127: ‘Accelerating Offsite Construction’, with Radu Gidei

127: ‘Accelerating Offsite Construction’, with Radu Gidei

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, I talk with Radu Gidei, Radu discusses his background in architecture and how it led him to pursue a career in building tools and workflows for the industry. Which led to his current role as CTO of KOPE. You might remember KOPE from episode 111 with Mark Thorley and David Flynn, in which we talked about it being a platform that aims to accelerate the adoption of offsite construction. Today Radu explains KOPE's vision to provide a software platform for designers, builders, and manufacturers to transition from design to construction, using prefabricated products for the offsite construction market.

Radu also talks about the challenges that contractors and architects face when trying to adopt offsite construction, including the lack of visibility into available construction systems and the risks associated with using new systems on a project.

However, and this isn't a bad, however, he notes that KOPE's platform does not [00:01:00] require people to completely revolutionized their workflows, which you'll hear more about in this episode.

Overall this episode provides insight into the world of offsite construction and how KOPE is working to make it easier for designers and builders to adopt it. So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Radu Gidei.

Radu, welcome to the podcast. Great to, great to see you.

Great to meet you. And I'm excited to have a conversation with you. You are the CTO at KOPE, and we've had Mark Thorley and David Flynn previously on the podcast, and they talked about the vision of KOPE and, and what you guys are doing and the, the strategy behind it.

And today we're gonna talk more about the technical side. So this is gonna be a, a great conversation. I would love it. If, before we get into that, if you could give a backstory on how you've got to where you are, like what, what, paint a picture of what that journey has been like for you [00:02:00] in, uh, in your career.

Radu Gidei: For sure. Um, first off, very happy to be on the show. Uh, been a long time listener, so, uh, it's uh, gonna be slightly awkward to see my own name pop up there. But, uh, it's exciting. Um, so giving you a bit of backstory of, uh, um, how I got to, to where I am. Uh, I guess I have a slightly Unusual or, um, different, uh, path to, to what you would see most, uh, BIM managers turned techies, uh, uh, have taken over the years.

So, uh, I was born in Romania and I grew up there and did my high school education there. And one of the unique things about that is, um, I went to a high school that's very, uh, focused on math and

computer science. So we were, I did four years of c plus plus and one year

of

uh, you know, before

even finishing high school. So they start you off early at 14. [00:03:00]

And, you know, you do something like 10 hours of computer science a week. Uh, so it's that kind of, uh, place. So I, you know, I'd already written quite a bit of code by the time I was, uh, 18 and, uh, you know, you even have a, a programmer's diploma for that. Uh, and I didn't want to go into, uh, tech, uh, because at, uh, that point in time and in that place it mostly meant accounting

software or, uh, you

know, ERPs or, um, you know, more traditional software like that.

So I decided to go into architecture instead. Um, so I trained like a madman for a couple of years to try and pass the architecture school exam, which consisted of, uh, free hand drawing

and some technical drawing. Uh, you know, cool things like trying to do a bullying of a cylinder with a sphere by hand

on pen and paper. Uh, still very

traditional back home, right? And yeah, I've, uh, eventually [00:04:00] I actually, uh, applied to a university in the uk and that's where I studied my bachelor in Masters in architecture, uh, in the uk. So I moved when I was 18, studied there, and then started working in architecture practices. Um, because I had this bit of a background in software, one of the things I did, um, early on was, um, obviously learning CAD and, uh, you know, advanced tools to kind of help me in my architectural education. So by the end of my first year, I was

very fluent 3D Max, and

I started

freelancing, doing VA renders for other

people and things like that. Uh, and naturally that meant that by the time I came to my first job, I knew Revit quite well. And it was one of the reasons, uh, I managed to land that job

was to, uh, not just be an architectural designer, but also helped the practice. Uh, adopt a BIM and, uh, move to Revit and

these kind of things.

Evan Troxel: cool. [00:05:00]

Radu Gidei: So I started my career as an architect, essentially working on mainly educational buildings, so, uh, schools, and then later on, uh, high rise residential. But throughout that whole architectural career, I was also doing the, the BIM side. So I was half and half between the two, two roles up until the point where I was like, enough is enough.

Uh, you know,

gotta pick one. Uh, it was too much work to try and do both, and I decided to go down the BIM route full time. And that's, uh, that's when I joined,

uh, Grimshaw, uh, to, to head up BIM at their London office. And, yeah, that was a, that was a, a wild couple of years. It was very interesting work. Very, uh, talented, passionate people. I. I learned a lot there. We did some very cool things, and it's also how I met

Mark and Dave eventually. Um, and yeah, following that, uh, I was building more and more automations and tools [00:06:00] there. I started getting more and into my original

love of programming essentially. So, uh, I kind of started doing that on the side a bit and then at work and eventually realized actually this is, uh, this

is kind of what I

want to do.

Evan Troxel: Okay. .Cool.

Radu Gidei: So, yeah, so living, uh, leaving Grimshaw, I went, uh, full on, on the tech side of, uh, building, uh, tools and

products for AEC essentially.

And that's how we eventually started Matter

Lab and

KOPE.

Evan Troxel: it, it's always interesting to me to hear people's story about kind of this, especially when it includes the architectural

aspect to it and not coming to architecture from the

outside, but coming from

architecture to tech.

And I think that's a common thread in our industry as well, in the people who come on this show for

sure, that there's this kind of initial architect in everybody and then they pick this, they pick this specialty.

[00:07:00] And I think it's interesting when someone like you, I've done a similar thing, is step outside of the practice of architecture to create something for architects. And that to me is always I don't know what the right word for this is, but it, it's like working, I, I always, I, I frame it as work, working on the profession rather than working in the profession.

Uh and, and trying to have a

bigger impact throughout the profession or for, you know, at scale as many people as you can affect as possible for them to have better outcomes in their practice. And I, I, I always love hearing stories

like that. You also mentioned 3D

said 3D Max. Right. And, and, and it's like,

Radu Gidei: yeah,

Evan Troxel: I learned 3D Studio before it was Max, and that was running on DOS, and it just brings back

all these memories of, of when I was in college.

So I, I'm totally dating myself. Right. But it's, uh, that, that's also fun to hear the tools that

people grew up on.

Radu Gidei: you know, I had a, I guess an interesting [00:08:00] relationship with these tools, uh, in architecture schools where, um, my colleagues at one point, I think this was in my master's, they were, uh, quite, uh, fascinated by Grasshopper, um, and what it could do and tools like that. And, uh, you know, it was the first time I was exposed to it.

And, uh, to me it was like, okay, you're just changing some functions here. Uh, okay. And that I just moved on naturally. Uh, the, the ecosystem at that point in time wasn't something that attracted me. And, uh, I was very focused on. The actual architectural education and, uh, you know, the design

side of my brain essentially. Um,

but yeah, obviously eventually came back to the, the,

the programming side. And I have to say that Dynamo was actually one of the gateways that kind of brought me back, um,

to it,

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I could

Radu Gidei: uh, kind of refound the joy of,

of

Evan Troxel: And being a BIM manager and at Grimshaw I'm sure was, there was a lot of heavy Revit work. I'm sure there was still a lot of heavy, there is [00:09:00] a lot of heavy grasshopper work as well, but like when you're actually building

tools to deliver the construction document side of the, of the equation, you're heavily gonna be

investing

in, in Dynamo

inside a Revit.

Radu Gidei: Yeah. And we had, uh, you know, heavy

usage of both sides essentially there. But I, I think it comes back to that nice framing you had of Not working on the architecture itself, but uh, working to help the teams that

do the architecture essentially. And, and that was, uh, uh, to me it's a fairly natural segue, I guess, from doing that bit work and helping the teams to building the tools that help the

teams

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And, and there's, there's this whole like architecture school trains people to be designers. Very few people in the architecture industry are designers. There aren't that many designers. And because there's more, there's all these other jobs to do. And, uh, I think it's

an interesting pivot. Like you, you mentioned it earlier, you were, you were using the [00:10:00] design side of your brain, right?

And you're still doing that, but you're doing that to design tools and workflows and, and automations and things for people to accomplish their tasks. And so I think it's still a great way to express, or, or it's a, it's a expression of that passion to be able to implement tool design, as it were for others.

And, and I

think that's, that's a cool

outlet.

Radu Gidei: Yeah, absolutely. It's a, it's a very creative process actually, uh, bringing these tools to life. Uh, you know, you've got obviously the engineering, software engineering side of it, but there's also the user experience side. There's all of these different facets of it. That means I am actually able to bring both of those experiences I've had together to kind of, uh, try and, uh, come up with something that's, uh,

really helpful.

Evan Troxel: a very architectural approach. I mean, you have to synthesize

all of the different inputs into something, right? And sometimes it's a physical

[00:11:00] environment as architecture, sometimes it's a tool and you're still have to, through all the different aspects of what people want, what people need, there's a series of trade-offs in there versus development time and, and.

There's so many things that go into that plus user experience. What does it feel like to use the tool? What is, how there's so many

pieces to that. It is actually, I, I appreciate what

you're saying about it being kind of this architectural

process as well.

Yeah. I think that's why you, uh, you see quite a few ex architects

in, uh, product management or UX design, because it is that role where you're trying to bring everything together, uh, uh, and kind of

orchestrate everything, uh, into its

final shape

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk about what you're doing specifically at KOPE with the tools that you are ma. You're basically the CTO, you are

the CTO at KOPE, and tell us about what

[00:12:00] Yes. doing there.

there's. Yeah, so there's, uh, three of us co-founders, mark, Dave, and myself. And, uh, you know, we've, uh, kind of split the roles between us. So, uh, I work as

our, our

Radu Gidei: CTO

Evan Troxel: essentially looking after our technology strategy and product development. So all the product we're building, it's, it's part of my group.

Radu Gidei: Uh, we actually

build the software and, you know, take care of that entire end-to-end process essentially. So, um, everything from, uh, uh, you know, having our PMs, uh, come up with features, uh, that design the UX for it, uh, test with users, build the software, deploy to our cloud, uh, the, the whole, um, end-to-end experience

essentially.

Evan Troxel: Great, and, and so maybe you can walk us through what KOPE does, because this isn't something we spent a lot of time on. When I talked to Mark and David, that was a big picture vision for the industry. There was some .

[00:13:00] Larger buckets kind of established about a marketplace and talking about, you know, connecting design to fabrication and modular construction.

And, and there there was a lot of kind of big picture stuff. But I want to get more nuts and bolts specific with you about

what, and, and maybe let's go back and say like, 'cause you had an initial vision and I'm wondering if that has changed over

time, uh, how things have changed over time. Because change

always happens, right?

It's, it's, you can't, can't

perfectly predict where you're gonna end up. So maybe take us on a journey of, of what you've been doing with KOPE over the last several years.

Radu Gidei: Yeah, it's a hundred percent changed over time, but I would say that the shape of it has changed, but not the vision itself. So we, we actually had this vision quite early on, and we haven't wavered much, uh, from it of, building a, a, a platform. to accelerate the adoption of offsite construction. [00:14:00] So, um, you know, we, we were, we started off as a consultancy, um, building products and tools for, um, our clients and then gradually building things for ourselves. Um, right. And one of the things we, we saw in doing this was, um, people wanting to move to offsite construction, whether they're contractors, architects, or you know, manufacturers, but not necessarily having the means to do so, the tools

or the know-how or the experience.

Uh, there were various different kind of roadblocks to them doing that. So we wanted, we had this vision of like, okay, we can build something here that's, uh, kind of bridges that gap in the same way or addresses the same challenges that we had as an industry adopting BIM, right? Everyone wanted to do it, but there wasn't like a one button

solution

to how to do it. So could we, could we have another one of those challenges on our hand with, uh, with offsite construction? And if, you know, our, [00:15:00] our thesis is that yes, it's, it's exactly what it that will be. So we have to build something to help it

make it easier, essentially

for people

move to that. So it's, it's still in that vein of helping designers build design and builders build and, uh, um, you know, not necessarily building things ourselves, um, in terms of physical construction, but providing a software platform for people to be able to do that.

So we started off with this vision of, um, you know, going from a, all the way from a, a site to a finished building and employing offsite construction at every step of the way and doing a lot of the heavy lifting through computational design and generative design and all of these, uh, other techniques. And we haven't really. wavered from that much. Uh, we, we have, we actually have a sketch of a, on a whiteboard that we did back in January, 2020, I think, um, of all the components that would be needed and all the moving [00:16:00] pieces. And we thought it was too

ambitious at the time. So we said, okay, what's the smallest version of this we could build? Uh, and we started with what we now call our workflow engine, which is basically a, um, a computation engine in the cloud. Think of it as dynamo in the cloud, if you will, right? Where instead of having very small nodes that deal with, uh, you know, make a cube or make a rectangle, we have, we're working at a kind of a, the next level of abstraction where you're dealing with products or, uh, systems that you apply to a building.

So you're dealing with like, okay, the wall system or the internal partitions or the floor.

It's actually, and you orchestrate these things together into a workflow to be able to then automate, uh, this transition from design to construction using prefabricated, uh, products and

techniques.

Evan Troxel: So how prevalent are prefabrication [00:17:00] outfits where you're targeting, I you, I assume you're really based outta the uk so you're really targeting UK based contractors or prefab, uh, facilities and, and companies. So it, there's gotta be a market there and I'm just wondering because I, there are some in the United States as well, but I, I can't imagine that there's enough saturation in that market here to, and you tell me, I mean, maybe I'm completely wrong, but, um, there, there's gotta

be, it has to be a pretty big market for you to, to chase after that, so specifically

Radu Gidei: it, yeah, it is a, it is a very big market and I think

it's only gonna get bigger. Um, and one of, one of the reasons for that is adoption of these products and, and ways of building, uh, has been hampered, uh, you know, by a couple of challenges. And that's what we're trying to address. So if we're successful, uh, with, with our endeavor, we will make the market bigger as well.

We [00:18:00] will help everyone use these things more, and they will kind of, you know, have a snowball

effect almost. Um, we are most prevalent, uh, in the UK and the US at

the moment,

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Radu Gidei: so we have customers on both sides of, pond and, yeah. I, I guess there are differences between the two markets. So in the UK you would see Products like precast

concrete slab used a bit more, um, or, you know, different wall cassettes and the US you might have different names. You might call, you know, drywall versus plasterboard and things like that, but you might use a lot more timber framing, uh, systems for offsite. But I think there's still a heavy usage on both sides. Um, what's not, it's just not visible essentially. Um, so contractors are using these systems, but a lot of times they only use one or two systems that they know of or that they've

worked with before, um, or that they've, uh, seen, uh, their colleague use [00:19:00] before, essentially. So there's a real barrier to finding other systems that you might be using and adopting them because

it's a risk, obviously, on a project if, uh, to, to use a system you've never used before. And the on the architectural side, there's also not a lot of knowledge of these systems

either.

Um, we, we call this challenge the, the visibility challenge, uh, that you don't have visibility into what the supply chain has to offer and what sys, what construction systems you might be able to actually make use of to improve the, the outcome of your building.

Evan Troxel: and, and I think a lot of contractors are probably coming from a place of, well, obviously a long history and experience in the industry, and they probably came through a trade. They specialized in a trade. But now you're talking about orchestrating as a gc, a lot of trades together, plus new ways of building, right?

And so to, it has [00:20:00] this compounding effect of risk like you're talking about, because when you're talking about prefabricated thing, you're, you're talking about assemblies, you're talking about even modules, right? And you're not talking about going in to do a job that is a very specific trade on a larger job site.

You're talking about creating products and delivering through logistics, those products onto site. And they're, because they're assemblies, they're probably big products, right? That get delivered to these sites. And so it

is probably a, a whole new world for a lot of contractors out there. But I'd be interested to hear like what, like you say, it's, it's only getting bigger.

What is that adoption looking like? What is that curve looking like?

Radu Gidei: I think there's a, there's a couple of blog posts on our, on our, uh, websites that kind of, uh, talk about the adoption and, uh, you know, give you some, some metrics that I don't have off the top of my head, but to to kind of paint a picture. Uh, I think one of the things that I'm, we're most excited

about for KOPE is it doesn't

require people [00:21:00] to change their workflows, uh, uh, and completely revolutionize how they work.

So what I mean by that is contractors are already orchestrators of different subtracts. So, for example, in the UK, you know, some of the tier one or largest contractors we have, uh, they don't physically necessarily build, they, they subcontract a lot of things

out. So you might have someone, someone else being subcontracted to deliver the floor package, someone subcontracted to deliver the interior partitions package. Now they might actually have builders that come on site and, and work, but a lot of times it's this kind of orchestration of other trades and other, um, Uh, materials that go into a building. So with with offsite, what we're trying to do is make it easier for, uh, contractors to basically find the right, uh, offsite supplier that could fulfill that, uh, that package of work essentially.

So if you're looking, uh, if you're looking for [00:22:00] example for how do I make my floor, uh, a bit more, uh, emission friendly, uh, so you know, lower carbon, how do I make it lighter? Um, is there another system I could use to kind of fulfill some of these specifications or performance targets I have better than the design I always go to, which is maybe port concrete or something else. So this visibility challenge that we're tackling with our marketplace where we enable people to go there, find the right supplier for the right system that they're looking, looking for, and, uh, use that in their ability. It doesn't have to be a fully prefabricated building. but you can partially adopt these things for your various, uh, parts of

the

building,

Evan Troxel: So when you say marketplace, and I, I, I got this, I gleaned this from the previous episode with Mark and David, but the idea of a marketplace is also a kind of

a phone book of connections in the

Radu Gidei: huh?

Evan Troxel: It's not just a place to go find products or technology, it's a [00:23:00] place to go find people

as well. And, And, so then you have this ability to connect.

And this is a lot of in alignment with the work that I'm doing at at tech, which is it when I don't know what I don't know, who do I need to talk to so that I get off on the right foot? And I think it's so interesting as a technology company delivering a product for offsite construction as well, that you're actually creating the connecting points.

So that people can be more successful in their business when they're delivering this kind of productized architecture almost, or buildings in, in component, in these larger assemblies of components. And, and that to me, you're doing this handholding for the benefit of the whole industry. You're connecting the dots, you're helping them help themselves, right?

And, and, and offer a wider range of services or products that they could potentially deliver to a, to a

client.

Radu Gidei: Absolutely. And [00:24:00] that's one of the reasons why the, the, the marketplace is free. Uh, there is no kind of gate to access it. Uh, we, we saw it as a

catalyst for the industry to, adopt offsite and, you know, shed some light into the supply chain, what it can do, because there are some fantastic buildings out there that have used offsite

products and systems. Um, so if we showcase them, connect that to who were the suppliers on that, who were the consultants on that as well? So you have this interconnected set of data where you can see a project you liked, find a supplier for it, find a consultant, uh, maybe on the architectural side or the structural side, or, um, so it, it really kind of can help you establish some of those connections.

We have tools to get you, put you in touch with 'em directly. And that obviously brings us to the, the, the second part of our, our product, which is called construct, which is, uh, the step you would take after you find something you, you

are interested in. So [00:25:00] if I have a design I'm looking to build, and I find, okay, I've got these two floor suppliers that I'm interested in.

One might be a, a timber wall set, the other might be a precast concrete slab, wildly different. Um, how would these

apply to my design? So that's where co construct kicks in. And this is where our, you know, workflow engine and all of the automation tools and computational design that we've done over the years, kind of Applies, uh, to basically help you pick a product, upload a bit model, apply that product to

that

bit model, .

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Radu Gidei: and we're, we're really striving for it to be as simple and experienced as that.

Evan Troxel: So can you explain

how that kind of works? Because the, the idea, at least in my mind, is that the design team is gonna come with a fairly generic set of models so that when they

select the appropriate construction system, it might, it might [00:26:00] go back and modify their design model a little bit based on different constraints of different assemblies.

Right? So if, if you had a concrete floor cassette versus a A C L T floor cassette or something like that, would have different constraints to them, which could change the layout. And so you don't want to overdo it on the design side at least early. You want to, you want to keep it like loose as much, as much as you can, but still be going down a design direction.

Can you talk about how that negotiation, that back and forth happens, and how you help facilitate that so that people aren't redoing

their work?

Radu Gidei: Yeah, absolutely. It's, uh, this, uh, kind of nicely segues into one of the, the, the second challenges we see with offsite construction, which is, we call it variation, where, uh, you know, it's very easy to produce 1

million of the same house,

uh, manufacture it, uh, repeatable, uh, all the same. It's very hard to, uh, basically say, I have this base design, [00:27:00] but I need this wall moved by one meter, uh, for this one house, and I need this floor higher, uh, uh, for this other variation of the design.

So it's very hard to accommodate these, uh, variations, which is kind of why we talk for about, uh, The mass customization, uh, side of it. So coming back to that workflow and how do we keep people from going back and forth, we actually wanna enable them to go back and forth, uh, a little bit, but at speed. So that's, that's the trick.

Evan Troxel: So in an ideal world, you would design the building with a specific system in mind for every single part of the building

from day one, and it would get built and,

you know,

that would be outcomes. Uh, exactly right,

In

reality, that's not what happens, right.

For the vast majority of buildings, like, uh, along of various points in the design, you might think, could I use an offsite system for this?

Radu Gidei: So we're, we're basically trying to build on ramps at these various points to allow you to, to go in at any point and say, I want to test [00:28:00] some products for this part of my building. It could be multiple systems at the same time. So we've had workflows where we've done floors, walls, uh, you know, ceilings, other things at the same time.

Or it could be just one of these. Systems. Uh, but the idea is to enable you to, to test, uh, how the product would work in your specific building. Uh, taking into consideration the, the rules and the constraints of that particular product, right? And give you very rich metrics to be able to then make designs,

uh, and decisions, uh, whether you want to tweak the design, whether you want to tweak the product, uh, configuration,

and kind of keep going.

Evan Troxel: I was gonna ask right there if, if

there is a . A method behind the digital, or if there's a companion to the digital side, which is the people side, to actually tap into the wisdom of the fabricator, uh, or the, the general contractor or the designer. [00:29:00] Right. This kind of

two-way communication that's so important

to, to,

know what the potential pitfalls are, what the constraints are for the system.

Because when you say tweak a system, it's like, that could mean a million different things. Right? And you would want to talk to somebody right then

and say, what can I do? What can't I do? What are the, what's the question I should be asking? Because these are the kinds of, this wisdom exists in the industry and it's leaving the industry without getting captured anywhere. Right. And that's a, that's a side problem that I don't, I don't know that you guys . Are addressing or even have the ability to address, or if anybody

does, because nobody's really doing it. Right. It the, but, but this whole idea of connecting to the, to the wisdom side, along with the tools so that people make the best decisions.

Because often we find that the tools or the products or the, the data itself doesn't offer that insight that we need from somebody who has

the experience.

Radu Gidei: Yeah, [00:30:00] absolutely. So we do see this problem of, of you know, brain train in the industry, but also A sheer workforce strain. Uh, there just aren't enough people to go around to build these things and the knowledge of how these, uh, uh, things are built is getting lost. So part of our, our approach is when we work with a manufacturer to put their

system up on KOPE, is we work

directly with that team that has that knowhow.

Um, and again, when you work with a manufacturer,

it might not be one person. Uh, you know, there might be someone that knows very well how the thing actually gets assembled or, or built on the, the factory floor. There might be other people that know more about design constraints of this thing. There might be other people that know about the

logistics of this, uh, particular piece of, uh, uh, of a, of a construction. So we work with that entire team, essentially to, to try and capture as many of those, uh, facets of a

product as possible to basically package it up. As the, the configurable product

you see in [00:31:00] KOPE essentially.

So when you're working with a, a, a

product in KOPE and you,

you know, for example, you see a slider for a particular parameter or some aspect of that product, you, you know, that, uh, someone's spoken to that manufacturing and knows what the minimum and maximum is, and there's a reason.

It's those values. So you can't essentially go outside of what's permissible in that system.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, so you basically get a great starting point of realistic expectations in what the par parameters are that are

changeable, right? And, and then

if it's something, if I have an idea that goes outside of that, that's when I would want to connect with somebody

and talk to them.

Radu Gidei: Yeah. And there, there might actually be another step in between. So one of the, the really cool things

we have in KOPE is our optimization

engine. So, you know, when you go to apply one of these products to your building, you, you always have a, a, you know, an immediate start. [00:32:00] You have default values for everything.

You can just press, go and see what be

a good starting point. Then you can tweak it and find, actually, if I, if I tell a telco I want slightly higher spacing for, you know, some of these internal studs or, or things in a, in a wall cassette, I might get, you know, a more efficient layout. Right. Where our optimization engine kicks in is it allows you to, uh, basically automate a lot of that heavy lifting and a lot of that back and forth, essentially.

So we have a very simple interface that allows people to say, I want these three things to vary to, to essentially to change their values, uh, in ways that are acceptable. And I have these five of 10 goals in mind. I want, you know, minimal waste. I want maybe minimal cost, but you know, you might be making different trade offs in different types of designs. And then you press run, you run, uh, our optimization. So engine on top of this. So we basically [00:33:00] apply that product to your building, thousands and thousands of times in the cloud. Uh, we come back with what is, uh, an optimal set of, uh, designs and you can obviously explore those designs and find the right trade-offs for your, your particular building.

Save that, uh, design, and then continue working with the outputs.

Uh, essentially. So one of the, the, the things, going back to that idea of the, uh, the back and forth between design tools, where probably the only one that I can think of right now, platforms out there that's, um, uses as input and output. So we don't use it as a kind of dead end format. We, we take it as an input. We work with it, and we give you back so that you can act, actually integrate it back into your design tools and use those outputs directly.

Evan Troxel: let's stick on that for a minute. How, how has IFC been work [00:34:00] with? I mean, it's, it's basically is is it? Okay, so you're smiling, tell, tell us what you're thinking. When I, when I

ask Yeah. question,

Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a sticking point in the industry, in the conversation right now, isn't it? Uh, it's not a perfect, uh, standard by any means. It's a, it's a decent schema. It is bloated, it is hard to work with. It's got complexities and layers. Um, but, uh, it does quite a few things, right? Quite, quite a few things wrong.

Radu Gidei: Um, it's redeeming quality is that it is the only one that pretty much everyone agrees

on. And most software

packages, uh, accept. So, you know, there's, there's really only two approaches here. Either you make, well, three, let's say, uh, either you have some closed source proprietary format that only you know about, or you have some kind of open schema that you tell people about and everyone has to

adopt yours, or you [00:35:00] use this common

standard, right? This is

only one of these three. Um, we've tried all

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Radu Gidei: and we've, uh, we've kind of, uh, ended up in, in a slightly hybrid world. But, uh, yeah, at the end of the, at the end of the day, we wanted to maximize compatibility with, uh, our

customers' tools.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Radu Gidei: So we, we didn't want to limit it to all the ArchiCAD users or all the Navisworks

users or this or that.

So we, we made a trade off of, okay, let's spend the, quite a few engineering months on this problem, trying to build tools that work with these, uh, Complicated schema, but at the end result is that customers can upload these things, uh, directly to our, our product and kind of hit the

ground

Evan Troxel: And when you're

talking about

Radu Gidei: obviously we,

Evan Troxel: you're talking about the design side or the construction side, or

both?

Radu Gidei: uh, a bit of both. So our, our [00:36:00] customers are both from the contractor side, uh, or

the manufacturing side, right? Uh, there's, there's some usage from the more kind of design architectural side, but that's not necessarily our core audience at,

at this point in time. It's mainly, mainly manufacturers that, uh, want to speed themselves up. Uh, for example, when they respond to a tender, uh, they would use our tool to actually automate their own process and respond to that tender, you know, in five minutes,

not

Evan Troxel: Mm, mm-hmm.

Radu Gidei: Or contractors on the other side of the fence, who would, uh, you know, similarly test different, uh, products to, to kind of apply to the

building.

Evan Troxel: Right. Right. So, are you staying on thing for a minute? Are you actively contributing back into that ecosystem of, of the, the standard to help it get to where you see it needing to go? Or is there a

a wall there that you're not willing to, to go through?

Radu Gidei: I, [00:37:00] I think it's less about willingness and more about, uh, time and opportunity and, uh, uh, you know, doing it at the right moment. So at the moment, we aren't contributing, uh, in, in the sense that we're not, you know, part of building spark or trying to influence the standard itself. because we, we just have too much to build and we

need to move

too quickly.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I get that.

Radu Gidei: So, uh,

you know, it's a fairly stable standard. It takes

years for it to change, so it's gonna be around for quite a while. So for us to, to priorities obviously to, to build for our customers as quickly

as we can.

Evan Troxel: Now

Radu Gidei: but that doesn't mean that we won't be looking to contribute

in the

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I mean that, that that is a key component to it, right? It's, it's like architects complaining about the AIA, but they're also members of AIA saying, what are you doing for us? And it's like, well, what are you

doing to help steer the AIA as a member too? And it, so it's, it's not dissimilar from that in that the, the

Building smart people who are [00:38:00] participating in that are also contributing to steering where it goes. But I know it's also there. It is very slow moving and I can imagine that's really frustrating for bleeding edge tech companies to participate in as well when they also have to build a product. And I mean, there, it's, it's

complicated.

I, I totally get it.

Radu Gidei: Yeah. And you know, another way to look at participation is, uh, actually putting out a tool that has good support for input and output, and uses it as the kind of the pass through format. It, you know, there isn't much

out there that does that. Uh, there's viewers for and, uh, you know, we're seeing some, some really cool things come out of the open source community with, uh, you know, uh, the, the blender BIM side of things and, uh, J S.

But

there aren't many tools that kind of use it as an input and then allow you to do stuff with it. Uh, k or recently another startup has, has been doing some really interesting things there. [00:39:00] So I think even just having robust support for this is already kind of contributing, uh, somewhat to that conversation and that to that discussion, uh, and enabling people to say, okay, like, you know, we can invest and we can follow

this route as well.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Radu Gidei: cause it, it would've been much more, much easier for us to just come up with our own closed format and, uh, you know, call it

a day.

Evan Troxel: Hmm Hmm So ultimately you decided to go down the route for and I, and I'm just wondering if that's something your customers. Have given you feedback on what, because I can imagine there's a, there's a good number of them. They're like, what is IFC? Like, they don't even know that it's maybe there, but then there's, I'm sure there's

other feedback that you've gotten that, that has shown you that you made a good decision in this

to go down that road.

Radu Gidei: Yeah. And it's it's been, uh, less direct as in like, it's not like, uh, customers going like, oh my God, you

support . [00:40:00] Yes. it's more like, uh, I wanna use your tool and, uh, I use these five tools. Uh, you know, can your tool connect to these? And being able to say yes, because four out of five of those export , the other one does something else

we can work with. That's what customers appreciate. Uh, not having to. Change their workflow too much, essentially, and being able to retain the investment that frankly, they've, they've done over years

into their tools, right? So a practice adopting Revit or ArchiCAD, they have years

of investment in training and standards and those things, and being able to just press export , uh, is great for them. Now, I don't, don't wanna dwell too much on the IFC side, but we do support direct

Revit uploads as well. So for us, it's all about giving, users, the least amount of friction to, to start playing with our, our platform and, and using it and getting the

benefits

of it.

Evan Troxel: sure. So I think, [00:41:00] I think we've talked

enough about your point, and, and

I Yeah. it's an interesting side, side route that we, that we went down there, that we had the opportunity to go down.

But I'm wondering, you, you know, you talk about the tools that you're making and you're talking about different components and assemblies, and can you give us an idea of the types of projects people are actually doing with KOPE so that we have some thing that we can put a picture in our mind to, um, like what kinds of buildings, what sizes of buildings, what kinds of spaces and, and

things like that?

Radu Gidei: Yeah, so that's a good question. I think that the, the cool answer to that is that it, we've seen pretty much

anything in there. So we've seen single family residential, for example, we we're working with a manufacturer from Canada, actually, um, uh, who mostly applies their system to, to kind of, you know, detached houses as

they're called in the uk. Um, and it's a single family's home, essentially. So, and they, we, we do the entire, the entire exterior [00:42:00] envelope essentially with these walker sets. That's at one end of the spectrum. Um, You might even use it for smaller things such as inside, uh, your, one of your apartment layouts or something like that.

You might wanna do your internal partitions from using a particular

system, or you want, might wanna optimize your pla board or drywall usage. Uh, where we have some fantastic results in, uh, kind of, uh, reducing waste there. So it could be as, as small as three walls, uh, all the way to the other end of the spectrum where we have commercial office building towers in London that, uh, we're looking at precast, concrete slabs, for example, and a few other systems and they were able to save, a large amount of money, to not, uh, break any rules here

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Uh,

Radu Gidei: what I'm allowed to say.

Evan Troxel: Can we talk about that drywall example for a second? I, I'm interested

to hear that because, I think a lot of times coming at the problem from an architect's point of view, I mean, I, I read an article [00:43:00] recently, it's like, architects aren't gonna save the world. And it was speaking to, you know, the carbon emissions and sustainability and one project at a time, kind of coming at it back and saying, We want to save the world.

We should do everything we can to implement sustainable practices, uh, renewable energy, uh, lightweight systems that, you know, the things that you can take apart later. Think about the whole building

lifecycle on every project.

Ultimately, our clients are paying for something. Oftentimes they want the cheapest thing that they can get right now because they're not interested in the 50 year lifecycle of the building, because they're not gonna be around then, as an example.

Um, and so what is our part in that? And, and just trying to kind of say, can we just be realistic about that? Now, at the same time as an architect coming at the problem and saying, look, by using this tool, I've saved the project, or I've given the project the ability to use [00:44:00] less drywall because we're reusing the waste pieces in a, in another manner.

But then when a contractor takes over, They're just gonna do it how they do it. Right. And so your audience is the contractor. So I think you're coming at this from, from the other side and saying, our contractors are buying into this idea. They're looking at the savings, the waste reusability that they can, it's not really waste anymore.

Right. It's, it's getting put back into the project.

So kind of talk through what you're seeing happen in the industry there, because I, love hearing that that's coming from the contractor

side.

Radu Gidei: Yeah. And it's uh, uh, I have a, a pretty good anecdote, I guess with the usage of both the contractor and, uh, offsite builder side actually. So I, I'll get

into that in a second. But, uh, to, to your wider point of like, what can architects do and, and, you know, what should we be doing? I think one of the reasons we

approach KOPE the way we

do is and allow [00:45:00] you to do these kind of partial, uh, Updates or, or partial applications of a product or a building. So take only this wall or only look at floors, uh, you know, in this area, or, uh, look at all the internal partitions that have this type, uh, uh, of code. Essentially. One of the reasons we're approaching that is because not every building is a

brand new building, uh, that's gonna be built using

this system from scratch, right?

It might be a renovation, it might be that, uh, actually the, the Shell and core are already up and it's later in the design stage that we're, they're, they're even hearing about this tool or getting a chance to use it. Um, so actually supporting all of those different points in the life cycle of a, of a building, uh, is I think one of the ways we could be looking at this one.

Not everything is built from scratch. Uh, not everything has to be decided from day one. I. Some of these things, uh, can actually be, uh, swapped in and out later [00:46:00] on, and you can try to find solutions where you might normally not look for them. Um, essentially coming back to that, uh, analogy with the contractors and the, the offset builders.

So obviously contractors would like to eliminate waste, uh, say save money, uh, on, on the plaster board, and especially time, uh, essentially. So if you can come up with a good layout that kind of optimizes for installation speed, uh, and minimal amount of cuts, it might use a tiny bit more material, but you might have less waste and be 30% faster, for example. So this is where, you know, we've seen usage of our optimization engine kick in and be able to surface these options that they hadn't considered before. Right? On the other end of the spectrum, we might have, uh, we've worked with an offsite builder who, who is, uh, using modular. So they were building volumetric uh, modules. And obviously they, they needed something for their internal partitions and they were using [00:47:00] plasterboard, but they had an automated

cutting line, right? So all of a sudden you don't really mind as much if you have to do complex cuts anymore. So, um, we were able to, to essentially take that into account and optimize for simple versus complex cuts and, you know, is it a human cutting?

Is it a machine cutting to have different trade offs of speed and, uh, waste material essentially so that you maximize your outcomes for ev for your particular, uh, set of circumstances.

Evan Troxel: I would imagine also at that point you're actually talking about dollars to

produce something where, whereas that's very conceptual

for on the architect, on the design side and when the contractor sees it. And you're saying there's a checkbox for complex cuts versus simple cuts. And what does that mean?

Uh, 'cause I think we only do simple cuts and what, and then you can actually have a conversation about, The cost and the R O I for implementing a

system [00:48:00] like that into their outfit that they maybe don't have already. I think that's a really interesting kind of outcome that can happen

during this process.

Radu Gidei: and it has, we, we've seen our customers do exactly that. So, you know, we obviously, uh, produce highly detailed outputs and highly detailed, uh, takeoff from those outputs. So very accurate dollar numbers and quantities and all of these things. But the cool thing about that is, uh, you know, going back to our optimization engine, It, it allows people to say, I don't know what this simple or complex cut thing does. So I'm, I want to play around with that, vary that a bit. I also don't know if I should cut my plaster board at the, uh, you know, edge of a door or in the middle of a door, or, you know, should I consider rotating things 90 degrees? Is that more efficient?

I have no clue.

Right? So they, they say, okay, I want these things to vary. Uh, and, you know, what are your goals then? Uh, well, I would like to minimize for cost, [00:49:00] for example. So then you're able to run, uh, these

things at KOPE and see what

kind of, uh, results are produced for what kind of different inputs and trade-offs. So you can then spot, okay. Actually the complex cut thing is making the cost double because I don't know, I'm just giving an example here.

But, um, you know, you might see that actually rotating the panels in certain circumstances gives a, you know, 5%, uh, saving. So it, it kind of gives you, opportunity to, to find out what the best, uh, application of a particular product might be because you, it's, it's like you said earlier, uh, manufacturers know how that product works, but the architect might not

be familiar with it, right? So it's about giving them the space where they can explore, they can play with it. Uh, you can kind of get to start to, to learn how the system works and optimize it for your own particular

needs.

Evan Troxel: When you're creating that optimized, and [00:50:00] I'm gonna put that in in my famous podcasting air quotes, because you have talked to

somebody to figure out what the optimal way to do something is. That's one data point, right? You might talk to another contractor and they'd be like, what are you talking about?

This, this way is way faster, better, whatever. And, and so then you could get additional data points to inform maybe options in how you approach things. Or maybe

you, you decide, Nope, this is the best way based on outcomes that we've seen or the things that we've measured for, for example. I think it's so

interesting because I, I mean, I've gone through the same thing, like if I remodel a room in my house and I need to re drywall it, I would do it a certain way based on my experience or what I think, maybe my preconceived ideas.

But if I have a, a, somebody who come in who's done drywall for 30 years, which I did, and they say, Nope, we do it like this. And, and it was like kind of

mind blowing to me to say, oh, that's how the pros do it. That [00:51:00] is way different than what I thought, uh, in my, because I don't work in that trade. I don't do that every single day.

And I don't, and then I even get to say why. Right? Because that's, that's the important part. Well, why do you do it like that? Oh, here's five reasons why we do it like that. And, and so now you're

doing that on behalf of the design teams so that you get this optimization output, optimized output. By having those conversations with contractors up front, they're sharing that information with you to their benefit because they're the ones buying this product potentially.

Right. So I'm just interested in that

whole, the way that that all kind of happens in unfolds and. You've seen, you've been able to ask the questions behind, behind the scenes of how, how, and why do you do it like this? And I think that that is always something that comes late in the game in traditional construction practices, which is like, I drew this detail, here's how I want you to build it.

And the contractor's like, we don't build like that . [00:52:00] We don't do it like that. We do it like this and we only learn that at the end. But what you're doing is you're injecting that optimization into

the beginning,

Radu Gidei: Yeah. 'cause it's that, all that knowledge and know-how is basically embedded into that product

and how it's applied. Right? So the second you apply it, you're, you're using that extracted knowledge and experience. And, you know, one of the funny things with something as simple as plasterboard is, uh, like you said, the pros do it one way, but then you figure out, actually the pros do it a different way in the UK

versus the US.

And actually, if they use this particular brand of plasterboard, then they actually do it slightly differently again because that manufacturer has, I know, some weird edge or, uh, you know, they make the panel slightly, uh, uh, wider than the rest or, or something like that. So it's all of these little moments that, uh, of knowledge that get embedded into these, these products.

And, uh, you get to benefit from that when you apply them with. Sometimes without knowing. [00:53:00] Other times when you run them enough times, you start to suss it out yourself. So it kind of, it, it gives you a glimpse into the black box a bit. Uh, you start to kind of reverse engineer it in your head, if you will. Um, you know, if you've applied the same thing to a, a, a wall a hundred times, you start to spot the patterns, so you might understand how that product works. Um, but the, the idea is that we're, we're trying to, to kind of, uh, shrink down that manufacturer and put them next to you

on your desk.

Every time you, you, you try to play with one of these, uh, products.

Evan Troxel: It's this whole, uh, co-pilot thing.

We're hearing everybody, ,everybody used

the word right. Uh, recently with the ai, you've got KOPE, ai, you must be using ai, you must have a co-pilot

too, right? That's what you're talking about. But this idea of having that expertise available

in the co-create as a

co-creation in the process of, of designing

and building, I think is, it's an, it's an appropriate analogy to, to, [00:54:00] to make.

And I I love how you kind of framed it as shrinking them down and making them available all the time right

there on your desk.

Radu Gidei: Uh, I mean, I'd love to have a little talking version next to me on my desk, right. That tells you, no, don't do that. You know?

Evan Troxel: I think architects,

Radu Gidei: is

as close to it as we can

Evan Troxel: already have that. No, don't do that. No, don't do that. No, don't do it like that. You're doing it wrong. You're doing

it wrong. Yeah.

Radu Gidei: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: the life

of an architect.

Radu Gidei: main, yeah. Mainly takes the form of Revit error, but,

uh,

Evan Troxel: Right, right. Warnings and errors. Yes. , are you sure?

Are you sure you want just a little slap on the hand

every time? Yeah. A, a physical manifestation

Radu Gidei: you've done, you've done,

that wrong.

So, uh,

yeah. We'll give you the option to delete everything. Alright?

Evan Troxel: you mentioned a couple of project

types. Are there, are there larger project types that this is being implemented on as well? These, these, uh, cus the, the construction, the, you know, are, are they doing it on, on mid-rise,

high-rise and these, these prefabricated cassettes?

Radu Gidei: Yeah. So,

Evan Troxel: answer [00:55:00] is yes.

Radu Gidei: yeah, so on the commercial side, we've, we've seen it on high-rise offices in London, so quite, quite large, uh, buildings. Uh, we've also seen this used for large span buildings, so, you know,

monster warehouses or, or things like that. Uh, not necessarily warehouses, but a very long and wide building with only, you know, uh, one, one

floor essentially. And by one floor, I mean, uh, one extra floor apart

from ground

floor, just to be extra clear.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Radu Gidei: Uh, so it, it's kind of every typology

in between. Uh, and, and that, that's part of the beauty of it, that it's fairly agnostic, uh, in terms of, uh, what type of building you use because it's, it's not about the type of the building, but about the, uh, the construction system that you're applying.

Evan Troxel: And so when you're talking about these components, these assemblies, these cassettes, uh, I think about, you know, manageable size components. But when you're talking about designing a building, you're talking about a site, you're talking about a [00:56:00] structural system, you're talking about some of these larger components.

Are you dealing with

those as well?

Radu Gidei: We are dealing with some structural components already. Yes. So, uh, uh, um, I'm trying to think what the, the right example would be, but, um, some of these systems are already structural, so,

uh, there are, uh, you know, for example, yeah, you know, we have sips and CL LT systems that, uh, you know, are load bearing and you know, you have to take that into consideration. There is obviously the precast concrete stuff is structural. And this is where, uh, you know, just having a floor that you're applying these things to isn't enough. You need to know about the columns in, in that, uh, building and some of these other elements, which is why we take in that entire BIM model as the inputs and you take those things into consideration.

So, uh, you're, you're then able to go around the columns or, you know, whatever it is that product needs to do, essentially to get a good layout.

Evan Troxel: I, I, I know we're getting close to our, [00:57:00] our time here, but I would love it if you could explain, and maybe as a final chapter in this episode, kinda what the user experience is like. You tapped into that earlier on in the conversation when you're designing your tools,

but. Paint a picture for someone who is a user of KOPE, and maybe you can do it from a couple of different vantage points on the construction side, maybe on the design side.

I know they're, they're probably a little different, but what, what do people experience when they're using KOPE and, and, and talk about what it's actually like? Like what is this running on your computer? Is it running in the cloud? Just, just talk through that general, a general scenario of the day in the life of a KOPE user from a couple of different vantage points.

Radu Gidei: That's a, that's a great question. Let me see

if I can do it justice. Um, so first

things first. KOPE is all cloud-based,

so everything we do is running in the cloud. Nothing runs on your computer, and the, the [00:58:00] way you interact with our software is through your browser. So, um, the marketplace has, uh, you know, one particular web app that you're interacting with. And our co-construct product is, uh, uh, another one. And they're, they're interlinked. So coming back to the, the. The user journey. Let's, uh, let's assume you're a, contractor, right? And you have a

license of KOPE and you get

a, uh, a new project in and, uh, maybe it's a tender stage or you know, maybe it's even on site.

Then you're just trying to figure out, uh, I think there might be a better way to do these internal partitions, right, than this kind of, uh, frame, uh, you

know,

Evan Troxel: Stick frame or

Radu Gidei: timber framing

plus. Exactly right. So you have this idea like, okay, I might, I might wanna try something out here, right? So you go onto the, uh, Coke marketplace and uh, you know, you go to the regional one for us or uk, wherever you're based, and you might look for things that, uh, uh, you know, apply to walls. So [00:59:00] you might look for, uh, any type of system that can do internal partitions. You might say, I want this to be within, I. Uh, you know, the supplier for this to be within a hundred miles of this particular address, because I want to keep, uh, logistics, uh, uh, and kind of transport low for environmental impact reasons. And you might want to, you know, add other filters to kind of find the right supplier to say, I want them to be accredited with this particular thing. And, uh, you know, all of these other things that we give you to kind of find the right supplier. You then find a couple of them. You, you might compare them, you might look at the projects they've done.

You might, uh, then actually some of them might have what we call a flex configurator, which is a configurator that, uh, you can use in isolation without a project. So it's just kind of a, a little sandbox environment to get a sense of what their system

might be like. Um, so you play around with those and, you know, you narrow it down to, let's say two manufacturers.

Evan Troxel: One's a a, [01:00:00] a timber walker set, and the other is a. Let's say a SIPS

provider,

Okay.

And you add them, uh, you add them to what we call a supply chain. So it's kind of like a, a favorite sort of bookmarks folder, right? The, the cool

Radu Gidei: thing about KOPE is that everything

you do is collaborative in the sense that you are within your company account, and all of your colleagues can see all of these things you're doing. So as soon as I've created that supply chain, I give it a name and you know, these suppliers go into that supply chain, my colleagues can find it, uh, the next time

they log

on, right? So, so I might say, this is a supply chain for this particular project, or it might be for this region, or it might be for whatever reason you want, essentially. Now after you've chosen these suppliers, the next step would be, okay, I want to test this out on my particular project. So you're go into co-construct, you create a new project, you give it the address, you upload your BIM model. Uh, you know, we process that bottle, we give you a three D viewer [01:01:00] to interact with to see what the preview looks like, and then you go into the configurator essentially, and this is the step where you say, I want this building to be used as the input. Now I want to use products from this particular supply chain. So it'll be one of the two suppliers I've, uh, shortlisted essentially, and I wanna apply it to internal partitions. In this building, actually, we give you all the knobs, uh, and kind of sliders and controls to tweak that design if you want. But by default you would just press run

Evan Troxel: And just based on the classification of the objects that are in the BIM model that you uploaded, you're replacing those with something else

from this other supply chain, that workflow

that

you've created. Okay?

Radu Gidei: S So you know, the product you've selected already knows it, it gets applied to internal partitions, for example. So when you press run, we, uh, take your model. We run all of this computation in the cloud. Uh, [01:02:00] we, we take all of those partitions, we re, you know, uh, kind of isolate them from the building. We apply the product to that. So we panelize it and we know, create all the internal studs and all of the things that

might go into that product. Um, and then we, we give you the output portal that you can just drop in to overlay precisely onto that, uh, input model essentially. And as aside from the actual BIM model that is produced, you also get very rich metrics. So number of panels, number of cassettes, you know, square meterage of things, costs, all of these other metrics to help you make a decision.

Evan Troxel: And where are those costs

Radu Gidei: So in our

Evan Troxel: Are those costs coming from the panel panel

manufacturer? And

are they updated very often? Like how, because

to me there's the, the, whole idea of files, right, is that it's kind of dead

as soon

as you hit save, right? .And so you, if you

have the

old

costs and they're not the new costs, what good is it?[01:03:00]

So I would just love it if you would, if you would plug in to hear how you implement that side of it, because that's so important to actually make a decision whether you're gonna

use this or not at this point.

Radu Gidei: yeah. And, uh, you know, there's, there's a companion experience to all of this, which is from the manufacturer side where they create and upload their products onto our platform. And that's where they tell, you know, they input the cost and, and you know, all of these metrics. And it's a fully versioned experience.

Uh, so actually they have a very cool experience of, uh, you know, creating a product. And when they're ready, they hit publish, they make it available

publicly or not. So we still allow people to actually keep things private

if they want to. And, you know, they might work on a version two of their wild cassette. They might start tweaking the parameters or the cost or you know, maybe the length

has changed or something like that. And, and, you know, they could have 15

versions in between. And then when they're ready, they go like, okay, I'm now ready. I'll hit publish again. So we publish a version [01:04:00] two that the other users

might

Evan Troxel: So you're relying on them though, to update their information as if it were cost, as the example they do need

to go in and, and keep up to date. And

are they doing that? I mean, that to me seems like something

they would want to keep their finger on the pulse of because if people are using their panelizing configurator for their system, they wanna make sure that their potential future customers

have the right information.

Radu Gidei: exactly. And that's, uh, actually why we have this kind of self-serve experience for, uh, allowing manufacturers to, to control some of these things because we, they wanted to be able to, to tweak these settings without having to go through

us, essentially. Right. So, Uh, we, we try to remove ourselves from the process as much as we can and let the, the kind of, the two sides interact, uh,

directly. So manufacturers keep that up to date 'cause it's

in their interest, uh, to kind of keep it up to date. Uh, so coming back to the contractor side, uh, I've now applied this waca set to my, my, my internal [01:05:00] partitions, and I switch it out for the other products that I saw of maybe the sips one. I apply it again, play with the, uh, you know, the sliders.

Again, I can run optimization on this and decide actually I like option number 17 out of this that fits my, uh, uh, things perfectly. So I save these two results and I, I like that you mentioned the dead files comment because, uh, this is a very live environment with manufacturers tweaking their products constantly. Um, so, so we've built this feature of, of creating these snapshots of, of your results where you save one of these things and it's there for perpetuity.

Not tweakable. Essentially, if you want to tweak it, it can go back into the configurator and you continue tweaking it, but it's there kind of safely, kind of, uh, um, stored. Um, so you can always get back to it.

Evan Troxel: So at this

Radu Gidei: once you,

Evan Troxel: I have these two options, have it, has it gone through

your optimization engine yet or

Radu Gidei: yeah, it could have, it could have, [01:06:00] yeah, it could have gone already. So you could save, you know, one of the options that our optimization engine produced, or you could use that as a base to then tweak the inputs and, and some of the parameters, uh, further and get something even more custom. And, uh, the idea is that once you are happy with one of these, you save it and that's what's not

tweakable anymore.

Evan Troxel: But

you can always go back

and

tweak

No. You need the ability

the point a snapshot. It can't be live all the time.

Like we, no, we decided this is the thing we decided and, and

we're gonna move forward with that.

Radu Gidei: and there's, there's very much echoed the kind of the BIM workflows, you know, from the, the international ISO of, you know, you have your work in progress area and you have your actual approved area that's, uh, kind of

been saved, right? I'm not saying we're replacing a cd, these things should

still go in there, but it kind of helps you kind of manage the, this lifecycle of experimenting and then getting to a

point that you like. So now that we've had these, these two products applied to my building, I want to choose one of them, right? [01:07:00] So I will put them in our comparison tool and it will give the numbers side by side and tell me, okay, this one's got 23% waste stage, this one's got 15, but this one costs more. And you're able to kind of make that comparison. At any point you're able to take these outputs and actually

save them, get a A J S O N C S V Excel file out, you get your, you know, raw geometry out. All of these things, uh, you know, we will happily produce. So, you've done your comparison and now you're basically at the point where you found a product you like. It's a good layout, it saves you some money and some time. What's the next step? Well, the next step of this would be that you might want to get some, uh, either more detailed metrics or some other kind of outputs from this design. So you go to what we call a deliverables, uh, section, and this is where you can produce further outputs from this design. So if we take our internal partition [01:08:00] example, this is where I can say I now want drawings of each one of those wall ca sets. And what we do here is, uh, actually quite, quite magical, uh, really where you say you kind of configure your drawing. You say, I want a three sheets. I want these things on the title block. I want a top view and a side view. I want my dimensions to be running, not segmented, or all of these settings. And you hit run again. And we produce that drawing on demand for every single one of those wall cassettes with a bomb on the title, uh, title block, and producing both PDFs and dwg. So you put it into your CAD system or your factory floor if you have a

factory.

Evan Troxel: I I think I have

Radu Gidei: So, and that's

just one example.

Evan Troxel: let me just switch over here. I, I'm, I'm gonna insert this. Into,

Radu Gidei: Okay.

Evan Troxel: can you hear that?

No.

There's a, there's

an applause going on right now. Uh, and the

Radu Gidei: [01:09:00] Ah, great.

Evan Troxel: applause in is because, uh, this whole idea of

automating the drawing side, is so

Radu Gidei: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and it's so interesting to me that

architects still are competing on doing construction documents That is not where their

value lies their value There, there may be decisions that are documented in those construction documents on how a certain detail needs to work out or how the assembly or the performance, but it's not, and actually doing the

drawing. And so it's just music

to

my ears to hear you say that you,

That was

you automate the whole system and, and the drawings

and the, and the output because that is not where we should be spending our time competing, like actually spending our time, which we bill for on projects.

We should be billing for things that are way more

important than that.

Radu Gidei: exactly. And, you know, we produce these drawings like for every individual, uh, uh, assembly essentially. Uh, but we we're working on right now is actually producing, uh, general arrangement drawings as well. [01:10:00] Um, so a kind of a, a full floor plan, uh, to see how these things are laid out in the floor plan. And the real beauty of this is it's, it's a drawing engine really where, um, our components come in as components and we don't know much more about them, and yet we're still able to dimension them accurately every single notch

and not have overlapping dimensions.

And we're, we're, you know, we're architects at heart, so the drawings that we spit out are clean, nice drawings that you would not be embarrassed to show to your associate,

essentially.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, That's a good

Radu Gidei: That's the kind of the,

Evan Troxel: thing.

Radu Gidei: the benchmark.

Yeah. Uh, and it's taken us a long

time to get, get to this level where the drawings are so crisp and usable and, uh, uh, yeah.

So you produce all of these outputs right from your, for your design at this point, you can pretty much move into whatever tool you want. You can go back to your design tool, tweak your design. And try again.

Upload [01:11:00] a new design. Uh, you could use it as a reference. Okay. I'm super happy with these, uh, internal partitions.

I'm gonna leave them as they are. And one of the, the, the important factors here is that let's say you're using Revit, right? Uh, this isn't a Revit family. That's, uh, you can then click edit on

and tweak it and, uh, you know, change how it's put together that would make it go outside of those

manufacturing rules, right?

This is a, an file. You link in like you would an external file, and that means that all of those kind of manufacturing constraints and rules are

still kind of respected, right? Obviously you can still go into files and edit them. Uh, you know, for people that, uh, might not know that, uh, probably the, my favorite tool to do that is an notepad, uh,

for I f c

files that are, uh, uh, Uh, not I

f C extension, but the idea is that it's, it's a fairly uh, kind of, uh, you know, snapshot in moment.

Evan Troxel: This is what the

partitions [01:12:00] are, Right.

And from there you have your cost and all of these other outputs. And, uh, you know, we we're working on other integrations to kind of push it into the next step, but I can tell you that some of our customers were using these to, to produce basically, uh, uh, x, y, Z files and cutting files that were going straight into their

C

Mm. machines. .Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was gonna say there has to be then a connection to the actual production of the,

the, the items. And, and at that point you have it. And so once you really nail down the design and these decisions, and you've made your way through the different phases of design at that point, that can actually go directly to the

manufacturer to produce those parts.

Radu Gidei: Yeah.

And you know, I, I can't speak too much of, uh, you know, uh, of our roadmap, I guess, but you know, You could imagine that this side of the contractor experience will be linked to the manufacturer experience.

Uh, at one

point, um, you know, from the manufacturer [01:13:00] experience, you know, that different user persona, it would actually be a very similar workflow. The, the difference might be that they might have more detail in the outputs. They might have, you know, uh, G codes bat out and all of these other things, and they might want to keep these things private and not share them with the rest of the, the marketplace. Or they might be doing this to respond to a tender or, or, or something like that. But the basic mechanism of select the products, upload your, uh, BIM file, hit apply, uh, is, is still the kind of the core mechanic, uh, essentially,

Evan Troxel: And just to be totally clear, 'cause I, I'm not sure it is totally clear from, from the listener's perspective, but the, the initial layout is happening in their tool of choice. It is going .

Radu Gidei: yeah.

Evan Troxel: Round trip through KOPE and then back into their tool of choice. It may be the same tool, it might be a different tool at that point, but it, but what they're not doing in KOPE is they're not moving the walls around.

They're not [01:14:00] adjusting geometry that they've drawn somewhere else in KOPE. KOPE is taking that geometry, it's doing the processing to it. It's giving the output that you then link back into the original or another design tool where you can then look at the original versus the the, the new KOPE optimized version.

It might be in a different location, maybe a little bit, maybe something's changed a little bit, and then you would tweak your original model to kind of match that at that

point. Right.

Radu Gidei: Yeah, exactly. Um,

we, so, you know, you're not moving walls and doing those

things in

KOPE at the moment.

Right. Um, one of our earliest prototypes actually was doing this, uh, live in Revit. Uh, so you were. Selecting a wall and saying, I wanna use this, uh, this particular system, and it would respond, uh, in almost real time to those changes and kind of recompute in the cloud and come back down and reapply those things to Revit. Um, you know, uh, we're still technically [01:15:00] able to do the, that kind of workflow, um, but we, we've seen slightly more demand, uh, um, on the, the kind of managed process where you have full versioning for the files, you upload full versioning for the outputs. Uh, you know, there's full versioning for the, the actual compute that happens because, uh, uh, that's maybe something that I haven't spoken about yet.

But in our workflow engine, you know, we obviously publish a lot of these

workflows ourselves. Uh, a lot of these, uh, things you run, but we actually have the capability for customers to upload their own, uh, bit of code, their own bit of logic. and run it in our infrastructure and still make use of the optimization engine and all of these other

things. Uh, but they can retain complete control of their ip. We have some really cool enterprise solutions for that.

Evan Troxel: Maybe final question here and maybe, maybe kind of a boring subject, but I'm interested because I think it, I think it's just different than what people are used [01:16:00] to. How does this change the l o d uh, narrative? Because when you're think is it coming at this from a designer and. just the architectural career that I've had different phases of design equal a different l o d when it comes to bim, right?

So the level of detail that you have to get to, obviously it's a lower number in the early stages and a higher number in the final stages. A lot of people have, uh, arguments on the internet about what numbers should be at what stage and how high that number should go and, and, and all those things. But, but here it really seems like what you're doing is you're saying keep it simple and let the, let KOPE handle the level of detail to whatever it needs to be for the manufacturer to make the piece and the manufacturer drives the level of detail versus the client Demanding an LOD whatever, 400, 500, uh, 800 as in my, the

[01:17:00] mythical 800. But the, it's, it's interesting to me to, to, for you to say no, keep it simple. On the design side will give the, the who, the person who's making the thing that, the level of detail that their machines need to make the thing.

Radu Gidei: Yeah. And you know, KOPE is completely,

uh, capable of going all the way down to like every single position of every nail. And we've done that for, uh, a volumetric customer, for example, where, uh, we actually lay out the, the points where the machine, the robot will actually come in like nail something, right? So e e it's just the position in space, but

it's still in the model actually. So, um, you know, we can go into that level of detail, but it, it's this kind of happy middle ground we found that works best where, uh, it's, it, it might not be the, the, the full level of detail of like what goes into manufacturing because you don't necessarily need every bolt to see as a contractor, right? Um, but it's also not just a, a [01:18:00] monolithic wall type of solution that you might be drawing

a wall in Revit, right? It's this happy medium where it satisfies both what the contractor or, you know, the spec, we call them specifier. So it could be a contractor or architect or whoever's using the tool to kind of test these designs. And also enough level of detail so that the manufacturer would know how to, to manufacture it, but it doesn't need to replace their, you know, uh, inventor or or like solid works files or some of these other things. They might have to kind of do some of their solution. It obviously can, but it doesn't have to.

Evan Troxel: So, most products will probably be in this happy medium that's useful for, for everyone. There might be others that actually there's two versions of the product published. There's a, uh, a version that everyone can use, which is this happy medium, and there might be a private version the manufacturer has that has the full lid, Yeah. Uh, or vice versa. So it's, it very much depends on the system and the manufacturer. Like, like you mentioned,

And, and then when [01:19:00] you're talking about this type of , Way, this way of building. And you're talking about offsite construction and industrialized construction techniques and prefabrication. And there's also like the owner side of that equation, which is what did

they, if that they wanted a quote unquote digital twin right, of some level of detail of their built project so that they can manage it, do facility, do facilities management on it after the fact, do, uh, simulations or whatever you might want to do in a digital twin.

It seems like the data's there, you just have to decide level you wanna see it at, what and why it would matter based on if the things you might want to do to that building in the future. But, but like you said, you have the ability to go every . Bolt placement, every nail placement, but not everybody needs that kind of detail.

And I'm just interested to hear maybe last thing here is if owners are getting value [01:20:00] out of this too, that has been unrealized before.

Radu Gidei: yeah, I guess it depends on their involvement in that construction and

design process, right? So, uh, there's various different methods of procurements. Uh, you know, so in the UK you'd have something like design and build where the end user or client, uh, would say, you know, say I want this building, and then the contractor would, would win that and, uh, you know, deliver it as a kind of, here's the key,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Radu Gidei: Um, so they might, they might be quite hands off in that process. You might have clients that are actually, uh, very sophisticated in terms of their, uh, you know, facility management and have specific requirements and, and all of these things. One of the, you know, another one of these benefits, uh, and kind of early decisions we made with Koch to output actual BIM models of these assemblies. And be open with all the data we produce so that you can access it, uh, you know, using, uh, either directly downloading it from the result page or through our a p i is we give [01:21:00] you all the data you want. So you can then put that into your, uh, model that you hand over for then the, the kind of the facility management side.

So we're, we're not gonna try and go into that because that's not what we do. There are fantastic tools out there that, uh, kind of help you with that transition from as-built to facility management. And essentially we've tried to make it as compatible as we

can with, uh, existing workflows. So, uh, you know, our sweet spot is this, uh, you know, designed to constructability. Uh, portion where it's not an early stage feasibility tool. There's plenty of tools out there that, that do a great job. It's not a, a kind of a digital twin. Like, uh, you know, see your sensors overlaid, uh, to a model in, in operations kind of stage. Again, fantastic tools out there. We're in this kind of, very underserved, part of the market where you're going from a design to construction and that's when the kind of, you know, the rubber meets the road [01:22:00] and you're making a final decision, okay, this is how that wall will actually be built, irrespective of what the, the architect might have drawn or what the spec might say. This is the physical embodiment of that construction element.

Evan Troxel: It's an earlier stage digital twin or it's a, precursor to the, to the actual physical output. Yeah, Fantastic.

Radu Gidei: and you know, we've, uh, we, we've had customers use this together with early stage feasibility tools, right? So, you know, we've had Some of our previous products, like Unitize kind of help you do that. And, uh, you know, they're, they integrate very nicely with those kind of solutions. Um, so it really is designed to, to kind of have these on-ramp, on and off-ramps. Uh, pretty much any point of the, uh, design, uh, lifecycle.

Evan Troxel: Fantastic. Well, Radu, this has been a fun conversation and I appreciate, uh, sharing everything that you've shared it. It's, and I really appreciate just kind of going through the [01:23:00] journey of what it's like to use a tool like this and the things that are possible with it, because you are doing, you, you just said it, you're serving an underserved area where the rubber meets the road, where the design actually needs to get

Created, fabricated, built. And, uh, to really look to the future of raising the level of production in that way, we need tools that support that. And so kudos to you and the team for, for making that happen. And so, uh, I'm gonna send everybody to your website and to follow you guys on LinkedIn and all the other social media where you participate.

Is there anything else that you wanna let the audience know about or, or tell them to send them to? Anything like that? To, to wrap up here?

Um, now I'd just like to say massive. Thank you for inviting us, and, uh, it's been a, it's been a blast to have, uh, have this chat. and yeah, come talk to us if you wanna do offsite. love hearing from, uh, all sorts of, companies [01:24:00] that are involved in the construction, arena, from architecture to contractors, to manufacturers.

Radu Gidei: we'd love to hear your thoughts on offsite.

Evan Troxel: All right, Radu, thank you so much for, for your time today. Appreciate it.

Radu Gidei: Thank you.

127: ‘Accelerating Offsite Construction’, with Radu Gidei

______

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, I talk with Radu Gidei, Radu discusses his background in architecture and how it led him to pursue a career in building tools and workflows for the industry. Which led to his current role as CTO of KOPE. You might remember KOPE from episode 111 with Mark Thorley and David Flynn, in which we talked about it being a platform that aims to accelerate the adoption of offsite construction. Today Radu explains KOPE's vision to provide a software platform for designers, builders, and manufacturers to transition from design to construction, using prefabricated products for the offsite construction market.

Radu also talks about the challenges that contractors and architects face when trying to adopt offsite construction, including the lack of visibility into available construction systems and the risks associated with using new systems on a project.

However, and this isn't a bad, however, he notes that KOPE's platform does not [00:01:00] require people to completely revolutionized their workflows, which you'll hear more about in this episode.

Overall this episode provides insight into the world of offsite construction and how KOPE is working to make it easier for designers and builders to adopt it. So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Radu Gidei.

Radu, welcome to the podcast. Great to, great to see you.

Great to meet you. And I'm excited to have a conversation with you. You are the CTO at KOPE, and we've had Mark Thorley and David Flynn previously on the podcast, and they talked about the vision of KOPE and, and what you guys are doing and the, the strategy behind it.

And today we're gonna talk more about the technical side. So this is gonna be a, a great conversation. I would love it. If, before we get into that, if you could give a backstory on how you've got to where you are, like what, what, paint a picture of what that journey has been like for you [00:02:00] in, uh, in your career.

Radu Gidei: For sure. Um, first off, very happy to be on the show. Uh, been a long time listener, so, uh, it's uh, gonna be slightly awkward to see my own name pop up there. But, uh, it's exciting. Um, so giving you a bit of backstory of, uh, um, how I got to, to where I am. Uh, I guess I have a slightly Unusual or, um, different, uh, path to, to what you would see most, uh, BIM managers turned techies, uh, uh, have taken over the years.

So, uh, I was born in Romania and I grew up there and did my high school education there. And one of the unique things about that is, um, I went to a high school that's very, uh, focused on math and

computer science. So we were, I did four years of c plus plus and one year

of

Radu: sql, uh, you know, before

even finishing high school. So they start you off early at 14. [00:03:00]

And, you know, you do something like 10 hours of computer science a week. Uh, so it's that kind of, uh, place. So I, you know, I'd already written quite a bit of code by the time I was, uh, 18 and, uh, you know, you even have a, a programmer's diploma for that. Uh, and I didn't want to go into, uh, tech, uh, because at, uh, that point in time and in that place it mostly meant accounting

software or, uh, you

know, ERPs or, um, you know, more traditional software like that.

So I decided to go into architecture instead. Um, so I trained like a madman for a couple of years to try and pass the architecture school exam, which consisted of, uh, free hand drawing

and some technical drawing. Uh, you know, cool things like trying to do a bullying of a cylinder with a sphere by hand

on pen and paper. Uh, still very

traditional back home, right? And yeah, I've, uh, eventually [00:04:00] I actually, uh, applied to a university in the uk and that's where I studied my bachelor in Masters in architecture, uh, in the uk. So I moved when I was 18, studied there, and then started working in architecture practices. Um, because I had this bit of a background in software, one of the things I did, um, early on was, um, obviously learning CAD and, uh, you know, advanced tools to kind of help me in my architectural education. So by the end of my first year, I was

Radu Gidei: very fluent 3D Max, and

Radu: I started

Radu Gidei: freelancing, doing VA renders for other

Radu: people and things like that. Uh, and naturally that meant that by the time I came to my first job, I knew Revit quite well. And it was one of the reasons, uh, I managed to land that job

was to, uh, not just be an architectural designer, but also helped the practice. Uh, adopt a BIM and, uh, move to Revit and

these kind of things.

Evan Troxel: cool. [00:05:00]

Radu Gidei: So I started my career as an architect, essentially working on mainly educational buildings, so, uh, schools, and then later on, uh, high rise residential. But throughout that whole architectural career, I was also doing the, the BIM side. So I was half and half between the two, two roles up until the point where I was like, enough is enough.

Uh, you know,

gotta pick one. Uh, it was too much work to try and do both, and I decided to go down the BIM route full time. And that's, uh, that's when I joined,

uh, Grimshaw, uh, to, to head up BIM at their London office. And, yeah, that was a, that was a, a wild couple of years. It was very interesting work. Very, uh, talented, passionate people. I. I learned a lot there. We did some very cool things, and it's also how I met

Mark and Dave eventually. Um, and yeah, following that, uh, I was building more and more automations and tools [00:06:00] there. I started getting more and into my original

love of programming essentially. So, uh, I kind of started doing that on the side a bit and then at work and eventually realized actually this is, uh, this

is kind of what I

want to do.

Evan Troxel: Okay. .Cool.

Radu: So, yeah, so living, uh, leaving Grimshaw, I went, uh, full on, on the tech side of, uh, building, uh, tools and

Radu Gidei: products for AEC essentially.

Radu: And that's how we eventually started Matter

Radu Gidei: Lab and

KOPE.

Evan Troxel: it, it's always interesting to me to hear people's story about kind of this, especially when it includes the architectural

aspect to it and not coming to architecture from the

outside, but coming from

architecture to tech.

And I think that's a common thread in our industry as well, in the people who come on this show for

sure, that there's this kind of initial architect in everybody and then they pick this, they pick this specialty.

[00:07:00] And I think it's interesting when someone like you, I've done a similar thing, is step outside of the practice of architecture to create something for architects. And that to me is always I don't know what the right word for this is, but it, it's like working, I, I always, I, I frame it as work, working on the profession rather than working in the profession.

Uh and, and trying to have a

bigger impact throughout the profession or for, you know, at scale as many people as you can affect as possible for them to have better outcomes in their practice. And I, I, I always love hearing stories

like that. You also mentioned 3D

said 3D Max. Right. And, and, and it's like,

Radu: yeah,

Evan Troxel: I learned 3D Studio before it was Max, and that was running on DOS, and it just brings back

all these memories of, of when I was in college.

So I, I'm totally dating myself. Right. But it's, uh, that, that's also fun to hear the tools that

people grew up on.

Radu: you know, I had a, I guess an interesting [00:08:00] relationship with these tools, uh, in architecture schools where, um, my colleagues at one point, I think this was in my master's, they were, uh, quite, uh, fascinated by Grasshopper, um, and what it could do and tools like that. And, uh, you know, it was the first time I was exposed to it.

And, uh, to me it was like, okay, you're just changing some functions here. Uh, okay. And that I just moved on naturally. Uh, the, the ecosystem at that point in time wasn't something that attracted me. And, uh, I was very focused on. The actual architectural education and, uh, you know, the design

side of my brain essentially. Um,

but yeah, obviously eventually came back to the, the,

the programming side. And I have to say that Dynamo was actually one of the gateways that kind of brought me back, um,

to it,

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I could

Radu: uh, kind of refound the joy of,

of

Evan Troxel: And being a BIM manager and at Grimshaw I'm sure was, there was a lot of heavy Revit work. I'm sure there was still a lot of heavy, there is [00:09:00] a lot of heavy grasshopper work as well, but like when you're actually building

tools to deliver the construction document side of the, of the equation, you're heavily gonna be

investing

in, in Dynamo

inside a Revit.

Radu: Yeah. And we had, uh, you know, heavy

usage of both sides essentially there. But I, I think it comes back to that nice framing you had of Not working on the architecture itself, but uh, working to help the teams that

do the architecture essentially. And, and that was, uh, uh, to me it's a fairly natural segue, I guess, from doing that bit work and helping the teams to building the tools that help the

teams

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And, and there's, there's this whole like architecture school trains people to be designers. Very few people in the architecture industry are designers. There aren't that many designers. And because there's more, there's all these other jobs to do. And, uh, I think it's

an interesting pivot. Like you, you mentioned it earlier, you were, you were using the [00:10:00] design side of your brain, right?

And you're still doing that, but you're doing that to design tools and workflows and, and automations and things for people to accomplish their tasks. And so I think it's still a great way to express, or, or it's a, it's a expression of that passion to be able to implement tool design, as it were for others.

And, and I

think that's, that's a cool

outlet.

Radu: Yeah, absolutely. It's a, it's a very creative process actually, uh, bringing these tools to life. Uh, you know, you've got obviously the engineering, software engineering side of it, but there's also the user experience side. There's all of these different facets of it. That means I am actually able to bring both of those experiences I've had together to kind of, uh, try and, uh, come up with something that's, uh,

really helpful.

Evan Troxel: a very architectural approach. I mean, you have to synthesize

all of the different inputs into something, right? And sometimes it's a physical

[00:11:00] environment as architecture, sometimes it's a tool and you're still have to, through all the different aspects of what people want, what people need, there's a series of trade-offs in there versus development time and, and.

There's so many things that go into that plus user experience. What does it feel like to use the tool? What is, how there's so many

pieces to that. It is actually, I, I appreciate what

you're saying about it being kind of this architectural

process as well.

Yeah. I think that's why you, uh, you see quite a few ex architects

in, uh, product management or UX design, because it is that role where you're trying to bring everything together, uh, uh, and kind of

orchestrate everything, uh, into its

final shape

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk about what you're doing specifically at KOPE with the tools that you are ma. You're basically the CTO, you are

the CTO at KOPE, and tell us about what

[00:12:00] Yes. doing there.

there's. Yeah, so there's, uh, three of us co-founders, mark, Dave, and myself. And, uh, you know, we've, uh, kind of split the roles between us. So, uh, I work as

our, our

Radu Gidei: CTO

Evan Troxel: essentially looking after our technology strategy and product development. So all the product we're building, it's, it's part of my group.

Radu: Uh, we actually

build the software and, you know, take care of that entire end-to-end process essentially. So, um, everything from, uh, uh, you know, having our PMs, uh, come up with features, uh, that design the UX for it, uh, test with users, build the software, deploy to our cloud, uh, the, the whole, um, end-to-end experience

essentially.

Evan Troxel: Great, and, and so maybe you can walk us through what KOPE does, because this isn't something we spent a lot of time on. When I talked to Mark and David, that was a big picture vision for the industry. There was some .

[00:13:00] Larger buckets kind of established about a marketplace and talking about, you know, connecting design to fabrication and modular construction.

And, and there there was a lot of kind of big picture stuff. But I want to get more nuts and bolts specific with you about

what, and, and maybe let's go back and say like, 'cause you had an initial vision and I'm wondering if that has changed over

time, uh, how things have changed over time. Because change

always happens, right?

It's, it's, you can't, can't

perfectly predict where you're gonna end up. So maybe take us on a journey of, of what you've been doing with KOPE over the last several years.

Radu: Yeah, it's a hundred percent changed over time, but I would say that the shape of it has changed, but not the vision itself. So we, we actually had this vision quite early on, and we haven't wavered much, uh, from it of, building a, a, a platform. to accelerate the adoption of offsite construction. [00:14:00] So, um, you know, we, we were, we started off as a consultancy, um, building products and tools for, um, our clients and then gradually building things for ourselves. Um, right. And one of the things we, we saw in doing this was, um, people wanting to move to offsite construction, whether they're contractors, architects, or you know, manufacturers, but not necessarily having the means to do so, the tools

or the know-how or the experience.

Uh, there were various different kind of roadblocks to them doing that. So we wanted, we had this vision of like, okay, we can build something here that's, uh, kind of bridges that gap in the same way or addresses the same challenges that we had as an industry adopting BIM, right? Everyone wanted to do it, but there wasn't like a one button

solution

to how to do it. So could we, could we have another one of those challenges on our hand with, uh, with offsite construction? And if, you know, our, [00:15:00] our thesis is that yes, it's, it's exactly what it that will be. So we have to build something to help it

make it easier, essentially

for people

move to that. So it's, it's still in that vein of helping designers build design and builders build and, uh, um, you know, not necessarily building things ourselves, um, in terms of physical construction, but providing a software platform for people to be able to do that.

So we started off with this vision of, um, you know, going from a, all the way from a, a site to a finished building and employing offsite construction at every step of the way and doing a lot of the heavy lifting through computational design and generative design and all of these, uh, other techniques. And we haven't really. wavered from that much. Uh, we, we have, we actually have a sketch of a, on a whiteboard that we did back in January, 2020, I think, um, of all the components that would be needed and all the moving [00:16:00] pieces. And we thought it was too

ambitious at the time. So we said, okay, what's the smallest version of this we could build? Uh, and we started with what we now call our workflow engine, which is basically a, um, a computation engine in the cloud. Think of it as dynamo in the cloud, if you will, right? Where instead of having very small nodes that deal with, uh, you know, make a cube or make a rectangle, we have, we're working at a kind of a, the next level of abstraction where you're dealing with products or, uh, systems that you apply to a building.

So you're dealing with like, okay, the wall system or the internal partitions or the floor.

It's actually, and you orchestrate these things together into a workflow to be able to then automate, uh, this transition from design to construction using prefabricated, uh, products and

techniques.

Evan Troxel: So how prevalent are prefabrication [00:17:00] outfits where you're targeting, I you, I assume you're really based outta the uk so you're really targeting UK based contractors or prefab, uh, facilities and, and companies. So it, there's gotta be a market there and I'm just wondering because I, there are some in the United States as well, but I, I can't imagine that there's enough saturation in that market here to, and you tell me, I mean, maybe I'm completely wrong, but, um, there, there's gotta

be, it has to be a pretty big market for you to, to chase after that, so specifically

Radu: it, yeah, it is a, it is a very big market and I think

it's only gonna get bigger. Um, and one of, one of the reasons for that is adoption of these products and, and ways of building, uh, has been hampered, uh, you know, by a couple of challenges. And that's what we're trying to address. So if we're successful, uh, with, with our endeavor, we will make the market bigger as well.

We [00:18:00] will help everyone use these things more, and they will kind of, you know, have a snowball

effect almost. Um, we are most prevalent, uh, in the UK and the US at

the moment,

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Radu: so we have customers on both sides of, pond and, yeah. I, I guess there are differences between the two markets. So in the UK you would see Products like precast

concrete slab used a bit more, um, or, you know, different wall cassettes and the US you might have different names. You might call, you know, drywall versus plasterboard and things like that, but you might use a lot more timber framing, uh, systems for offsite. But I think there's still a heavy usage on both sides. Um, what's not, it's just not visible essentially. Um, so contractors are using these systems, but a lot of times they only use one or two systems that they know of or that they've

worked with before, um, or that they've, uh, seen, uh, their colleague use [00:19:00] before, essentially. So there's a real barrier to finding other systems that you might be using and adopting them because

it's a risk, obviously, on a project if, uh, to, to use a system you've never used before. And the on the architectural side, there's also not a lot of knowledge of these systems

either.

Um, we, we call this challenge the, the visibility challenge, uh, that you don't have visibility into what the supply chain has to offer and what sys, what construction systems you might be able to actually make use of to improve the, the outcome of your building.

Evan Troxel: and, and I think a lot of contractors are probably coming from a place of, well, obviously a long history and experience in the industry, and they probably came through a trade. They specialized in a trade. But now you're talking about orchestrating as a gc, a lot of trades together, plus new ways of building, right?

And so to, it has [00:20:00] this compounding effect of risk like you're talking about, because when you're talking about prefabricated thing, you're, you're talking about assemblies, you're talking about even modules, right? And you're not talking about going in to do a job that is a very specific trade on a larger job site.

You're talking about creating products and delivering through logistics, those products onto site. And they're, because they're assemblies, they're probably big products, right? That get delivered to these sites. And so it

is probably a, a whole new world for a lot of contractors out there. But I'd be interested to hear like what, like you say, it's, it's only getting bigger.

What is that adoption looking like? What is that curve looking like?

Radu: I think there's a, there's a couple of blog posts on our, on our, uh, websites that kind of, uh, talk about the adoption and, uh, you know, give you some, some metrics that I don't have off the top of my head, but to to kind of paint a picture. Uh, I think one of the things that I'm, we're most excited

Radu Gidei: about for KOPE is it doesn't

Radu: require people [00:21:00] to change their workflows, uh, uh, and completely revolutionize how they work.

So what I mean by that is contractors are already orchestrators of different subtracts. So, for example, in the UK, you know, some of the tier one or largest contractors we have, uh, they don't physically necessarily build, they, they subcontract a lot of things

out. So you might have someone, someone else being subcontracted to deliver the floor package, someone subcontracted to deliver the interior partitions package. Now they might actually have builders that come on site and, and work, but a lot of times it's this kind of orchestration of other trades and other, um, Uh, materials that go into a building. So with with offsite, what we're trying to do is make it easier for, uh, contractors to basically find the right, uh, offsite supplier that could fulfill that, uh, that package of work essentially.

So if you're looking, uh, if you're looking for [00:22:00] example for how do I make my floor, uh, a bit more, uh, emission friendly, uh, so you know, lower carbon, how do I make it lighter? Um, is there another system I could use to kind of fulfill some of these specifications or performance targets I have better than the design I always go to, which is maybe port concrete or something else. So this visibility challenge that we're tackling with our marketplace where we enable people to go there, find the right supplier for the right system that they're looking, looking for, and, uh, use that in their ability. It doesn't have to be a fully prefabricated building. but you can partially adopt these things for your various, uh, parts of

the

building,

Evan Troxel: So when you say marketplace, and I, I, I got this, I gleaned this from the previous episode with Mark and David, but the idea of a marketplace is also a kind of

a phone book of connections in the

Radu: huh?

Evan Troxel: It's not just a place to go find products or technology, it's a [00:23:00] place to go find people

as well. And, And, so then you have this ability to connect.

And this is a lot of in alignment with the work that I'm doing at at tech, which is it when I don't know what I don't know, who do I need to talk to so that I get off on the right foot? And I think it's so interesting as a technology company delivering a product for offsite construction as well, that you're actually creating the connecting points.

So that people can be more successful in their business when they're delivering this kind of productized architecture almost, or buildings in, in component, in these larger assemblies of components. And, and that to me, you're doing this handholding for the benefit of the whole industry. You're connecting the dots, you're helping them help themselves, right?

And, and, and offer a wider range of services or products that they could potentially deliver to a, to a

client.

Radu: Absolutely. And [00:24:00] that's one of the reasons why the, the, the marketplace is free. Uh, there is no kind of gate to access it. Uh, we, we saw it as a

catalyst for the industry to, adopt offsite and, you know, shed some light into the supply chain, what it can do, because there are some fantastic buildings out there that have used offsite

products and systems. Um, so if we showcase them, connect that to who were the suppliers on that, who were the consultants on that as well? So you have this interconnected set of data where you can see a project you liked, find a supplier for it, find a consultant, uh, maybe on the architectural side or the structural side, or, um, so it, it really kind of can help you establish some of those connections.

We have tools to get you, put you in touch with 'em directly. And that obviously brings us to the, the, the second part of our, our product, which is called construct, which is, uh, the step you would take after you find something you, you

are interested in. So [00:25:00] if I have a design I'm looking to build, and I find, okay, I've got these two floor suppliers that I'm interested in.

One might be a, a timber wall set, the other might be a precast concrete slab, wildly different. Um, how would these

apply to my design? So that's where co construct kicks in. And this is where our, you know, workflow engine and all of the automation tools and computational design that we've done over the years, kind of Applies, uh, to basically help you pick a product, upload a bit model, apply that product to

that

bit model, .

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Radu: and we're, we're really striving for it to be as simple and experienced as that.

Evan Troxel: So can you explain

how that kind of works? Because the, the idea, at least in my mind, is that the design team is gonna come with a fairly generic set of models so that when they

select the appropriate construction system, it might, it might [00:26:00] go back and modify their design model a little bit based on different constraints of different assemblies.

Right? So if, if you had a concrete floor cassette versus a A C L T floor cassette or something like that, would have different constraints to them, which could change the layout. And so you don't want to overdo it on the design side at least early. You want to, you want to keep it like loose as much, as much as you can, but still be going down a design direction.

Can you talk about how that negotiation, that back and forth happens, and how you help facilitate that so that people aren't redoing

their work?

Radu: Yeah, absolutely. It's, uh, this, uh, kind of nicely segues into one of the, the, the second challenges we see with offsite construction, which is, we call it variation, where, uh, you know, it's very easy to produce 1

million of the same house,

uh, manufacture it, uh, repeatable, uh, all the same. It's very hard to, uh, basically say, I have this base design, [00:27:00] but I need this wall moved by one meter, uh, for this one house, and I need this floor higher, uh, uh, for this other variation of the design.

So it's very hard to accommodate these, uh, variations, which is kind of why we talk for about, uh, The mass customization, uh, side of it. So coming back to that workflow and how do we keep people from going back and forth, we actually wanna enable them to go back and forth, uh, a little bit, but at speed. So that's, that's the trick.

Evan Troxel: So in an ideal world, you would design the building with a specific system in mind for every single part of the building

from day one, and it would get built and,

you know,

that would be outcomes. Uh, exactly right,

In

reality, that's not what happens, right.

For the vast majority of buildings, like, uh, along of various points in the design, you might think, could I use an offsite system for this?

Radu: So we're, we're basically trying to build on ramps at these various points to allow you to, to go in at any point and say, I want to test [00:28:00] some products for this part of my building. It could be multiple systems at the same time. So we've had workflows where we've done floors, walls, uh, you know, ceilings, other things at the same time.

Or it could be just one of these. Systems. Uh, but the idea is to enable you to, to test, uh, how the product would work in your specific building. Uh, taking into consideration the, the rules and the constraints of that particular product, right? And give you very rich metrics to be able to then make designs,

uh, and decisions, uh, whether you want to tweak the design, whether you want to tweak the product, uh, configuration,

and kind of keep going.

Evan Troxel: I was gonna ask right there if, if

there is a . A method behind the digital, or if there's a companion to the digital side, which is the people side, to actually tap into the wisdom of the fabricator, uh, or the, the general contractor or the designer. [00:29:00] Right. This kind of

two-way communication that's so important

to, to,

know what the potential pitfalls are, what the constraints are for the system.

Because when you say tweak a system, it's like, that could mean a million different things. Right? And you would want to talk to somebody right then

and say, what can I do? What can't I do? What are the, what's the question I should be asking? Because these are the kinds of, this wisdom exists in the industry and it's leaving the industry without getting captured anywhere. Right. And that's a, that's a side problem that I don't, I don't know that you guys . Are addressing or even have the ability to address, or if anybody

does, because nobody's really doing it. Right. It the, but, but this whole idea of connecting to the, to the wisdom side, along with the tools so that people make the best decisions.

Because often we find that the tools or the products or the, the data itself doesn't offer that insight that we need from somebody who has

the experience.

Radu: Yeah, [00:30:00] absolutely. So we do see this problem of, of you know, brain train in the industry, but also A sheer workforce strain. Uh, there just aren't enough people to go around to build these things and the knowledge of how these, uh, uh, things are built is getting lost. So part of our, our approach is when we work with a manufacturer to put their

Radu Gidei: system up on KOPE, is we work

Radu: directly with that team that has that knowhow.

Um, and again, when you work with a manufacturer,

it might not be one person. Uh, you know, there might be someone that knows very well how the thing actually gets assembled or, or built on the, the factory floor. There might be other people that know more about design constraints of this thing. There might be other people that know about the

logistics of this, uh, particular piece of, uh, uh, of a, of a construction. So we work with that entire team, essentially to, to try and capture as many of those, uh, facets of a

product as possible to basically package it up. As the, the configurable product

Radu Gidei: you see in [00:31:00] KOPE essentially.

Radu: So when you're working with a, a, a

Radu Gidei: product in KOPE and you,

Radu: you know, for example, you see a slider for a particular parameter or some aspect of that product, you, you know, that, uh, someone's spoken to that manufacturing and knows what the minimum and maximum is, and there's a reason.

It's those values. So you can't essentially go outside of what's permissible in that system.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, so you basically get a great starting point of realistic expectations in what the par parameters are that are

changeable, right? And, and then

if it's something, if I have an idea that goes outside of that, that's when I would want to connect with somebody

and talk to them.

Radu: Yeah. And there, there might actually be another step in between. So one of the, the really cool things

Radu Gidei: we have in KOPE is our optimization

Radu: engine. So, you know, when you go to apply one of these products to your building, you, you always have a, a, you know, an immediate start. [00:32:00] You have default values for everything.

You can just press, go and see what be

a good starting point. Then you can tweak it and find, actually, if I, if I tell a telco I want slightly higher spacing for, you know, some of these internal studs or, or things in a, in a wall cassette, I might get, you know, a more efficient layout. Right. Where our optimization engine kicks in is it allows you to, uh, basically automate a lot of that heavy lifting and a lot of that back and forth, essentially.

So we have a very simple interface that allows people to say, I want these three things to vary to, to essentially to change their values, uh, in ways that are acceptable. And I have these five of 10 goals in mind. I want, you know, minimal waste. I want maybe minimal cost, but you know, you might be making different trade offs in different types of designs. And then you press run, you run, uh, our optimization. So engine on top of this. So we basically [00:33:00] apply that product to your building, thousands and thousands of times in the cloud. Uh, we come back with what is, uh, an optimal set of, uh, designs and you can obviously explore those designs and find the right trade-offs for your, your particular building.

Radu Gidei: Save that, uh, design, and then continue working with the outputs.

Uh, essentially. So one of the, the, the things, going back to that idea of the, uh, the back and forth between design tools, where probably the only one that I can think of right now, platforms out there that's, um, uses as input and output. So we don't use it as a kind of dead end format. We, we take it as an input. We work with it, and we give you back so that you can act, actually integrate it back into your design tools and use those outputs directly.

Evan Troxel: let's stick on that for a minute. How, how has IFC been work [00:34:00] with? I mean, it's, it's basically is is it? Okay, so you're smiling, tell, tell us what you're thinking. When I, when I

ask Yeah. question,

Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a sticking point in the industry, in the conversation right now, isn't it? Uh, it's not a perfect, uh, standard by any means. It's a, it's a decent schema. It is bloated, it is hard to work with. It's got complexities and layers. Um, but, uh, it does quite a few things, right? Quite, quite a few things wrong.

Radu: Um, it's redeeming quality is that it is the only one that pretty much everyone agrees

on. And most software

packages, uh, accept. So, you know, there's, there's really only two approaches here. Either you make, well, three, let's say, uh, either you have some closed source proprietary format that only you know about, or you have some kind of open schema that you tell people about and everyone has to

adopt yours, or you [00:35:00] use this common

standard, right? This is

only one of these three. Um, we've tried all

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Radu: and we've, uh, we've kind of, uh, ended up in, in a slightly hybrid world. But, uh, yeah, at the end of the, at the end of the day, we wanted to maximize compatibility with, uh, our

customers' tools.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Radu: So we, we didn't want to limit it to all the ArchiCAD users or all the Navisworks

users or this or that.

Radu Gidei: So we, we made a trade off of, okay, let's spend the, quite a few engineering months on this problem, trying to build tools that work with these, uh, Complicated schema, but at the end result is that customers can upload these things, uh, directly to our, our product and kind of hit the

ground

Evan Troxel: And when you're

talking about

Radu: obviously we,

Evan Troxel: you're talking about the design side or the construction side, or

both?

Radu: uh, a bit of both. So our, our [00:36:00] customers are both from the contractor side, uh, or

the manufacturing side, right? Uh, there's, there's some usage from the more kind of design architectural side, but that's not necessarily our core audience at,

at this point in time. It's mainly, mainly manufacturers that, uh, want to speed themselves up. Uh, for example, when they respond to a tender, uh, they would use our tool to actually automate their own process and respond to that tender, you know, in five minutes,

not

Evan Troxel: Mm, mm-hmm.

Radu: Or contractors on the other side of the fence, who would, uh, you know, similarly test different, uh, products to, to kind of apply to the

building.

Evan Troxel: Right. Right. So, are you staying on thing for a minute? Are you actively contributing back into that ecosystem of, of the, the standard to help it get to where you see it needing to go? Or is there a

a wall there that you're not willing to, to go through?

Radu: I, [00:37:00] I think it's less about willingness and more about, uh, time and opportunity and, uh, uh, you know, doing it at the right moment. So at the moment, we aren't contributing, uh, in, in the sense that we're not, you know, part of building spark or trying to influence the standard itself. because we, we just have too much to build and we

need to move

too quickly.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I get that.

Radu: So, uh,

you know, it's a fairly stable standard. It takes

years for it to change, so it's gonna be around for quite a while. So for us to, to priorities obviously to, to build for our customers as quickly

as we can.

Evan Troxel: Now

Radu: but that doesn't mean that we won't be looking to contribute

in the

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I mean that, that that is a key component to it, right? It's, it's like architects complaining about the AIA, but they're also members of AIA saying, what are you doing for us? And it's like, well, what are you

doing to help steer the AIA as a member too? And it, so it's, it's not dissimilar from that in that the, the

Building smart people who are [00:38:00] participating in that are also contributing to steering where it goes. But I know it's also there. It is very slow moving and I can imagine that's really frustrating for bleeding edge tech companies to participate in as well when they also have to build a product. And I mean, there, it's, it's

complicated.

I, I totally get it.

Radu Gidei: Yeah. And you know, another way to look at participation is, uh, actually putting out a tool that has good support for input and output, and uses it as the kind of the pass through format. It, you know, there isn't much

out there that does that. Uh, there's viewers for and, uh, you know, we're seeing some, some really cool things come out of the open source community with, uh, you know, uh, the, the blender BIM side of things and, uh, J S.

But

Radu: there aren't many tools that kind of use it as an input and then allow you to do stuff with it. Uh, k or recently another startup has, has been doing some really interesting things there. [00:39:00] So I think even just having robust support for this is already kind of contributing, uh, somewhat to that conversation and that to that discussion, uh, and enabling people to say, okay, like, you know, we can invest and we can follow

this route as well.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Radu: cause it, it would've been much more, much easier for us to just come up with our own closed format and, uh, you know, call it

a day.

Evan Troxel: Hmm Hmm So ultimately you decided to go down the route for and I, and I'm just wondering if that's something your customers. Have given you feedback on what, because I can imagine there's a, there's a good number of them. They're like, what is IFC? Like, they don't even know that it's maybe there, but then there's, I'm sure there's

other feedback that you've gotten that, that has shown you that you made a good decision in this

to go down that road.

Radu Gidei: Yeah. And it's it's been, uh, less direct as in like, it's not like, uh, customers going like, oh my God, you

support . [00:40:00] Yes. it's more like, uh, I wanna use your tool and, uh, I use these five tools. Uh, you know, can your tool connect to these? And being able to say yes, because four out of five of those export , the other one does something else

we can work with. That's what customers appreciate. Uh, not having to. Change their workflow too much, essentially, and being able to retain the investment that frankly, they've, they've done over years

into their tools, right? So a practice adopting Revit or ArchiCAD, they have years

of investment in training and standards and those things, and being able to just press export , uh, is great for them. Now, I don't, don't wanna dwell too much on the IFC side, but we do support direct

Revit uploads as well. So for us, it's all about giving, users, the least amount of friction to, to start playing with our, our platform and, and using it and getting the

benefits

of it.

Evan Troxel: sure. So I think, [00:41:00] I think we've talked

enough about your point, and, and

I Yeah. it's an interesting side, side route that we, that we went down there, that we had the opportunity to go down.

But I'm wondering, you, you know, you talk about the tools that you're making and you're talking about different components and assemblies, and can you give us an idea of the types of projects people are actually doing with KOPE so that we have some thing that we can put a picture in our mind to, um, like what kinds of buildings, what sizes of buildings, what kinds of spaces and, and

things like that?

Radu: Yeah, so that's a good question. I think that the, the cool answer to that is that it, we've seen pretty much

anything in there. So we've seen single family residential, for example, we we're working with a manufacturer from Canada, actually, um, uh, who mostly applies their system to, to kind of, you know, detached houses as

they're called in the uk. Um, and it's a single family's home, essentially. So, and they, we, we do the entire, the entire exterior [00:42:00] envelope essentially with these walker sets. That's at one end of the spectrum. Um, You might even use it for smaller things such as inside, uh, your, one of your apartment layouts or something like that.

You might wanna do your internal partitions from using a particular

system, or you want, might wanna optimize your pla board or drywall usage. Uh, where we have some fantastic results in, uh, kind of, uh, reducing waste there. So it could be as, as small as three walls, uh, all the way to the other end of the spectrum where we have commercial office building towers in London that, uh, we're looking at precast, concrete slabs, for example, and a few other systems and they were able to save, a large amount of money, to not, uh, break any rules here

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Uh,

Radu Gidei: what I'm allowed to say.

Evan Troxel: Can we talk about that drywall example for a second? I, I'm interested

to hear that because, I think a lot of times coming at the problem from an architect's point of view, I mean, I, I read an article [00:43:00] recently, it's like, architects aren't gonna save the world. And it was speaking to, you know, the carbon emissions and sustainability and one project at a time, kind of coming at it back and saying, We want to save the world.

We should do everything we can to implement sustainable practices, uh, renewable energy, uh, lightweight systems that, you know, the things that you can take apart later. Think about the whole building

lifecycle on every project.

Ultimately, our clients are paying for something. Oftentimes they want the cheapest thing that they can get right now because they're not interested in the 50 year lifecycle of the building, because they're not gonna be around then, as an example.

Um, and so what is our part in that? And, and just trying to kind of say, can we just be realistic about that? Now, at the same time as an architect coming at the problem and saying, look, by using this tool, I've saved the project, or I've given the project the ability to use [00:44:00] less drywall because we're reusing the waste pieces in a, in another manner.

But then when a contractor takes over, They're just gonna do it how they do it. Right. And so your audience is the contractor. So I think you're coming at this from, from the other side and saying, our contractors are buying into this idea. They're looking at the savings, the waste reusability that they can, it's not really waste anymore.

Right. It's, it's getting put back into the project.

So kind of talk through what you're seeing happen in the industry there, because I, love hearing that that's coming from the contractor

side.

Radu: Yeah. And it's uh, uh, I have a, a pretty good anecdote, I guess with the usage of both the contractor and, uh, offsite builder side actually. So I, I'll get

into that in a second. But, uh, to, to your wider point of like, what can architects do and, and, you know, what should we be doing? I think one of the reasons we

Radu Gidei: approach KOPE the way we

Radu: do is and allow [00:45:00] you to do these kind of partial, uh, Updates or, or partial applications of a product or a building. So take only this wall or only look at floors, uh, you know, in this area, or, uh, look at all the internal partitions that have this type, uh, uh, of code. Essentially. One of the reasons we're approaching that is because not every building is a

brand new building, uh, that's gonna be built using

this system from scratch, right?

It might be a renovation, it might be that, uh, actually the, the Shell and core are already up and it's later in the design stage that we're, they're, they're even hearing about this tool or getting a chance to use it. Um, so actually supporting all of those different points in the life cycle of a, of a building, uh, is I think one of the ways we could be looking at this one.

Not everything is built from scratch. Uh, not everything has to be decided from day one. I. Some of these things, uh, can actually be, uh, swapped in and out later [00:46:00] on, and you can try to find solutions where you might normally not look for them. Um, essentially coming back to that, uh, analogy with the contractors and the, the offset builders.

So obviously contractors would like to eliminate waste, uh, say save money, uh, on, on the plaster board, and especially time, uh, essentially. So if you can come up with a good layout that kind of optimizes for installation speed, uh, and minimal amount of cuts, it might use a tiny bit more material, but you might have less waste and be 30% faster, for example. So this is where, you know, we've seen usage of our optimization engine kick in and be able to surface these options that they hadn't considered before. Right? On the other end of the spectrum, we might have, uh, we've worked with an offsite builder who, who is, uh, using modular. So they were building volumetric uh, modules. And obviously they, they needed something for their internal partitions and they were using [00:47:00] plasterboard, but they had an automated

cutting line, right? So all of a sudden you don't really mind as much if you have to do complex cuts anymore. So, um, we were able to, to essentially take that into account and optimize for simple versus complex cuts and, you know, is it a human cutting?

Is it a machine cutting to have different trade offs of speed and, uh, waste material essentially so that you maximize your outcomes for ev for your particular, uh, set of circumstances.

Evan Troxel: I would imagine also at that point you're actually talking about dollars to

produce something where, whereas that's very conceptual

for on the architect, on the design side and when the contractor sees it. And you're saying there's a checkbox for complex cuts versus simple cuts. And what does that mean?

Uh, 'cause I think we only do simple cuts and what, and then you can actually have a conversation about, The cost and the R O I for implementing a

system [00:48:00] like that into their outfit that they maybe don't have already. I think that's a really interesting kind of outcome that can happen

during this process.

Radu: and it has, we, we've seen our customers do exactly that. So, you know, we obviously, uh, produce highly detailed outputs and highly detailed, uh, takeoff from those outputs. So very accurate dollar numbers and quantities and all of these things. But the cool thing about that is, uh, you know, going back to our optimization engine, It, it allows people to say, I don't know what this simple or complex cut thing does. So I'm, I want to play around with that, vary that a bit. I also don't know if I should cut my plaster board at the, uh, you know, edge of a door or in the middle of a door, or, you know, should I consider rotating things 90 degrees? Is that more efficient?

I have no clue.

Right? So they, they say, okay, I want these things to vary. Uh, and, you know, what are your goals then? Uh, well, I would like to minimize for cost, [00:49:00] for example. So then you're able to run, uh, these

Radu Gidei: things at KOPE and see what

Radu: kind of, uh, results are produced for what kind of different inputs and trade-offs. So you can then spot, okay. Actually the complex cut thing is making the cost double because I don't know, I'm just giving an example here.

But, um, you know, you might see that actually rotating the panels in certain circumstances gives a, you know, 5%, uh, saving. So it, it kind of gives you, opportunity to, to find out what the best, uh, application of a particular product might be because you, it's, it's like you said earlier, uh, manufacturers know how that product works, but the architect might not

be familiar with it, right? So it's about giving them the space where they can explore, they can play with it. Uh, you can kind of get to start to, to learn how the system works and optimize it for your own particular

needs.

Evan Troxel: When you're creating that optimized, and [00:50:00] I'm gonna put that in in my famous podcasting air quotes, because you have talked to

somebody to figure out what the optimal way to do something is. That's one data point, right? You might talk to another contractor and they'd be like, what are you talking about?

This, this way is way faster, better, whatever. And, and so then you could get additional data points to inform maybe options in how you approach things. Or maybe

you, you decide, Nope, this is the best way based on outcomes that we've seen or the things that we've measured for, for example. I think it's so

interesting because I, I mean, I've gone through the same thing, like if I remodel a room in my house and I need to re drywall it, I would do it a certain way based on my experience or what I think, maybe my preconceived ideas.

But if I have a, a, somebody who come in who's done drywall for 30 years, which I did, and they say, Nope, we do it like this. And, and it was like kind of

mind blowing to me to say, oh, that's how the pros do it. That [00:51:00] is way different than what I thought, uh, in my, because I don't work in that trade. I don't do that every single day.

And I don't, and then I even get to say why. Right? Because that's, that's the important part. Well, why do you do it like that? Oh, here's five reasons why we do it like that. And, and so now you're

doing that on behalf of the design teams so that you get this optimization output, optimized output. By having those conversations with contractors up front, they're sharing that information with you to their benefit because they're the ones buying this product potentially.

Right. So I'm just interested in that

whole, the way that that all kind of happens in unfolds and. You've seen, you've been able to ask the questions behind, behind the scenes of how, how, and why do you do it like this? And I think that that is always something that comes late in the game in traditional construction practices, which is like, I drew this detail, here's how I want you to build it.

And the contractor's like, we don't build like that . [00:52:00] We don't do it like that. We do it like this and we only learn that at the end. But what you're doing is you're injecting that optimization into

the beginning,

Radu: Yeah. 'cause it's that, all that knowledge and know-how is basically embedded into that product

and how it's applied. Right? So the second you apply it, you're, you're using that extracted knowledge and experience. And, you know, one of the funny things with something as simple as plasterboard is, uh, like you said, the pros do it one way, but then you figure out, actually the pros do it a different way in the UK

versus the US.

And actually, if they use this particular brand of plasterboard, then they actually do it slightly differently again because that manufacturer has, I know, some weird edge or, uh, you know, they make the panel slightly, uh, uh, wider than the rest or, or something like that. So it's all of these little moments that, uh, of knowledge that get embedded into these, these products.

And, uh, you get to benefit from that when you apply them with. Sometimes without knowing. [00:53:00] Other times when you run them enough times, you start to suss it out yourself. So it kind of, it, it gives you a glimpse into the black box a bit. Uh, you start to kind of reverse engineer it in your head, if you will. Um, you know, if you've applied the same thing to a, a, a wall a hundred times, you start to spot the patterns, so you might understand how that product works. Um, but the, the idea is that we're, we're trying to, to kind of, uh, shrink down that manufacturer and put them next to you

on your desk.

Every time you, you, you try to play with one of these, uh, products.

Evan Troxel: It's this whole, uh, co-pilot thing.

We're hearing everybody, ,everybody used

the word right. Uh, recently with the ai, you've got KOPE, ai, you must be using ai, you must have a co-pilot

too, right? That's what you're talking about. But this idea of having that expertise available

in the co-create as a

co-creation in the process of, of designing

and building, I think is, it's an, it's an appropriate analogy to, to, [00:54:00] to make.

And I I love how you kind of framed it as shrinking them down and making them available all the time right

there on your desk.

Radu: Uh, I mean, I'd love to have a little talking version next to me on my desk, right. That tells you, no, don't do that. You know?

Evan Troxel: I think architects,

Radu: is

as close to it as we can

Evan Troxel: already have that. No, don't do that. No, don't do that. No, don't do it like that. You're doing it wrong. You're doing

it wrong. Yeah.

Radu: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: the life

of an architect.

Radu: main, yeah. Mainly takes the form of Revit error, but,

uh,

Evan Troxel: Right, right. Warnings and errors. Yes. , are you sure?

Are you sure you want just a little slap on the hand

every time? Yeah. A, a physical manifestation

Radu: you've done, you've done,

that wrong.

So, uh,

yeah. We'll give you the option to delete everything. Alright?

Evan Troxel: you mentioned a couple of project

types. Are there, are there larger project types that this is being implemented on as well? These, these, uh, cus the, the construction, the, you know, are, are they doing it on, on mid-rise,

high-rise and these, these prefabricated cassettes?

Radu: Yeah. So,

Evan Troxel: answer [00:55:00] is yes.

Radu: yeah, so on the commercial side, we've, we've seen it on high-rise offices in London, so quite, quite large, uh, buildings. Uh, we've also seen this used for large span buildings, so, you know,

monster warehouses or, or things like that. Uh, not necessarily warehouses, but a very long and wide building with only, you know, uh, one, one

floor essentially. And by one floor, I mean, uh, one extra floor apart

from ground

floor, just to be extra clear.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Radu: Uh, so it, it's kind of every typology

in between. Uh, and, and that, that's part of the beauty of it, that it's fairly agnostic, uh, in terms of, uh, what type of building you use because it's, it's not about the type of the building, but about the, uh, the construction system that you're applying.

Evan Troxel: And so when you're talking about these components, these assemblies, these cassettes, uh, I think about, you know, manageable size components. But when you're talking about designing a building, you're talking about a site, you're talking about a [00:56:00] structural system, you're talking about some of these larger components.

Are you dealing with

those as well?

Radu: We are dealing with some structural components already. Yes. So, uh, uh, um, I'm trying to think what the, the right example would be, but, um, some of these systems are already structural, so,

uh, there are, uh, you know, for example, yeah, you know, we have sips and CL LT systems that, uh, you know, are load bearing and you know, you have to take that into consideration. There is obviously the precast concrete stuff is structural. And this is where, uh, you know, just having a floor that you're applying these things to isn't enough. You need to know about the columns in, in that, uh, building and some of these other elements, which is why we take in that entire BIM model as the inputs and you take those things into consideration.

So, uh, you're, you're then able to go around the columns or, you know, whatever it is that product needs to do, essentially to get a good layout.

Evan Troxel: I, I, I know we're getting close to our, [00:57:00] our time here, but I would love it if you could explain, and maybe as a final chapter in this episode, kinda what the user experience is like. You tapped into that earlier on in the conversation when you're designing your tools,

but. Paint a picture for someone who is a user of KOPE, and maybe you can do it from a couple of different vantage points on the construction side, maybe on the design side.

I know they're, they're probably a little different, but what, what do people experience when they're using KOPE and, and, and talk about what it's actually like? Like what is this running on your computer? Is it running in the cloud? Just, just talk through that general, a general scenario of the day in the life of a KOPE user from a couple of different vantage points.

Radu: That's a, that's a great question. Let me see

if I can do it justice. Um, so first

Radu Gidei: things first. KOPE is all cloud-based,

Radu: so everything we do is running in the cloud. Nothing runs on your computer, and the, the [00:58:00] way you interact with our software is through your browser. So, um, the marketplace has, uh, you know, one particular web app that you're interacting with. And our co-construct product is, uh, uh, another one. And they're, they're interlinked. So coming back to the, the. The user journey. Let's, uh, let's assume you're a, contractor, right? And you have a

Radu Gidei: license of KOPE and you get

Radu: a, uh, a new project in and, uh, maybe it's a tender stage or you know, maybe it's even on site.

Then you're just trying to figure out, uh, I think there might be a better way to do these internal partitions, right, than this kind of, uh, frame, uh, you

know,

Evan Troxel: Stick frame or

Radu: timber framing

plus. Exactly right. So you have this idea like, okay, I might, I might wanna try something out here, right? So you go onto the, uh, Coke marketplace and uh, you know, you go to the regional one for us or uk, wherever you're based, and you might look for things that, uh, uh, you know, apply to walls. So [00:59:00] you might look for, uh, any type of system that can do internal partitions. You might say, I want this to be within, I. Uh, you know, the supplier for this to be within a hundred miles of this particular address, because I want to keep, uh, logistics, uh, uh, and kind of transport low for environmental impact reasons. And you might want to, you know, add other filters to kind of find the right supplier to say, I want them to be accredited with this particular thing. And, uh, you know, all of these other things that we give you to kind of find the right supplier. You then find a couple of them. You, you might compare them, you might look at the projects they've done.

You might, uh, then actually some of them might have what we call a flex configurator, which is a configurator that, uh, you can use in isolation without a project. So it's just kind of a, a little sandbox environment to get a sense of what their system

might be like. Um, so you play around with those and, you know, you narrow it down to, let's say two manufacturers.

Evan Troxel: One's a a, [01:00:00] a timber walker set, and the other is a. Let's say a SIPS

provider,

Okay.

And you add them, uh, you add them to what we call a supply chain. So it's kind of like a, a favorite sort of bookmarks folder, right? The, the cool

Radu Gidei: thing about KOPE is that everything

Radu: you do is collaborative in the sense that you are within your company account, and all of your colleagues can see all of these things you're doing. So as soon as I've created that supply chain, I give it a name and you know, these suppliers go into that supply chain, my colleagues can find it, uh, the next time

they log

on, right? So, so I might say, this is a supply chain for this particular project, or it might be for this region, or it might be for whatever reason you want, essentially. Now after you've chosen these suppliers, the next step would be, okay, I want to test this out on my particular project. So you're go into co-construct, you create a new project, you give it the address, you upload your BIM model. Uh, you know, we process that bottle, we give you a three D viewer [01:01:00] to interact with to see what the preview looks like, and then you go into the configurator essentially, and this is the step where you say, I want this building to be used as the input. Now I want to use products from this particular supply chain. So it'll be one of the two suppliers I've, uh, shortlisted essentially, and I wanna apply it to internal partitions. In this building, actually, we give you all the knobs, uh, and kind of sliders and controls to tweak that design if you want. But by default you would just press run

Evan Troxel: And just based on the classification of the objects that are in the BIM model that you uploaded, you're replacing those with something else

from this other supply chain, that workflow

that

you've created. Okay?

Radu: S So you know, the product you've selected already knows it, it gets applied to internal partitions, for example. So when you press run, we, uh, take your model. We run all of this computation in the cloud. Uh, [01:02:00] we, we take all of those partitions, we re, you know, uh, kind of isolate them from the building. We apply the product to that. So we panelize it and we know, create all the internal studs and all of the things that

might go into that product. Um, and then we, we give you the output portal that you can just drop in to overlay precisely onto that, uh, input model essentially. And as aside from the actual BIM model that is produced, you also get very rich metrics. So number of panels, number of cassettes, you know, square meterage of things, costs, all of these other metrics to help you make a decision.

Evan Troxel: And where are those costs

Radu: So in our

Evan Troxel: Are those costs coming from the panel panel

manufacturer? And

are they updated very often? Like how, because

to me there's the, the, whole idea of files, right, is that it's kind of dead

as soon

as you hit save, right? .And so you, if you

have the

old

costs and they're not the new costs, what good is it?[01:03:00]

So I would just love it if you would, if you would plug in to hear how you implement that side of it, because that's so important to actually make a decision whether you're gonna

use this or not at this point.

Radu: yeah. And, uh, you know, there's, there's a companion experience to all of this, which is from the manufacturer side where they create and upload their products onto our platform. And that's where they tell, you know, they input the cost and, and you know, all of these metrics. And it's a fully versioned experience.

Uh, so actually they have a very cool experience of, uh, you know, creating a product. And when they're ready, they hit publish, they make it available

publicly or not. So we still allow people to actually keep things private

if they want to. And, you know, they might work on a version two of their wild cassette. They might start tweaking the parameters or the cost or you know, maybe the length

has changed or something like that. And, and, you know, they could have 15

versions in between. And then when they're ready, they go like, okay, I'm now ready. I'll hit publish again. So we publish a version [01:04:00] two that the other users

might

Evan Troxel: So you're relying on them though, to update their information as if it were cost, as the example they do need

to go in and, and keep up to date. And

are they doing that? I mean, that to me seems like something

they would want to keep their finger on the pulse of because if people are using their panelizing configurator for their system, they wanna make sure that their potential future customers

have the right information.

Radu: exactly. And that's, uh, actually why we have this kind of self-serve experience for, uh, allowing manufacturers to, to control some of these things because we, they wanted to be able to, to tweak these settings without having to go through

us, essentially. Right. So, Uh, we, we try to remove ourselves from the process as much as we can and let the, the kind of, the two sides interact, uh,

directly. So manufacturers keep that up to date 'cause it's

in their interest, uh, to kind of keep it up to date. Uh, so coming back to the contractor side, uh, I've now applied this waca set to my, my, my internal [01:05:00] partitions, and I switch it out for the other products that I saw of maybe the sips one. I apply it again, play with the, uh, you know, the sliders.

Again, I can run optimization on this and decide actually I like option number 17 out of this that fits my, uh, uh, things perfectly. So I save these two results and I, I like that you mentioned the dead files comment because, uh, this is a very live environment with manufacturers tweaking their products constantly. Um, so, so we've built this feature of, of creating these snapshots of, of your results where you save one of these things and it's there for perpetuity.

Not tweakable. Essentially, if you want to tweak it, it can go back into the configurator and you continue tweaking it, but it's there kind of safely, kind of, uh, um, stored. Um, so you can always get back to it.

Evan Troxel: So at this

Radu: once you,

Evan Troxel: I have these two options, have it, has it gone through

your optimization engine yet or

Radu: yeah, it could have, it could have, [01:06:00] yeah, it could have gone already. So you could save, you know, one of the options that our optimization engine produced, or you could use that as a base to then tweak the inputs and, and some of the parameters, uh, further and get something even more custom. And, uh, the idea is that once you are happy with one of these, you save it and that's what's not

tweakable anymore.

Evan Troxel: But

you can always go back

and

tweak

No. You need the ability

the point a snapshot. It can't be live all the time.

Like we, no, we decided this is the thing we decided and, and

we're gonna move forward with that.

Radu: and there's, there's very much echoed the kind of the BIM workflows, you know, from the, the international ISO of, you know, you have your work in progress area and you have your actual approved area that's, uh, kind of

been saved, right? I'm not saying we're replacing a cd, these things should

still go in there, but it kind of helps you kind of manage the, this lifecycle of experimenting and then getting to a

point that you like. So now that we've had these, these two products applied to my building, I want to choose one of them, right? [01:07:00] So I will put them in our comparison tool and it will give the numbers side by side and tell me, okay, this one's got 23% waste stage, this one's got 15, but this one costs more. And you're able to kind of make that comparison. At any point you're able to take these outputs and actually

save them, get a A J S O N C S V Excel file out, you get your, you know, raw geometry out. All of these things, uh, you know, we will happily produce. So, you've done your comparison and now you're basically at the point where you found a product you like. It's a good layout, it saves you some money and some time. What's the next step? Well, the next step of this would be that you might want to get some, uh, either more detailed metrics or some other kind of outputs from this design. So you go to what we call a deliverables, uh, section, and this is where you can produce further outputs from this design. So if we take our internal partition [01:08:00] example, this is where I can say I now want drawings of each one of those wall ca sets. And what we do here is, uh, actually quite, quite magical, uh, really where you say you kind of configure your drawing. You say, I want a three sheets. I want these things on the title block. I want a top view and a side view. I want my dimensions to be running, not segmented, or all of these settings. And you hit run again. And we produce that drawing on demand for every single one of those wall cassettes with a bomb on the title, uh, title block, and producing both PDFs and dwg. So you put it into your CAD system or your factory floor if you have a

factory.

Evan Troxel: I I think I have

Radu: So, and that's

just one example.

Evan Troxel: let me just switch over here. I, I'm, I'm gonna insert this. Into,

Radu: Okay.

Evan Troxel: can you hear that?

No.

There's a, there's

an applause going on right now. Uh, and the

Radu: [01:09:00] Ah, great.

Evan Troxel: applause in is because, uh, this whole idea of

automating the drawing side, is so

Radu: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and it's so interesting to me that

architects still are competing on doing construction documents That is not where their

value lies their value There, there may be decisions that are documented in those construction documents on how a certain detail needs to work out or how the assembly or the performance, but it's not, and actually doing the

drawing. And so it's just music

to

my ears to hear you say that you,

That was

you automate the whole system and, and the drawings

and the, and the output because that is not where we should be spending our time competing, like actually spending our time, which we bill for on projects.

We should be billing for things that are way more

important than that.

Radu Gidei: exactly. And, you know, we produce these drawings like for every individual, uh, uh, assembly essentially. Uh, but we we're working on right now is actually producing, uh, general arrangement drawings as well. [01:10:00] Um, so a kind of a, a full floor plan, uh, to see how these things are laid out in the floor plan. And the real beauty of this is it's, it's a drawing engine really where, um, our components come in as components and we don't know much more about them, and yet we're still able to dimension them accurately every single notch

and not have overlapping dimensions.

Radu: And we're, we're, you know, we're architects at heart, so the drawings that we spit out are clean, nice drawings that you would not be embarrassed to show to your associate,

essentially.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, That's a good

Radu: That's the kind of the,

Evan Troxel: thing.

Radu: the benchmark.

Yeah. Uh, and it's taken us a long

time to get, get to this level where the drawings are so crisp and usable and, uh, uh, yeah.

So you produce all of these outputs right from your, for your design at this point, you can pretty much move into whatever tool you want. You can go back to your design tool, tweak your design. And try again.

Upload [01:11:00] a new design. Uh, you could use it as a reference. Okay. I'm super happy with these, uh, internal partitions.

I'm gonna leave them as they are. And one of the, the, the important factors here is that let's say you're using Revit, right? Uh, this isn't a Revit family. That's, uh, you can then click edit on

and tweak it and, uh, you know, change how it's put together that would make it go outside of those

manufacturing rules, right?

Radu Gidei: This is a, an file. You link in like you would an external file, and that means that all of those kind of manufacturing constraints and rules are

still kind of respected, right? Obviously you can still go into files and edit them. Uh, you know, for people that, uh, might not know that, uh, probably the, my favorite tool to do that is an notepad, uh,

for I f c

files that are, uh, uh, Uh, not I

f C extension, but the idea is that it's, it's a fairly uh, kind of, uh, you know, snapshot in moment.

Evan Troxel: This is what the

partitions [01:12:00] are, Right.

And from there you have your cost and all of these other outputs. And, uh, you know, we we're working on other integrations to kind of push it into the next step, but I can tell you that some of our customers were using these to, to produce basically, uh, uh, x, y, Z files and cutting files that were going straight into their

C

Mm. machines. .Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was gonna say there has to be then a connection to the actual production of the,

the, the items. And, and at that point you have it. And so once you really nail down the design and these decisions, and you've made your way through the different phases of design at that point, that can actually go directly to the

manufacturer to produce those parts.

Radu: Yeah.

And you know, I, I can't speak too much of, uh, you know, uh, of our roadmap, I guess, but you know, You could imagine that this side of the contractor experience will be linked to the manufacturer experience.

Uh, at one

point, um, you know, from the manufacturer [01:13:00] experience, you know, that different user persona, it would actually be a very similar workflow. The, the difference might be that they might have more detail in the outputs. They might have, you know, uh, G codes bat out and all of these other things, and they might want to keep these things private and not share them with the rest of the, the marketplace. Or they might be doing this to respond to a tender or, or, or something like that. But the basic mechanism of select the products, upload your, uh, BIM file, hit apply, uh, is, is still the kind of the core mechanic, uh,

essentially,

Evan Troxel: And just to be totally clear, 'cause I, I'm not sure it is totally clear from, from the listener's perspective, but the, the initial layout is happening in their tool of choice. It is going .

Radu: yeah.

Evan Troxel: Round trip through KOPE and then back into their

tool of choice. It may be the same tool, it might be

a different tool at that point, but it,

but what they're not doing in KOPE is they're not moving the walls around.

They're not [01:14:00] adjusting

geometry that they've drawn somewhere else in KOPE. KOPE is taking that geometry, it's doing the processing to it. It's giving the output that you then link back into the original or another design tool where you can then look at the original versus the the, the new KOPE optimized version.

It might be in a different location, maybe a little bit, maybe something's changed a little bit, and then you would tweak your original model to kind of match that at that

point. Right.

Radu: Yeah, exactly. Um,

we, so, you know, you're not moving walls and doing those

Radu Gidei: things in

KOPE at the moment.

Radu: Right. Um, one of our earliest prototypes actually was doing this, uh, live in Revit. Uh, so you were. Selecting a wall and saying, I wanna use this, uh, this particular system, and it would respond, uh, in almost real time to those changes and kind of recompute in the cloud and come back down and reapply those things to Revit. Um, you know, uh, we're still technically [01:15:00] able to do the, that kind of workflow, um, but we, we've seen slightly more demand, uh, um, on the, the kind of managed process where you have full versioning for the files, you upload full versioning for the outputs. Uh, you know, there's full versioning for the, the actual compute that happens because, uh, uh, that's maybe something that I haven't spoken about yet.

But in our workflow engine, you know, we obviously publish a lot of these

workflows ourselves. Uh, a lot of these, uh, things you run, but we actually have the capability for customers to upload their own, uh, bit of code, their own bit of logic. and run it in our infrastructure and still make use of the optimization engine and all of these other

things. Uh, but they can retain complete control of their ip. We have some really cool enterprise solutions for that.

Evan Troxel: Maybe final question here and maybe, maybe kind of a boring subject, but I'm interested because I think it, I think it's just different than what people are used [01:16:00] to. How does this change the l o d uh, narrative? Because when you're think is it coming at this from a designer and. just the architectural career that I've had different phases of design equal a different l o d when it comes to bim, right?

So the level

of detail that you have to get to, obviously it's a lower number in the early stages and a higher number in the final stages. A lot of people have, uh, arguments on the internet about what numbers should be at what stage and how high that number should go and, and, and all those things. But, but here it really seems like what you're doing is you're saying keep it simple and let the, let KOPE handle the level of detail to whatever it needs to be for the manufacturer

to make the piece and the manufacturer drives the level of detail versus the client

Demanding an L O d whatever, 400, 500, uh, 800 as in my, the

[01:17:00] mythical 800. But the, it's, it's interesting to me

to, to, for you to say no, keep it simple. On the design side will give the, the who, the person who's making the thing that, the level of detail that their machines

need to make the thing.

Radu: Yeah. And

Radu Gidei: you know, KOPE is completely,

Radu: uh, capable of going all the way down to like every single position of every nail. And we've done that for, uh, a volumetric customer, for example, where, uh, we actually lay out the, the points where the machine, the robot will actually come in like nail something, right? So e e it's just the position in space, but

it's still in the model actually. So, um, you know, we can go into that level of detail, but it, it's this kind of happy middle ground we found that works best where, uh, it's, it, it might not be the, the, the full level of detail of like what goes into manufacturing because you don't necessarily need every bolt to see as

a contractor, right? Um, but it's also not just a, a [01:18:00] monolithic wall type of solution that you might be drawing

a wall in Revit, right? It's this happy medium where it satisfies both what the contractor or, you know, the spec, we call them specifier. So it could be a contractor or architect or whoever's using the tool to kind of test these designs. And also enough level of detail so that the manufacturer would know how to, to manufacture it, but it doesn't need to replace their, you know, uh, inventor or or like solid works files or some of these other things. They might have to kind of do some of their solution. It obviously can, but it doesn't have to.

Evan Troxel: So, most products will probably be in this happy medium that's useful for, for everyone. There might be others that actually there's two versions of the product published. There's a, uh, a version that everyone can use, which is this happy medium, and there might be a private version the manufacturer has that has the full

lid,

Yeah.

Uh, or vice versa. So it's, it very much depends on the system and the manufacturer. Like, like you mentioned,

And, and then when [01:19:00] you're talking about this type of , Way, this way of building. And you're talking about offsite construction and industrialized construction techniques and prefabrication. And there's also like the owner side of that equation, which is what did

they, if that they wanted a quote unquote digital twin right, of some level of detail of their built project so that they can manage it, do facility, do facilities management on it after the fact, do, uh, simulations or whatever you might want to do in a digital twin.

It seems like the data's there, you just have to decide level you wanna see it at, what and why it would matter based on if the things you might want to do to that building in the future. But, but like you said, you have the ability to go every . Bolt placement, every nail placement, but not everybody needs that kind of detail.

And I'm just interested to hear maybe last thing here is if owners are getting value [01:20:00] out of this too, that has been unrealized

before.

Radu: yeah, I guess it depends on their involvement in that construction and

design process, right? So, uh, there's various different methods of procurements. Uh, you know, so in the UK you'd have something like design and build where the end user or client, uh, would say, you know, say I want this building, and then the contractor would, would win that and, uh, you know, deliver it as a

kind of, here's the key,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Radu: Um, so they might, they might be quite hands off in that process. You might have clients that are actually, uh, very sophisticated in terms of their, uh, you know, facility management and have specific requirements and, and all of these things. One of the, you know, another one of these benefits, uh, and kind of early decisions we made with Koch to output actual BIM models of these assemblies. And be open with all the data we produce so that you can access it, uh, you know, using, uh, either directly downloading it from the result page or through our a p i is we give [01:21:00] you all the data you want. So you can then put that into your, uh, model that you hand over for

then the, the kind of the facility management side.

So we're, we're not gonna try and go into that because that's not what we do. There are fantastic tools out there that, uh, kind of help you with that transition from as-built to facility management. And essentially we've tried to make it as compatible as we

can with, uh, existing workflows. So, uh, you know, our sweet spot is this, uh, you know, designed to constructability. Uh, portion where it's not an early stage feasibility tool. There's plenty of tools out there that, that do a great job. It's not a, a kind of a digital twin. Like, uh, you know, see your sensors overlaid, uh, to a model in, in operations kind of stage. Again, fantastic tools out there. We're in this kind of, very underserved, part of the market where you're going from a design to construction and that's when the kind of, you know, the rubber meets the road [01:22:00] and you're making a final decision, okay, this is how that wall will actually be built, irrespective of what the, the architect might have drawn or what the spec might say. This is the physical embodiment

of that construction element.

Evan Troxel: It's an earlier stage digital twin or it's a, precursor to the, to the actual

physical output.

Yeah,

Fantastic.

Radu: and you know, we've, uh, we, we've had customers use this together with early stage feasibility tools, right? So, you know, we've had Some of our previous products, like Unitize kind of help you do that. And, uh, you know, they're, they integrate very nicely with those kind of solutions. Um, so it really is designed to, to kind of have these on-ramp, on and off-ramps. Uh, pretty much any point of the, uh, design, uh,

lifecycle.

Evan Troxel: Fantastic. Well, Radu, this has been a fun conversation and I appreciate, uh, sharing everything that you've shared it. It's, and I really appreciate just kind of going through the [01:23:00] journey of what it's like to use a tool like this and the things that are possible with it, because you are doing, you, you just said it, you're serving an underserved area where the rubber meets the road, where the design actually needs to get

Created, fabricated, built. And, uh, to really look to the future of raising the level of production in that way, we need tools that support that. And so kudos to you and the team for, for making that happen. And so, uh, I'm gonna send everybody to your website and to follow you guys on LinkedIn and all the other social media where you participate.

Is there anything else that you wanna let the audience know about or, or tell them to send them to? Anything like that? To, to

wrap up here?

Um, now I'd just like to say massive. Thank you for inviting us, and, uh, it's been a, it's been a blast to have, uh, have this chat. and yeah, come talk to us if you wanna do offsite. love hearing from, uh, all sorts of, companies [01:24:00] that are involved in the construction, arena, from architecture to contractors, to manufacturers.

Radu: we'd love to hear your thoughts on offsite.

Evan Troxel: All right, Radu, thank you so much for, for your time today. Appreciate it.

Radu: Thank you.