these
00:24:08.822 --> 00:24:13.092
models being trained, you know, everyone's suddenly kind of rereading the data
00:24:13.092 --> 00:24:14.867
sharing clauses in their contracts.
00:24:15.273 --> 00:24:19.432
And I think that makes sense for all kinds of reasons. But I think at the same
00:24:19.432 --> 00:24:23.722
time, we overestimate the value of a lot of data.
00:24:24.242 --> 00:24:29.522
And I think a lot of data in these organizations hasn't yet been mapped.
00:24:29.942 --> 00:24:34.472
And I think when you look at means and methods as a key kind of component of
00:24:34.472 --> 00:24:38.222
competitive advantage, I've made the argument before, we've made the argument
00:24:38.222 --> 00:24:42.052
before on the show, that a lot of that still remains in people's heads, right?
00:24:42.052 --> 00:24:48.717
And so, like, true IP won't show up on a spreadsheet, is not really showing up in a data set.
00:24:48.996 --> 00:24:56.622
How do you handle and manage, as you go through and create this ontology, the missing IP? Right.
00:24:57.127 --> 00:25:01.254
Yeah. I mean, I think to your point, one comment I wanted to make is that you're
00:25:01.254 --> 00:25:04.807
exactly right that a lot of what's being tracked is never used.
00:25:05.844 --> 00:25:08.034
I remember making this argument to Kavanaugh. It's like, well,
00:25:08.034 --> 00:25:11.469
you're not tracking what color socks your foremen are wearing because you know it doesn't matter.
00:25:11.626 --> 00:25:14.406
You're probably tracking a bunch of stuff that you're also not using.
00:25:14.621 --> 00:25:19.064
Like there's this dream that if we have data tracking so good that the estimators
00:25:19.064 --> 00:25:23.461
can now kind of run like, you know, a postmortem and get better the next time.
00:25:23.728 --> 00:25:26.944
But statistically, the problem here is that unless you're like in the data center,
00:25:26.944 --> 00:25:30.164
space where you might do the same project or very similar projects over and
00:25:30.164 --> 00:25:34.993
over again, unless I'm paving the same road in the same conditions 10 times,
00:25:35.237 --> 00:25:37.509
I don't really have enough kind of
00:25:37.869 --> 00:25:40.744
statistical power to really fine tune that.
00:25:41.304 --> 00:25:45.324
I'm really reliant on that IP in my estimators heads, in my schedulers heads
00:25:45.324 --> 00:25:50.731
to know, yeah, I have a feel for this. I remember 10 years ago when we paved that road, it has a clay.
00:25:52.844 --> 00:25:55.634
Substrate that makes it harder to dig or something like that these little pieces
00:25:55.634 --> 00:25:59.570
of information and so to answer your question of how we encode that,
00:26:00.223 --> 00:26:04.824
part of it is that as you make decisions in foundry that becomes a source of
00:26:04.824 --> 00:26:06.899
data you can do this in a few ways you can
00:26:07.154 --> 00:26:09.924
do it very easily it's just like an audit log of like this person did this at
00:26:09.924 --> 00:26:12.193
this time you could ask for an explanation
00:26:12.448 --> 00:26:16.094
you can start to have ai models suggest answers and then if you disagree with
00:26:16.094 --> 00:26:20.674
it say hey i this is why i disagree that becomes part of how the model is suggesting
00:26:20.674 --> 00:26:23.716
it for you so that's one way that you can start to encode those pieces.
00:26:24.199 --> 00:26:27.554
So you can do it bit by bit. You can try to start it from, you know,
00:26:27.554 --> 00:26:30.634
from the very beginning of saying, hey, just speak to me for an hour.
00:26:30.861 --> 00:26:35.704
I'll record you. I'll pump that into Foundry, use AI FTE to try and encode it
00:26:35.704 --> 00:26:37.577
as a set of rules. And then you work with me.
00:26:38.244 --> 00:26:42.834
But really what it is, is like, how can how can we give you the best tools that
00:26:42.834 --> 00:26:46.444
let you that can
work on the parts of the problem that a human being is like
00:26:46.444 --> 00:26:48.063
slower, inefficient as at
00:26:48.376 --> 00:26:51.874
and leave you with the ability to focus on those pieces that you are better
00:26:51.874 --> 00:26:56.387
than any AI in the world that dealing with because of your experience in that field. Hmm.
00:26:57.487 --> 00:26:58.567
Yeah, that makes sense.
00:27:00.844 --> 00:27:05.354
And McCarthy maybe destroys the thesis of the question I'm about to ask a little
00:27:05.354 --> 00:27:06.918
bit, or the McCarthy partnership, but,
00:27:07.493 --> 00:27:12.894
I can imagine it's a little bit more data rich working with a fully vertically
00:27:12.894 --> 00:27:16.324
integrated contractor, right? there's just a lot more parameters.
00:27:16.824 --> 00:27:19.921
There's a lot more variables you can seemingly control.
00:27:22.137 --> 00:27:27.554
Is that a factor as Palantir evaluates opportunities and kind of thinks through
00:27:27.554 --> 00:27:30.814
the model of how they integrate with or interact with the market?
00:27:31.486 --> 00:27:35.264
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, as powerful as we are and as good as our
00:27:35.264 --> 00:27:38.017
software and forward to put engineers are, we're not actually magicians.
00:27:38.284 --> 00:27:41.744
So if you don't have the data, there's not much we can do with that.
00:27:41.744 --> 00:27:44.216
But we can be very creative in how you get that data.
00:27:44.506 --> 00:27:50.164
An illustrative example would be cost allocation, right? So you can be creative in this.
00:27:50.624 --> 00:27:55.094
If I am doing two tasks today, right? Like I am, you know, breaking the side
00:27:55.094 --> 00:27:59.125
of a road and I'm also picking up trash on the side of the road.
00:27:59.696 --> 00:28:05.664
And we kind of know, roughly speaking, how much time it should take to do a
00:28:05.664 --> 00:28:09.557
unit of work there. We kind of have a sense of that from historical estimates.
00:28:10.027 --> 00:28:14.204
I can say, okay, cool. I look at the production I logged. I did four units of
00:28:14.204 --> 00:28:16.668
trash and four units of raking.
00:28:16.796 --> 00:28:21.474
Well, I know that the ratio is like two to one, so I could infer that my labor
00:28:21.474 --> 00:28:25.528
costs for that day should be split in that way across those two line items.
00:28:25.690 --> 00:28:27.565
Again, kind of a specific example.
00:28:28.378 --> 00:28:32.189
There's so many pieces like this where you can back into the data you wish you
00:28:32.189 --> 00:28:36.975
had without making someone put it in by hand because you already have enough of those pieces.
00:28:37.341 --> 00:28:41.090
But yes, in general, if the data doesn't exist, it could be hard to work with.
00:28:41.398 --> 00:28:45.479
But, you know, we've done very interesting data collection and data aggregation
00:28:45.479 --> 00:28:49.127
exercises in the past, all the way down to like sticky notes on the side of someone's desk.
00:28:51.019 --> 00:28:58.049
So what was, did you have kind of a presupposed model of construction that has now been challenged?
00:28:59.689 --> 00:29:04.307
For context, you know, I was a business econ major coming out of school and,
00:29:04.876 --> 00:29:06.529
kind of ended up in construction.
00:29:06.989 --> 00:29:12.358
And my first project as a project engineer, entry-level kind of management position on site,
00:29:12.863 --> 00:29:18.880
it really destroyed the little I knew about the industry in that the folks building,
00:29:19.333 --> 00:29:22.209
were much smarter than I ever thought, more innovative.
00:29:23.409 --> 00:29:26.299
And just really good at problem solving.
00:29:26.299 --> 00:29:29.892
And I think at times the narrative outside looking into construction is,
00:29:30.391 --> 00:29:33.474
you know, it's a bunch of knuckle draggers who don't really know how to do much.
00:29:34.294 --> 00:29:39.393
Obviously, that's not your opinion, but as you came into interacting with the
00:29:39.393 --> 00:29:44.041
industry, what were some of your pre-suppositions that maybe got challenged?
00:29:44.558 --> 00:29:48.913
Yeah, I think, you know, from the outside, I kind of had this vision that it
00:29:48.913 --> 00:29:53.783
was much more orderly, like a colony of ants being kind of centrally commanded
00:29:53.783 --> 00:29:56.343
and they do the task and it was clear to them how to do the task.
00:29:56.683 --> 00:30:00.799
They do it on time and, you know, they report back that it had been done.
00:30:01.084 --> 00:30:05.303
What I didn't, I guess, know kind of from the outside is the amount of like
00:30:05.303 --> 00:30:08.593
rich contacts that people in the job site have. Like they're really handed kind
00:30:08.593 --> 00:30:12.593
of an undifferentiated problem and told, hey, you're close to it.
00:30:12.593 --> 00:30:15.507
Figure it out. It's kind of similar, actually, to the way that Palantir works.
00:30:15.734 --> 00:30:18.313
Nobody tells me exactly how to solve it. They're just kind of like,
00:30:18.313 --> 00:30:20.993
hey, go figure out how to make this project work.
00:30:21.336 --> 00:30:26.053
And so, you know, the subsidiarism of it in the sense that every problem is
00:30:26.053 --> 00:30:29.313
like solved at the lowest level that can be solved. There's a lot of that.
00:30:29.313 --> 00:30:33.093
Like there's a lot of trust and, you know, they make it work,
00:30:33.093 --> 00:30:35.323
right? You break the system a lot of the times.
00:30:35.963 --> 00:30:39.393
I know this kind of example of, I'm going to get the term wrong,
00:30:39.393 --> 00:30:43.103
but it's when you do a strike where you actually just adhere to the rules exactly.
00:30:43.451 --> 00:30:46.893
And that like destroys your ability to be efficient on job sites.
00:30:47.131 --> 00:30:50.283
I can't remember the exact term for that, but like that was one of the things
00:30:50.283 --> 00:30:53.616
that
surprised me was just how much tacit knowledge everyone had in the field.
00:30:54.398 --> 00:30:59.163
And yeah, they're very capable people. like it's not the same to be non-technical
00:30:59.163 --> 00:31:02.343
as non-intelligent and i knew that going in but i think it's worth stating that
00:31:02.343 --> 00:31:07.857
people do sometimes have that assumption yeah no i think i think it's interesting because it's,
00:31:08.455 --> 00:31:13.153
it's it's like it's muscle memory like not not codified memory i don't know
00:31:13.153 --> 00:31:16.183
if that's that's the the analogy but yeah i understand what you're saying
00:31:16.503 --> 00:31:20.433
and it is interesting to see it in action which is kind of it's like organized
00:31:20.433 --> 00:31:24.313
chaos like how is this actually working And, you know, sometimes it doesn't at all.
00:31:24.403 --> 00:31:26.713
And obviously when you look for, from the outside of the end,
00:31:26.713 --> 00:31:30.373
like from a metric standpoint, from a mental health standpoint,
00:31:30.373 --> 00:31:31.684
a lot of ways it's not working.
00:31:32.805 --> 00:31:39.761
And I think we're at this edge of this new frontier, whether it's AI and its applications.
00:31:39.761 --> 00:31:43.283
But what I appreciate about the Palantir model
00:31:43.678 --> 00:31:48.751
is that you're getting really close to the problem with the minds who can potentially
00:31:48.751 --> 00:31:54.835
pair those problems with technology that can kind of modularize around
00:31:55.270 --> 00:31:57.381
the operation and drive some efficiency.
00:31:57.381 --> 00:32:02.901
So maybe digging into the Kavanaugh story, I think it would be interesting to
00:32:02.901 --> 00:32:07.305
understand this is an established business in Ontario. In Ontario?
00:32:07.613 --> 00:32:08.617
Yeah. Did I get that right? Okay.
00:32:09.175 --> 00:32:12.774
And heavy civil contractor, vertically integrated.
00:32:13.699 --> 00:32:15.852
I mean, it's probably a whole separate conversation to understand like,
00:32:16.247 --> 00:32:21.521
hey, that's a really forward thinking kind of C-suite to understand the value
00:32:21.521 --> 00:32:23.051
of a partnership with Valenteer.
00:32:23.544 --> 00:32:27.851
But that aside, what was the implementation path?
00:32:28.271 --> 00:32:32.061
Obviously, you're building out this ontology. Is that a 30-day effort?
00:32:32.061 --> 00:32:34.793
Is that a six-month effort? And then talking through.
00:32:36.851 --> 00:32:42.891
Change management 101, how do you go from changing behavior over time as you
00:32:42.891 --> 00:32:44.432
kind of roll out the foundry?
00:32:45.182 --> 00:32:50.671
Yeah. So I think that the path to engagement was we did like an initial engagement, came on site.
00:32:50.671 --> 00:32:54.941
I was there for a couple of days, identified a bit of data, started to solve
00:32:54.941 --> 00:32:57.451
a problem. And we started fairly simple. It was kind of a question of like,
00:32:57.451 --> 00:33:01.801
hey, our dispatch and our maintenance teams, there's some friction there.
00:33:01.801 --> 00:33:03.395
How can we help alleviate that?
00:33:04.105 --> 00:33:08.951
That then got us onto the path of doing a bit more of an engagement focused
00:33:08.951 --> 00:33:13.138
on things like how do you do closer to real-time job costing?
00:33:13.631 --> 00:33:17.471
And then from there, we moved into kind of a larger process of like,
00:33:17.471 --> 00:33:20.137
okay, cool. We all agree that there's some power here.
00:33:20.688 --> 00:33:24.621
Let's think about what it would look like to do everything inside of Foundry
00:33:24.621 --> 00:33:28.316
and chart a path towards that. It's like the North Star and we're charting a course.
00:33:30.096 --> 00:33:34.621
So you're building ontology in stages. You start from the data that you have.
00:33:34.737 --> 00:33:38.380
And then in the case of a company like Kavanaugh, they moved to starting to
00:33:38.380 --> 00:33:42.350
create that data inside a foundry. So there were multiple iterations.
00:33:42.730 --> 00:33:45.550
We threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall early on to try and figure out what
00:33:45.550 --> 00:33:49.440
the right way. There's an art to creating an ontology because it has to operate
00:33:49.440 --> 00:33:51.255
the way people think about the things.
00:33:51.453 --> 00:33:55.850
But there's also edge cases where you want to start to change how people work with the tools.
00:33:55.850 --> 00:33:59.900
Like, for example, if people are used to thinking about, you know trucks and
00:33:59.900 --> 00:34:01.440
equipment in the same way because
00:34:01.440 --> 00:34:04.207
they they all move you're like well actually trucks have a different
00:34:04.625 --> 00:34:07.920
property than equipment they they are carrying something or something like that
00:34:07.920 --> 00:34:10.076
so you have to kind of get into the the pieces there
00:34:10.419 --> 00:34:13.650
and so it was there were waves of iteration and we in building the ontology
00:34:13.650 --> 00:34:18.640
we laid the groundwork over the first 30 30 days extended that over 90 these
00:34:18.640 --> 00:34:20.070
are all kind of rough timelines,
00:34:21.052 --> 00:34:24.280
and then as we built out the use cases there was feedback from them saying hey
00:34:24.280 --> 00:34:27.750
like this is pretty cool it addresses this problem, but it needs to work this
00:34:27.750 --> 00:34:28.807
way. So there was rework.
00:34:29.069 --> 00:34:33.620
And that's, I think, part of the reason why it can be hard to understand how
00:34:33.620 --> 00:34:36.800
Palantir works from the outside in, especially if you're used to dealing with
00:34:36.800 --> 00:34:39.500
software providers that say, here's exactly what I'm going to do.
00:34:39.500 --> 00:34:43.131
Here's the milestone date. It'll work like this. Here's the UAT testing.
00:34:43.619 --> 00:34:47.220
We're trying to revolutionize construction, and that's going to
break some things.
00:34:47.220 --> 00:34:49.858
And it's going to be a little bit chaotic as we do it.
00:34:50.067 --> 00:34:54.083
And to their credit, they were very amenable to giving us that space to do that.
00:34:55.072 --> 00:34:58.598
And then I think what was the second part of your question? I mean,
00:34:58.598 --> 00:35:03.698
I asked like 15 questions in that one. So you did very well to even kind of piece out what you did.
00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:10.771
I think maybe just stopping there, like 90 days in, is part of the kind of map.
00:35:11.543 --> 00:35:16.178
Like understanding the existing tech stack and not to scare all the construction
00:35:16.178 --> 00:35:19.636
tech providers out there, but like, okay, this is what now goes away?
00:35:20.342 --> 00:35:24.528
Yeah, so I would say that in general, we don't necessarily approach from a,
00:35:24.528 --> 00:35:25.947
hey, we're going to rip and replace.
00:35:26.417 --> 00:35:30.208
Kavanaugh had that mentality as we got in of saying, hey, we'd like to just
00:35:30.208 --> 00:35:31.270
get this all in one system.
00:35:31.549 --> 00:35:37.035
But our design for Foundry is to be very interconnected. It can integrate with whatever you have.
00:35:37.366 --> 00:35:40.488
If you have a piece of software you like, we're not going to cause unnecessary
00:35:40.488 --> 00:35:43.858
change management by saying, hey, get rid of that thing that's working well, right?
00:35:43.858 --> 00:35:47.518
We'll integrate with it both bi-directional so we can write back to it.
00:35:47.518 --> 00:35:50.778
So if you're doing something with that outside of Foundry, you can still get
00:35:50.778 --> 00:35:52.521
benefits from being connected to Foundry.
00:35:52.887 --> 00:35:55.608
And then if you choose at some time to start to deprecate it because it doesn't
00:35:55.608 --> 00:35:58.373
have the features you want or you want to go a different direction,
00:35:58.704 --> 00:36:01.478
that's very easy to pull something out or to bring something in, right?
00:36:01.478 --> 00:36:04.817
You know, as these new tools come in for in construction tech,
00:36:05.037 --> 00:36:08.838
you know, we're not positioned that we want to get rid of everything.
00:36:08.838 --> 00:36:10.291
If it works, we're happy to work with it.
00:36:10.673 --> 00:36:13.258
And I think the change management piece was the one that you mentioned,
00:36:13.258 --> 00:36:14.574
which I think is very interesting.
00:36:15.026 --> 00:36:19.888
So when I first went to Kavanaugh and we started the year-long engagement,
00:36:19.888 --> 00:36:24.008
I made Joe two promises. The first one is that we are going to be subtractive before we're additive.
00:36:24.292 --> 00:36:27.488
We're going to make people's lives easier before we ever ask them to do a new
00:36:27.488 --> 00:36:30.288
thing because we have to earn the right, to earn the trust to say,
00:36:30.288 --> 00:36:33.608
hey, we're on your side. We're not just trying to make
your lives more complicated.
00:36:33.608 --> 00:36:37.730
It's not a top-down approach. We're here in the field with you making your lives better.
00:36:37.980 --> 00:36:41.658
And the second promise I made is that nothing we build for the field is going
00:36:41.658 --> 00:36:44.288
to make a guy in that field throw his phone across that field.
00:36:44.288 --> 00:36:47.240
It has to work. And so that was the way that we approached it.
00:36:47.482 --> 00:36:51.005
The change management piece was led largely by Kavanaugh's team.
00:36:51.678 --> 00:36:55.000
I think they onboarded like 800 people over a two-week period.
00:36:55.219 --> 00:36:59.893
It was very coordinated. They actually ran the trainings inside of Foundry and
00:36:59.893 --> 00:37:05.103
built kind of like almost like a ticketing system and like an Asana-type workflow
00:37:05.103 --> 00:37:06.783
to track things inside of Foundry.
00:37:06.783 --> 00:37:09.823
So, you know, we say, hey, this person's going to be trained this day.
00:37:09.823 --> 00:37:13.138
They get a notification on their phone that they had to show up at that time.
00:37:13.746 --> 00:37:15.487
And they approached it really well. I've seen like, hey, like,
00:37:15.696 --> 00:37:20.143
you know, another piece that we did, I think that helped a lot is that we identified
00:37:20.427 --> 00:37:23.556
people across the org who would be amenable to piloting with us.
00:37:24.051 --> 00:37:27.743
Kavanaugh was very non-precious about it. They said, we don't care if you don't
00:37:27.743 --> 00:37:30.973
have a CS degree. We don't care if you're a truck driver, a foreman.
00:37:31.124 --> 00:37:34.503
If you think you have value that you can provide in the back office by helping
00:37:34.503 --> 00:37:37.208
us build these things, come on and try it out.
00:37:37.579 --> 00:37:40.953
Open Casting Call. And so we're able to find people, find a foreman,
00:37:40.953 --> 00:37:45.543
find a truck driver, find an estimator who were able to say, hey, I have an idea.
00:37:45.543 --> 00:37:49.143
I want to make work. I see some brokenness in the system and then they were
00:37:49.143 --> 00:37:52.733
very good conduits because they can go to their guys and say hey look i'm i'm
00:37:52.733 --> 00:37:56.303
not an external i've been in your shoes i am in your shoes this actually is
00:37:56.303 --> 00:37:57.554
i'm here to help you you know.
00:37:58.517 --> 00:38:03.153
It's a really interesting approach to change management. I think it's so often
00:38:03.593 --> 00:38:05.053
underestimated as a variable.
00:38:05.813 --> 00:38:10.693
And, you know, I had enough experience in my career around software and process
00:38:10.693 --> 00:38:14.636
change where I tried to get really good at it because it was the thing that,
00:38:15.059 --> 00:38:18.972
you know, was kind of a deterministic in terms of whether or not something was going to be successful.
00:38:19.326 --> 00:38:23.588
Cool. So, I mean, outside of that, I
think just that open casting call to say,
00:38:24.486 --> 00:38:29.972
hey, if you want to be a problem solver, come kind of join this kind of endeavor. I like that approach.
00:38:30.682 --> 00:38:37.273
So if you were to look at what Kavanaugh is doing now versus what it was doing,
00:38:37.613 --> 00:38:41.503
is the main change, you know, you kind of started with like,
00:38:41.503 --> 00:38:44.310
hey, we need to build this unified language.
00:38:44.740 --> 00:38:52.923
And we want to ideally have only data inputs come from someone and the data
00:38:52.923 --> 00:38:55.976
be associated to that person's kind of specific expertise.
00:38:56.784 --> 00:39:01.653
What did success look like after? And obviously there's been some case studies,
00:39:01.653 --> 00:39:02.832
you've written some articles.
00:39:03.633 --> 00:39:07.783
What would Kavanaugh point to? Like, hey, this was the thing that did it for
00:39:07.783 --> 00:39:12.053
us. And did that align up to how success was defined beforehand? Yeah.
00:39:12.803 --> 00:39:16.091
Yeah, I mean, I would say that part of our model is that, you know,
00:39:16.091 --> 00:39:20.251
Palantir, we do sell services, the FDE model to get things running,
00:39:20.251 --> 00:39:23.750
but at our core, we're not a services company, we're a software company.
00:39:24.081 --> 00:39:27.521
And so I think Kavanaugh is a great example of, you know, we worked at full
00:39:27.521 --> 00:39:31.301
tilt for a year, and then we're able to hand it off, like we taught a man to
00:39:31.301 --> 00:39:35.045
fish, and now they're out there fishing, and they're helping other people fish with Kavtera.
00:39:35.446 --> 00:39:38.651
We don't want people to be dependent on us. It's not a black box.
00:39:38.651 --> 00:39:41.368
We really do want to share the ability to build in Foundry.
00:39:41.763 --> 00:39:46.311
And so I think that the journey, there were lots of twists and turns along the
00:39:46.311 --> 00:39:50.170
way of where we thought things would be valuable, pivoting our effort.
00:39:50.709 --> 00:39:56.051
And I think that the early wins in helping them get off a piece of dispatch
00:39:56.051 --> 00:40:00.291
software, making that more agentic, that was one thing that landed well.
00:40:00.738 --> 00:40:05.271
The time card app, that was a very fun process of building. I've never coded
00:40:05.271 --> 00:40:09.331
in React before, but we had one of their developers and on our side coded a
00:40:09.331 --> 00:40:13.791
React app, got it into the Apple iStore. So that was a new thing for me.
00:40:14.145 --> 00:40:17.665
And then getting that out into people's hands, I think that was a really big win for them.
00:40:17.810 --> 00:40:21.631
I think they would probably say, and Joe can comment on this at some point or
00:40:21.631 --> 00:40:25.811
Kavanaugh can, was that getting it out to like 97% of their workforce was a
00:40:25.811 --> 00:40:29.211
really big win there to kind of show that construction
can do it too.
00:40:30.031 --> 00:40:34.571
They can adopt tech if it's done the right way and it's value aligned in making
00:40:34.871 --> 00:40:37.872
their lives better and safer. I think that's the other thing to say is that
00:40:38.133 --> 00:40:42.105
it's not a zero-sum game of just making more profit and hitting the bottom line.
00:40:42.447 --> 00:40:44.902
Especially, I would say, in construction and physical fields,
00:40:45.139 --> 00:40:48.321
you want everyone to come home with all of their fingers, all of their toes
00:40:48.321 --> 00:40:50.196
not injured. You want them to be happier.
00:40:50.382 --> 00:40:53.701
And that's like an intangible ROI that goes into that. I'm sure it has knock-on
00:40:53.701 --> 00:40:56.106
effects. People stay at the job longer. They do better work.
00:40:56.349 --> 00:40:59.740
But, you know, there's a humanistic element to this that's not just,
00:40:59.879 --> 00:41:03.066
hey, how do we efficientize every process in the world?
00:41:03.799 --> 00:41:06.314
Yeah, we care about that here at Palance here, definitely.
00:41:07.180 --> 00:41:12.255
Who is Palantir's competitor? Everyone? Yeah. So my example for this is that
00:41:12.255 --> 00:41:16.425
like, who's the competitor of like a superstore? Like that's a Canadian store,
00:41:16.425 --> 00:41:18.944
like a Safeway or Sobeys or again, Canadian.
00:41:19.805 --> 00:41:23.925
We got Safeway. There we go. Is a butcher a competitor? Yeah.
00:41:23.925 --> 00:41:28.069
In the sense that they both sell meat. Is a cheesemonger? Yeah. A baker is a competitor.
00:41:28.785 --> 00:41:31.425
There's people who compete with different parts of our tech stack.
00:41:31.425 --> 00:41:35.696
Like Databricks is a partner of ours. We have an agreement with them on how we operate.
00:41:35.923 --> 00:41:38.570
They do certain things really well. We do certain things really well.
00:41:39.375 --> 00:41:43.822
So you could say that like inside of the Lego block ecosystem of Palantir,
00:41:43.967 --> 00:41:45.773
there's people competing on different pieces.
00:41:45.940 --> 00:41:49.965
I don't think that there's a company out there that is really a full competitor
00:41:49.965 --> 00:41:53.455
of everything that we do. You could maybe say something like Microsoft Fabric,
00:41:53.455 --> 00:41:55.647
though I don't know if I'd agree with that.
00:41:55.960 --> 00:42:00.065
But yeah, and the way we respond to this is by being integrable.
00:42:00.065 --> 00:42:02.645
If you have Databricks, you don't have to get rid of that to work with us.
00:42:02.645 --> 00:42:06.037
If you have something else, some other tool, some point solution,
00:42:06.322 --> 00:42:10.435
Viewpoint Vista, to name a few, bid to win, heavy job, whatever.
00:42:10.435 --> 00:42:14.732
We'll work with anyone because we're oriented at making the end customer's life better.
00:42:15.951 --> 00:42:20.204
So what maybe, you know, a big kind of segment of the audience that listens
00:42:20.204 --> 00:42:24.154
to the show is, you know, front lines, field ops folks, right?
00:42:24.154 --> 00:42:26.084
PMs, supers, project executives.
00:42:26.864 --> 00:42:30.284
And I think they're kind of stuck between this kind of rock and hard place,
00:42:30.284 --> 00:42:34.694
which is they're using ChatGPT, Claude in their day-to-day.
00:42:35.147 --> 00:42:38.914
There's some maybe light experimenting happening at project level.
00:42:39.390 --> 00:42:44.034
And a lot of organizations i mean some are making meaningful progress but a
00:42:44.034 --> 00:42:48.719
lot are kind of stuck in this like strategic analysis of like what is our,
00:42:49.230 --> 00:42:52.574
what is our cyber security policy around the use of chat gpt even though like
00:42:52.574 --> 00:42:56.674
everyone's using it on their you know personal phones so you know what would
00:42:56.674 --> 00:42:59.133
your message be to them of,
00:42:59.893 --> 00:43:05.269
understanding what's out there in terms of of just personally available frontier models.
00:43:05.675 --> 00:43:12.371
And, you know, obviously Palantir is kind of acting and operating at an enterprise layer.
00:43:12.813 --> 00:43:16.542
A lot of construction tech is kind of selling to the project level.
00:43:17.466 --> 00:43:21.354
Are there plans to kind of bridge that divide and go straight to projects?
00:43:21.354 --> 00:43:22.174
What are your thoughts there?
00:43:22.863 --> 00:43:27.474
So, I mean, the way we kind of enter into every customer is a bit different.
00:43:27.474 --> 00:43:30.164
Like there are certain places where we start at the project management level.
00:43:30.758 --> 00:43:34.125
For large organizations, we might be at a business unit level to start.
00:43:34.560 --> 00:43:38.934
Of course, the general positioning is that the deeper and more mature an ontology
00:43:38.934 --> 00:43:42.551
is across an org, the more value you can get from it because it's more connected.
00:43:43.284 --> 00:43:47.304
But you can build whatever you want on Foundry.
00:43:47.304 --> 00:43:51.494
The way I like to say it is if you have the data and you can describe a process,
00:43:51.494 --> 00:43:54.144
we can find a way to build it in Foundry for you. And of course,
00:43:54.524 --> 00:43:58.304
there's some interesting edge compute issues that people run up against as you
00:43:58.304 --> 00:44:00.490
start to get into the frontier.
00:44:00.705 --> 00:44:03.033
But for a lot of stuff in construction, it's pretty simple.
00:44:03.497 --> 00:44:06.226
It's simple problems that are hard to solve, if that makes sense.
00:44:07.091 --> 00:44:11.166
So I'd say for the project managers, the people who are like in the field and
00:44:11.166 --> 00:44:14.636
kind of managing the field, it's, you know, what if you just didn't really have
00:44:14.636 --> 00:44:17.876
to pick up the phone to email someone to ask them if they've seen the thing
00:44:17.876 --> 00:44:18.676
that they should have seen?
00:44:18.676 --> 00:44:24.066
Like the information flow, if you could undo that death by a thousand cuts,
00:44:24.066 --> 00:44:25.515
how much more efficient could you be?
00:44:25.771 --> 00:44:28.985
If you could leverage your insights from one project more easily to the next,
00:44:29.345 --> 00:44:30.477
would that make your life better?
00:44:30.773 --> 00:44:35.417
What's the shittiest part of your day and how can I make it go away is what I would say to them.
00:44:36.386 --> 00:44:42.486
Yeah, I like that. I mean, you know, Jack Dorsey, Square and Block and former
00:44:42.486 --> 00:44:48.006
Twitter founder, he wrote an article that was like the, it was the hierarchy
00:44:48.006 --> 00:44:49.368
of intelligence. Here it is.
00:44:49.673 --> 00:44:54.218
And, you know, he kind of made this point that in this age of AI that we are,
00:44:55.646 --> 00:45:01.306
our modern kind of management hierarchies and structures were built so that
00:45:01.306 --> 00:45:05.106
information could flow down and it goes all the way back to Roman times and
00:45:05.106 --> 00:45:07.658
the different... kind of organization of soldiers, right?
00:45:08.245 --> 00:45:15.106
And we are in this age where that kind of management structure is no longer
00:45:15.106 --> 00:45:17.491
required to pass information between people.
00:45:18.014 --> 00:45:22.440
And so how do we rethink what an structure looks like?
00:45:22.568 --> 00:45:27.026
And so he just kind of makes the point of how he's building block and how he's
00:45:27.026 --> 00:45:31.678
using AI to kind of be that thing that transfers information between people.
00:45:32.506 --> 00:45:36.426
And I think it's an interesting thought experiment to do at a project level
00:45:36.426 --> 00:45:41.496
of you have a supri of a pm px you have foreman you have all these different
00:45:41.496 --> 00:45:46.640
roles and if you could eliminate the friction between information flow what,
00:45:47.526 --> 00:45:52.526
what does that do for how how we organize our teams and and our processes and
00:45:52.526 --> 00:45:57.216
our workflows yeah i think there's there's a lot there what is what's the coolest
00:45:57.216 --> 00:46:01.123
thing you're doing with ai personally let's see me personally i'm.
00:46:02.332 --> 00:46:06.772
I think, you know, over time, I've built up like conversations in chat GPT that
00:46:06.772 --> 00:46:09.663
are kind of like interface with each other to say, you know,
00:46:10.070 --> 00:46:12.942
I mean, one thing I'm doing is I'm working on like an exercise program and I'm
00:46:12.942 --> 00:46:15.422
trying to make it optimal and kind of asking things like, hey,
00:46:15.422 --> 00:46:17.392
should I tweak, you know, the volume on this day?
00:46:17.392 --> 00:46:21.632
And so I think it's one of the coolest things is that you can build in like
00:46:21.632 --> 00:46:24.861
an understanding of who you are and you can kind of use it as like.
00:46:25.535 --> 00:46:29.282
You know,
you can kind of almost use it as like a store of brainpower to handle
00:46:29.282 --> 00:46:29.980
things that you don't have.
00:46:30.380 --> 00:46:33.092
There's lots of people who are going deeper than I have. Like I have not had
00:46:33.092 --> 00:46:36.382
time to figure out how open claw works and stuff like that. But I think there's
00:46:36.382 --> 00:46:37.676
some really cool stuff there.
00:46:38.592 --> 00:46:40.433
I think it's, it's kind of like, I'm trying to use it to get,
00:46:40.798 --> 00:46:44.742
to do the stupid parts of tasks that I don't like to free me up to do more of
00:46:44.742 --> 00:46:47.375
the stuff I actually like. It's just a general heuristic.
00:46:47.971 --> 00:46:49.550
That is a, that's a good rule of thumb.
00:46:50.148 --> 00:46:54.182
What, I know we kind of talked enterprise versus projects, but I think there's
00:46:54.182 --> 00:46:58.712
also, So, you know, there's probably midsize contractors, executives within
00:46:58.712 --> 00:47:00.450
that structure listening, thinking,
00:47:00.903 --> 00:47:05.895
am I big enough to warrant this kind of relationship with Palantir Foundry?
00:47:06.203 --> 00:47:11.512
Is there a model you guys use to say, you know, here's our kind of price structure,
00:47:11.512 --> 00:47:15.653
this is how it makes sense, and over time, where that investment pays off?
00:47:16.219 --> 00:47:19.722
Yeah, I mean, I would say that in general, we have a value-based pricing model.
00:47:19.722 --> 00:47:22.912
It's the only way that it would actually work for us to be able to do work with
00:47:22.912 --> 00:47:26.862
the U.S. government, which is kind of a big dog. They, you know, they have some money.
00:47:27.222 --> 00:47:30.752
And all the way down to, you know, smaller companies and everything in between.
00:47:30.752 --> 00:47:33.912
So we try to meet customers where they are and figure out, you know,
00:47:33.912 --> 00:47:34.947
what the path forward is.
00:47:35.156 --> 00:47:37.992
We're very flexible with how that works. There's lots of options.
00:47:37.992 --> 00:47:40.302
I mean, as you guys know, Capterra exists.
00:47:40.302 --> 00:47:44.812
So there are people who do services in Foundry that are not Palantir 4 deployed engineers.
00:47:44.812 --> 00:47:48.482
So that's one thing. But, you know, I would say that if you think that you have
00:47:48.482 --> 00:47:51.892
a problem that we could solve, then we'd be happy to have a conversation.
00:47:51.892 --> 00:47:54.412
And, you know, we'll be the first to say, hey, that's, you know.
00:47:55.392 --> 00:47:58.812
The juice isn't worth the squeeze there, right? We're not trying to license
00:47:58.812 --> 00:48:02.652
Max and get everyone working with us, even if it's not valuable to them.
00:48:03.012 --> 00:48:07.174
We want our customers to say that it was a beneficial engagement,
00:48:07.394 --> 00:48:10.342
they're happy with the value they're getting, and to find more value in the
00:48:10.342 --> 00:48:13.139
future. So if there's no there there, we're not going to push it.
00:48:13.798 --> 00:48:18.621
Yeah, it makes sense. How much interlap or interface do you have with the FDs
00:48:18.621 --> 00:48:20.941
on, you know, different kind of engagements?
00:48:20.941 --> 00:48:24.961
Like, do you have a construction vertical that's like, hey, these are best practices
00:48:24.961 --> 00:48:29.001
that we're seeing? And like, is there any information exchange within Palantir
00:48:29.001 --> 00:48:30.347
within construction verticals?
00:48:30.719 --> 00:48:35.011
Yeah, so there are kind of like loose structures that kind of emerge when there's
00:48:35.011 --> 00:48:38.672
a necessity for it. So like very much to your point of like the management structure,
00:48:39.311 --> 00:48:42.985
we try not to have internal structure for the sake of internal structure.
00:48:43.310 --> 00:48:46.831
So people kind of coalesce into teams of shared interest, right?
00:48:46.831 --> 00:48:48.255
They'll spin up Slack channels.
00:48:48.976 --> 00:48:52.541
So we, you know, you can sometimes like just say, send an email like,
00:48:52.541 --> 00:48:55.081
hey, I'm dealing with this problem. Does anyone in the organization have any
00:48:55.081 --> 00:48:58.321
experience with it? Like, hey, like I'm looking at BIM models for the first
00:48:58.321 --> 00:48:59.456
time, who's touched this?
00:49:00.054 --> 00:49:03.991
So there is that kind of like information sharing. It also gets encoded into
00:49:03.991 --> 00:49:08.771
the product by interface between our kind of product developers and our business
00:49:08.771 --> 00:49:10.847
development teams who are out on the job site.
00:49:11.500 --> 00:49:13.841
That kind of, you know, the product is developed at the edge.
00:49:13.841 --> 00:49:16.893
So there's a few different mechanisms by which information is ingested,
00:49:17.055 --> 00:49:18.843
shared, and pushed to the edges.
00:49:19.175 --> 00:49:21.992
But, you know, it's a radical responsibility. Like you're, you're,
00:49:22.178 --> 00:49:25.271
you could be here like three months and now you're at, you're the person responsible
00:49:25.271 --> 00:49:26.648
for making sure this is successful.
00:49:27.270 --> 00:49:31.449
Figure out how to make it successful right yeah we like self-starters and entrepreneurs.
00:49:32.218 --> 00:49:38.118
What what about you know you got these big pn software systems pro core autodesk trimble,
00:49:38.583 --> 00:49:44.831
what does how do those interact with boundary i mean obviously i'm sure there's
00:49:44.831 --> 00:49:49.111
integrations but do you guys take a point of view on like ultimately when you
00:49:49.111 --> 00:49:51.591
have a really mature ontology and,
00:49:52.331 --> 00:49:59.271
you're embedding the right kind of extractions from workflows so that the right
00:49:59.271 --> 00:50:01.215
kind of data is flowing into your system.
00:50:02.000 --> 00:50:08.407
Like what is the future of a PM
system? Yeah, I mean, it's unclear to me exactly
00:50:08.407 --> 00:50:12.327
how AI and PMs will interact in the future.
00:50:12.327 --> 00:50:16.240
I think there's a bullish case to say that, you know, at some point,
00:50:16.420 --> 00:50:21.597
most of what a PM does might be handled by AI or by like a better interface system.
00:50:21.597 --> 00:50:25.047
Now, this was also the promise of like the ERPs in the 1980s,
00:50:25.047 --> 00:50:27.903
and that didn't bear out. So I'm kind of agnostic there.
00:50:28.182 --> 00:50:31.397
Project managers have a lot of skill sets that are not just about collating
00:50:31.397 --> 00:50:34.748
information. It's about how to understand, you know, where can I push?
00:50:34.864 --> 00:50:36.803
Like, where is there slack in the system?
00:50:36.977 --> 00:50:40.627
How do I make this team work? How do I kind of, you know, there's a lot there
00:50:40.627 --> 00:50:43.157
that's not just like encoded in data movement.
00:50:43.570 --> 00:50:48.217
So I think, you know, there's a lot of software systems that I think will probably
00:50:48.217 --> 00:50:52.777
go the way of the Dodo because they were solving a specific problem in a specific
00:50:52.777 --> 00:50:56.307
field when the world was a little bit less interconnected.
00:50:56.775 --> 00:50:59.227
And I think the ones that survive are going to be the ones that figure out how
00:50:59.227 --> 00:51:04.321
to actually operationalize AI in a way that's not kitschy and actually makes people's lives easier.
00:51:05.055 --> 00:51:08.697
So, you know, our stance is that, you know, we're pro-competition,
00:51:08.697 --> 00:51:12.594
like let people try. We'll integrate with whatever works and we'll replace what doesn't.
00:51:13.651 --> 00:51:19.447
I like that. With what you know about the industry now and maybe what you know
00:51:19.447 --> 00:51:25.845
about kind of where at least the Palantir's kind of collection of technologies are.
00:51:26.877 --> 00:51:32.887
What do you see are the attributes in the field that will enable people to be
00:51:32.887 --> 00:51:37.042
more resilient and handle the change that is coming or is already here?
00:51:37.857 --> 00:51:41.227
Yeah. So, I mean, I think in the field, it's going to be like,
00:51:41.227 --> 00:51:45.437
first and foremost, you know, this, this isn't a put your head in the sand type situation.
00:51:45.437 --> 00:51:50.797
Like it's, it's coming, even if it's being forced down by kind of shareholders
00:51:51.117 --> 00:51:54.193
or, you know, the board, like people are going to want to use AI.
00:51:54.454 --> 00:51:57.697
And so I think, you know, one way to kind of protect yourself is to become opinionated
00:51:57.697 --> 00:52:02.517
on where the good uses of AI or the beneficial uses of AI are so that you can
00:52:02.517 --> 00:52:06.917
say, hey, like, I actually don't think that doing it this way is going to be is going to work for me.
00:52:06.917 --> 00:52:10.226
Like, you know, you have tradecraft, you know what you do.
00:52:10.534 --> 00:52:14.086
Understanding how that interfaces with it, I think, is going to be helpful because.
00:52:15.019 --> 00:52:18.154
We're in the stage where we're throwing this technology against everything.
00:52:18.450 --> 00:52:21.003
And I think there was a report, maybe it was Gartner or something,
00:52:21.003 --> 00:52:25.873
which is that like 90% or something of like AI pilots fail because they're just
00:52:25.873 --> 00:52:31.377
kind of throwing information and saying like, hey, magic oracle, solve my problem.
00:52:31.981 --> 00:52:36.893
AI guys are very fast, but they can be dumb in some ways.
00:52:36.893 --> 00:52:40.043
So I think, you know, becoming opinionated about it, learning the tools,
00:52:40.043 --> 00:52:43.623
right? Like, you know, you can use ChatGPT for free, get a feel for where the
00:52:43.623 --> 00:52:47.171
limitations are. play around with it, I would say is one way to do that.
00:52:49.399 --> 00:52:52.483
Have an idea about what you would do with it is one way to do it.
00:52:52.483 --> 00:52:55.743
Or you can also just choose to say, hey, I'm five years from retirement.
00:52:55.743 --> 00:52:58.559
I can probably ride this one out. That's completely up to you.
00:52:59.328 --> 00:53:03.933
But you might think about in that long career, what learnings can I encode that
00:53:03.933 --> 00:53:06.293
would be useful to pass on to the next generation?
00:53:06.293 --> 00:53:12.453
If there's some way to save other people from the pain I felt, how can I do that?
00:53:12.453 --> 00:53:15.942
And I think that's true, like definitely in construction in a lot of industries,
00:53:16.220 --> 00:53:19.403
you know, there's this element of, and when I've spoken to construction companies,
00:53:19.612 --> 00:53:21.553
a lot of the people in the field, like that's what they care about.
00:53:21.553 --> 00:53:24.600
They're like, we're a family in a lot of ways. So.
00:53:25.657 --> 00:53:28.255
Again, I'm kind of pontificating in a few different directions there,
00:53:28.255 --> 00:53:32.037
but I think you're becoming opinionated about it. Learn what it is, what it isn't.
00:53:32.642 --> 00:53:37.841
Yeah, I like that. What is, I mean, you went academic turned FDE.
00:53:38.161 --> 00:53:42.511
What are the other profiles of FDEs that kind of operate in this way?
00:53:42.801 --> 00:53:47.227
Yeah, I would say that there's a lot of people come from STEM undergrad.
00:53:47.482 --> 00:53:50.192
A lot of people come from a CS undergrad. There's a lot of that.
00:53:51.415 --> 00:53:54.685
There's a right tail of interesting people. I think for a while,
00:53:54.685 --> 00:53:58.561
our former CIO was an opera conductor in a former life.
00:53:59.328 --> 00:54:01.945
There's a lot of different paths to Palantir because, again,
00:54:01.945 --> 00:54:05.523
in a similar way that Kavanaugh wasn't precious about having a CS degree,
00:54:05.887 -->
00:54:10.148
yes, there's heuristics. Yeah, if you went to Yale, that's probably a good sign, I think.
00:54:10.835 --> 00:54:14.978
But if you can find a place here and you can provide value, we don't really care.
00:54:15.226 --> 00:54:19.458
We have a meritocracy fellowship. We bring people in before they've even gone to university.
00:54:19.661 --> 00:54:24.015
So we try to push back against that semiotic signaling but you know it's it's
00:54:24.015 --> 00:54:27.645
a history of having like been dissatisfied with the state of the world and wanting
00:54:27.645 --> 00:54:30.494
to fix it i think is kind of what the the through line is,
00:54:31.910 --> 00:54:35.712
i mean you're selling me on palantir a little more than i was ready for jesse,
00:54:36.294 --> 00:54:38.621
i wasn't ready to like you as much as i do uh.
00:54:40.119 --> 00:54:46.065
I think you know i i everyone probably has some narrative on you know all varieties
00:54:46.065 --> 00:54:50.302
of companies and and i think what palantir is solving for
00:54:50.713 --> 00:54:56.878
is you know best in class tech in theory right like like industry grade tech
00:54:57.292 --> 00:55:03.255
with the humility to go to the problem and and ask questions that may sound
00:55:03.255 --> 00:55:07.857
stupid at first and i think that's really powerful from a model standpoint because,
00:55:08.722 --> 00:55:14.715
it's normally we have the tool buy it if it doesn't work i guess you're just
00:55:14.715 --> 00:55:18.305
not very good at implementing tech and and i think that's a model that's been
00:55:18.305 --> 00:55:21.625
tried in our industry and and often fails and so it's it's,
00:55:22.293 --> 00:55:25.265
unique and i think it's healthy to see a new model coming up.
00:55:27.157 --> 00:55:30.479
So I normally end with like, what would you tell your younger self?
00:55:30.693 --> 00:55:33.126
But I feel like, you know, you look fairly young.
00:55:33.770 --> 00:55:39.138
What would, what would you tell your pre-Kavanaugh self, you know,
00:55:39.138 --> 00:55:44.789
coming from the academia world? What would you tell that person coming into construction?
00:55:45.534 --> 00:55:49.748
Yeah, I mean, I think there's, I think if I had to tell my younger self something,
00:55:50.268 --> 00:55:53.148
it would be that like, no one's going to give you permission to succeed.
00:55:53.148 --> 00:55:55.828
Like at the end of the day, like you have to go out and figure it out,
00:55:55.828 --> 00:56:00.358
right? Like academia, there's a very clear onerous causa, right?
00:56:00.358 --> 00:56:03.312
Like, you know, you do this, then you do this, then you publish these papers,
00:56:03.544 --> 00:56:05.650
then you make tenure, and then you do these things.
00:56:06.051 --> 00:56:09.988
I would tell myself that's like, that's comforting, but it's a constraint.
00:56:09.988 --> 00:56:13.802
So don't limit yourself to, you know, the path that you're on.
00:56:14.284 --> 00:56:19.218
But I think what I tell myself pre-Kavanaugh would be, things are about to get
00:56:19.218 --> 00:56:22.728
really fun. They're going to be hard, and you're going to be cold for a while in the winter.
00:56:23.268 --> 00:56:26.758
But you're gonna you're gonna make some friends and you're gonna really create
00:56:26.758 --> 00:56:31.462
something of value with the people around you yeah here's an amazon link for some good socks,
00:56:33.588 --> 00:56:37.727
good stuff jesse well i appreciate you coming on man yeah i was happy to be here.