183: ‘An Appetite for Transformation’, with Natalia Bakaeva

183: ‘An Appetite for Transformation’, with Natalia Bakaeva

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Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Natalia Bakaeva. Natalia is a registered architect, artist, and placemaker passionate about creating physical forms that reflect diverse cultural influences. She's worked on residential, commercial healthcare, educational and public space art projects.

Born and raised in the far east of Russia, her global journey includes Japan, Spain, Moscow, London, and Toronto, where she currently resides. Her dedication to the sustainability of architectural practice and diverse background led her to co-found ARKI focusing on incorporating AI agents to eliminate tedious work in design workflows, which you're gonna hear more about today.

In this episode, we explore the topics of rethinking data process and innovation and discuss the challenges of redundant work, the myth of spontaneous innovation inside firms, the value of knowledge [00:01:00] retention, and how AI and purpose-built tools like ARKI are transforming how architects access information.

Natalia shares her personal journey from practicing architect to tech founder offering insights into software design, user behavior, and what it really takes to build a more sustainable and creative practice.

A key theme from this conversation, which connects to many of my other episodes, is the challenge of talent loss in the profession.

Stay tuned until the end where I'll break down this critical issue and share concrete examples of what leadership needs to address and hopefully reverse this concerning trend. As usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes, so be sure to check those out. You can find them directly in your podcast app if you're a paid member and if you're a free member, you can find them on the website, which is trxl.Co. Lastly, you can really help the podcast by sharing the episodes with your colleagues and by commenting and sharing my [00:02:00] LinkedIn posts. You could also leave a comment over on YouTube for this episode and engage with me and other listeners there. I came away from this conversation, energized. It was amazing. And so now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Natalia Bakaeva.

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Evan Troxel: Thank you for coming onto the podcast. It's great to have you.

Natalia Bakaeva: Uh, thank you for having me, Evan.

Evan Troxel: let's start by talking about how you got to becoming a

Natalia Bakaeva: Of course.

Evan Troxel: founder, co-founder. I'm not like, I want you to tell the story, but, um, I know you have a history in the architecture industry that is wide ranging.

So give us, uh, your background.

Natalia Bakaeva: Thank you Evan. So my story starts, um, in far east of Russia in Vostok. That's where I was born. If you know the Berian Railroad, um, that's the city where it ends. So if you think about, uh, getting to [00:03:00] Moscow, which is the capital of Russia, it's about eight and a half hours flight. Just to give you a scale and perspective of where I'm actually from, uh, that's where I went to architecture school, uh, when I was 16 years old.

So for more than half of my life now, I've been an architect and consider still myself an architect. And, uh, it's been a passion of mine. You know, I always tell, um, my peers that. I was so obsessed with technology from day one. Uh, I start using more tech when I was like 18 to the point where one time my professor professors even failed me and sent me to redo a project because they wanted me to do it by hand.

And I did it on a computer, so I rebelled.

Evan Troxel: exactly the architectural profession that I went through as well. It was like there was two people using technology and it was like, what are you doing? Why are you doing te? Why are you using these tools? We want you to use these tools. And it was very much like dictated to you which [00:04:00] tools you will use to do the job.

Natalia Bakaeva: Exactly, exactly. You got it. So they failed me. They sent me to summer to summer kind of resubmission, and I spent, uh, you know, uh, the summertime just redo, redoing this project by hand this time. Um, so that was, uh, my education. We had a lot of, uh, you know, architectural physics, uh, theoretical mechanics, uh, a lot of.

Very robust, like post-Soviet type of subjects, uh, that were brought basically from Soviet Union, that's from engineering school, from civil engineering rather. And uh, from there I thought that, you know, I would like to see bigger picture. I would like to be in Europe and, uh, continue my studies there. So I went to do masters at, um, university, which is a joint program between London Metropolitan University from London, uk and, uh, British Higher School of Design, which is the, was the [00:05:00] school in Moscow.

And that's where I did my masters. And that was the opposite of everything I saw, uh, when I was going through my bachelor education. It was, um, we have a site and you decide what the problem is for this site.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Natalia Bakaeva: So. When we were going through, uh, the Bachelor, uh, you have, uh, technical requirements. You have, let's say a school and the program is 30 classrooms.

Each classroom is for certain amount of people. This is the square footage and go fit it into the building on certain site. Here I arrive into environment where you can build a city or you can build a bench,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: doesn't really matter because if you decide that the problem of this site, it lacks a bench, you should justify and concept explain why.

So, so that was definitely a huge change for me and a big personal transformation [00:06:00] that I had to go through. And then from there I decided not to stop there and, uh, continue my journey and go to North America. Um, I heard that the standards of profession were pretty high and, you know, going through license process was appealing to me and I also knew that.

Just the kind of operational flow and how things are done, um, here in Canada or the us. Uh, follow the standards and kind of the guidelines. And I, I wanted to learn about that. I wanted to be part of that ecosystem. So I came to Toronto. I've been here for the past 11 years, uh, practicing. I got my, uh, certificate of practice.

I got my license as an architect here. And, uh, throughout my career here in Toronto, I worked in small firms, you know, everything from four people team working in custom homes all the way to, you know, multi-billion, uh, healthcare projects with, you [00:07:00] know, 10 plus buildings and team of 60 plus people and 40 consultants on one team.

And, you know, it's like those mega projects and, uh. This is a very long answer to your question, how I got to be a founder. But essentially, no matter where I went, which geography or which type of firm I saw the same problems. Things we struggle with day-to-day as architects, and this is applicable to both principles and, uh, you know, technicians or intermediate architects, they see those problems from different angles, but they all revolve around the same issues in my opinion.

And, you know, I kind of grew to be obsessed with this idea that I can do something about it. And in architecture office, I always felt like there is not enough room for innovation because we wanna be, you know, a hundred percent billable or as much as [00:08:00] possible to kind of squeeze that time. And, you know, even it seemed like there was a desire to innovate inside the firms where I were.

Where I was, but then still there was never time allocated to it. So the only way for me to create this innovation was to create a, A company on my own. So that's how I end up on this journey where I'm still today.

Evan Troxel: It, it, you know, that that part that you just said really sparks this. Memory for me too. It's like there's hope that innovation will just happen as a byproduct of the really smart people working on the projects. And we'll be able to capitalize and leverage that future projects. And as you said, like there's no time allocated to doing those kinds of things. And so what did you do about it? Like you, it's not like you [00:09:00] could make that time unless you wanted to spend that time on your own after hours

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: developing that stuff and then bring it back to the firm question mark, right? Um, because you're just so loyal to that. Um, I think a lot of firms think that that's just gonna happen.

Or, or maybe, you know, this is like, the whole idea of hope is not a strategy, right? Like you can't hope this stuff will happen and benefit the business where you're not enabling that to happen within, from within the business. And so what did you do? You went off and you. Started your own thing and I think a, a lot of people end up having to go that route and these companies don't even realize what, how much they're losing by not incorporating that into the practice at all on that level.

Natalia Bakaeva: You are so right about it, Evan. And I think that I have a couple of points to make here based on just what I learned, uh, in a couple of recent years doing this. The work that I'm doing today [00:10:00] is that for some reason there is this illusion that. If, let's say we hire software engineers as architects and we bring them to the office, like, I don't know where are we gonna find the budget for it, but let's say it is happening.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: Um, then we will be able to just build a custom software for every workflow, which I also think that's part of the same problem. Um, you know, we lack innovation first. We don't do anything about it. But then we take this, um, extremely proactive measures. And from what I learned from those firms who did it, it's not effective either because you have to maintain the software, you have to be able to speak with software engineers, and you have to be able to productize the workflow.

So make, make a thing out of it. Right? It's not an easy task. And myself, I'm still learning every day, even though [00:11:00] before starting this company. I, for year and a half, had a chance to work at the property tech startup myself, where I learned about startups, I learned how to speak with software engineers. I learned, learned about customer success and how to, you know, build in public and deliver products that constantly changing and evol evolving.

And it's not an easy thing to do. And you know, I feel sometimes we as professionals first go from a point where we don't have time or we don't do anything about it, and then we go to the next extreme trying to imagine those complicated pieces of software that we will develop in house and we will maintain, we'll run.

And very often I have to tell, you know, those, those prospects of those customers, that's not how it works. I have a software engineer, engineering team working with me and it's still extremely hard to. [00:12:00] Continuously maintain to build, to make sure that there is no bugs and, and, and we are software engineers.

Imagine doing that in the architecture office.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, there's little room for, for those kinds of problems on top of project problems. Right. Um, and, and so, okay, so bear with me for a second because like, I am potentially making a really weak connection here, but I I this idea that you experienced do over when you were in school, right? You, you gave a project, you, you did it digitally. You used digital tools, right? And then they said fail. Go back. do it by hand. Okay. I'm sure. Well, I'm not sure. I would be curious to hear what you learned by doing it that way. If you found any value in kind of going back and doing it again in an analog way. And then I want to draw connection to what you just talked about, which was like, [00:13:00] this, there's this perception that we can just jump to the end.

We can envision this grand thing and that it just appears, right. I think that's what kind of professors used to think happened when you did stuff with digital tools. It was like, oh, you cheated. Right? You didn't use the same tools that I used when I was learning how to. How to be an architect. Right. Um, and so therefore, I want you to do it how I did it.

And, and okay. So there is value in that. I, I bet. Right? And at the same time, it's not like we're never gonna go back to doing things the way they were. And now this weak connection potentially that I'm, I'm drawing here, is like, that's what you're telling architects. You're saying, no, no, no, no. Like, we're not gonna skip to the end.

That that actually isn't a thing. We have to fully understand the problem. We have to develop the problem. There's gonna be bugs, we're gonna have to address those. Software development is hard, just like architecture is hard. And we need to somehow find a way to kind of marry these together. So let's go to the beginning of my, my, my query here, which is like, did you learn something by going [00:14:00] back and doing it again by hand?

Or did you feel like it was a complete waste of time? I mean, you probably felt things, but then there's like the real that may, you know, maybe you did learn something in there.

Natalia Bakaeva: Uh, great question. So I think to begin with, I was very upset, um, because I, I knew that

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Natalia Bakaeva: like they were holding me back and, you know, I, when I started architecture school, I thought that design is everything. Design is God and all the other things that history of art or we, we had like million subjects again in, in this more traditional education back home.

I thought that they were all unimportant. So when they told me to redo something that has been already created and do it manually, I was not happy to say the least. But in the same time, I was always so obsessed with design that for every project I had, like several [00:15:00] concepts that I wanted to develop because I was, I was just like so hungry.

I would lock myself in the room and I would just spend hours working on my project. You know Evan?

Evan Troxel: design some more.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah, exactly. You know what's so funny? Uh, a few years ago, my mom, we were traveling, um, somewhere in the world and she, out of the blue, tells me, you know, daughter, I was worried about you. You could have studied less.

You know how many parents can say that about their children? I was shocked. I'm like, you should be happy. Look at me. I'm so, uh, dedicated to my craft. Exactly. And she's like, I was actually worried about you that didn't look very healthy. I'm like, you just

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Natalia Bakaeva: describe,

Evan Troxel: you.

Natalia Bakaeva: describe architecture school in a nutshell.

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Natalia Bakaeva: Uh, so yeah, so I get to design another concept that I have developed and I think that was, even though it was in the summer and I really didn't wanna do that, but, you know, [00:16:00] I, I remember this project so well just because I think you right to connect it to what I do today because it stuck with me throughout my career, throughout my life that, that episode that I knew that I'm very dedicated to technology.

I was always. Testing things, trying things out, and talking to my peers and promoting them around. Let's try this, let's try that. And that was kind of my, always my, uh, agenda, if you will. Um, so I, I did use a completely different set setup for this project. So, you know, if the first one was on the white canvas, then the, the, the second one was like an inversion.

It, I took a black piece of, uh, cardboard and I drawn it in a white chalk. So I, I completely reinvented the whole thing and I quite frankly designed the whole new building for it. So, so it was just, uh, another exercise for me. Um, and, uh, I think I enjoyed it at the end. 'cause it's all [00:17:00] about creativity for me at that time.

And, uh, tying it to the second part of the question. I think Evan, you understood it really well, and I know because you speak to a lot of, uh, professionals who are in tech in this industry, that's probably why you, you sense it so well. Because I think the, the danger today is that people hear the word technology or the word ai, and then they think that everything is gonna be now produced automagically for them.

You know, we go from not having things filed at all, just floating on the server to, can we just generate it by clicking a button, you know, it's a, and the gap, as you can imagine, it's, it's absolutely massive. And, uh, I have to sit down and go through the process where every single feature, every single button, every single thing we do has to have a using and a [00:18:00] problem behind it.

Uh, we call it jobs to be done. And for every job to be done, we have secondary job to be done. We have the consequences. We have basically the persona for it assigned. And this is just kinda showing a little bit behind the scenes, but we essentially, coming from a generation of software developers where we don't want to end up with another sales force, we don't want to end up with another Revit.

We want to build the software that is absolutely clean in the sense things that are needed, they will be there. And if we can remove something, we'll remove it. And that's why we have things like reporting and, and maybe we sometimes thinking how to eliminate certain things and make them lean, make them more intuitive.

So I would describe it as being closer to Apple, [00:19:00] maybe. In terms of how you approach things and sometimes sculpting, like subtracting rather than adding, right? So that's the way, that's the way I see it, uh, in a nutshell.

Evan Troxel: And I think those kind of design ideals go back to masters. I remember following Johnny Ive at, at some level and him always referring, well, maybe not like outrightly referring to, but definitely far as like ideally referring to de Rams, right? Like these 10 principles of good design,

Natalia Bakaeva: Yep.

Evan Troxel: it's like nothing is extraneous. There's nothing else there that that shouldn't be there, right? And this idea of subtraction cleanliness and all of those things are definitely kind of in that design ethos that you're talking about. And so you're applying kind of very design centric principles to software design in an architectural a EC environment. And then going back [00:20:00] to my, my really weird question about kind of drawing these parallels, like you also probably learned. different approach and a different understanding of how to create using a different set of tools. And I'm sure that that also applies to you're doing now in firms.

Like you have a background as an architect and you're understanding the problems that they're dealing with and then talking with those individuals, just like an architectural design problem, to solve that problem for them instead of, you know, saying, here's the package that sits on the shelf, take it or leave it with all the extra stuff that you don't need potentially.

Right. Usually, and we only need it to do these few things, but you gotta buy the whole thing. You're talking about crafting very purpose built thing. And so I'm, I'm curious if you could just kind of the audience here on the kinds of things that, that your company is building for architecture firms, because [00:21:00] I think we still haven't really addressed that piece of context.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Sounds good. So I think in a nutshell, the problems that I've seen in the industry related to information and data access, uh, I'll tell you a story, um, that happened to me during COVID. It was in the middle of pandemic and we were all locked up at home. I was working for a, a very great firm, which is now a customer of ours.

And, um, I was an, an architect on a new project that we got and, and it was a food processing facility where the construction didn't stop, didn't stop during Covid because of, you know, the immediate need at that time. And because we had to rush into remote environment and, you know, we didn't really have processes for it.

And the project was very tough. The client was tough and the [00:22:00] construction was, you know, chaotic as it typically gets. And also plus Covid with all the delays. I found myself one day at 2:00 AM at home, locked up. My family's back home, you know, I don't have family in Canada. And uh, at 2:00 AM I was drawing a simple.

Kitchen for a staff lunchroom. And I was just thinking to myself, this firm is 65 years old. They've done great projects all around the city. They've done all sorts of typologies including like, you know, universities and some, again, training facilities. Many things. And I'm sure what I'm drawing right now has been drawn at least a thousand times.

And I'm,

Evan Troxel: times. Yeah.

Natalia Bakaeva: and I'm tired and I'm exhausted and I'm here by myself and I'm probably gonna make a mistake. And it's a very tough client, so it's [00:23:00] probably gonna become an issue. And then it's probably gonna be also changed 10,000 times where, you know, there are improvements to be made, which we also didn't track because I'm sure if we drawn it a thousand times, we learned 99.

A hundred times, you know, uh, 99, 999 times we, we learned something about this detail. So with all of this, uh, it kind of stuck with me and that's essentially what I brought to our CTO Medi, who is my co-founder. And I was like, listen, this is what we do. This is how we do this. And we jumped on a call with hundreds of architects and we flagged this hypothesis that, you know, potentially data is a problem, data access is a problem.

And, uh, that led us to [00:24:00] about 85% validation of all the questions we asked. And we never asked the right questions like, would you use this software? We said, what is the, we asked them, what is the worst part of your day? How do you. You know, why did you quit your previous job? And you know, when people go through this, uh, we call it the mom tests, right?

So you kind of ask them basic questions. When you hear them start swearing or really express their emotions, that's where yeah, that's where you know, and you start digging deeper. That's how we came up with the concept that, you know, we think that internally there are thousands of units of information that each firm has.

We have a technology today that is allowing us to tap into this knowledge. And then, then, as I already said, we have different stakeholders in each firm. And for each stakeholder, that would mean a different [00:25:00] thing for an architect's architect or draft in personnel, that would mean that. You know, they can be more empowered.

They can feel like they join this new team and they can really, you know, be excellent and find those insights and very efficiently leverage them and come prepared to the meetings by sourcing this information ahead of time. You know, for principles and decision makers, that would mean that they are able to predict the projects better.

They know how much information they already have, they can leverage versus how much of the new data they need to produce or create. And at the end of the day, if the team is more productive, maybe they can either take on more work or maybe they can let the staff go home earlier. They can be more sustainable design practice, which, you know, majority of the architectural offices really struggle [00:26:00] with.

And at the end of the day, if we are a medium sized firm. And we use the technology effectively. Maybe we can even scale without growing the headcount. Maybe we can compete with larger firms or sometimes, uh, we can even think of retiring architects, right? So retiring architects, they exit in the workforce.

And what we hear today is that intern architects or junior architects who joined firms during pandemic, they didn't get proper training. They didn't get that, you know, situation where you have your principal sitting by your side and sketching that detail and explaining to you the workflow how these things come together.

And they really lack that knowledge. At the same time as retired, if retired architects, they exist in the practice, they are not able to transfer that knowledge, that information. And you know, if we are talking about just the digital, uh, leads and, um, you know, [00:27:00] kind of IT stuff and anyone who is dealing with technology, we see that there is a huge problem with fragmentation and not being able to sometimes compile information effectively due to different formats due to the way the data is organized and stored and just the way we set up the practice today and how the search works, right?

So with all this information in mind, with all those angles, with all those stakeholders, we came up with an idea of a platform where you can access, uh, your data from any device you don't wanna be pigeonholed to, you know, either Autodesk ecosystem or you know, windows ecosystem. You can see your data on pc, on Mac, on iPad, on your phone, if you're on site and you can use just the human language to explain to this machine, what are you looking [00:28:00] for?

If I'm drawing a kitchen counter detail, I don't want to go and talk to 10 people asking me, asking them about this specific one detail that we have done. I want to just type kitchen counter to my search engine, and whatever data exists will be pulled up. And why we are different is that today there is a literal search, right?

You can essentially search for this data if it's tagged, if it's labeled, if it's certain, certain way. Because today with AI, we can search semantically and we can also search visually that what gives us this incredible advantage of something is not being noted. Like, let's say a grab bar, but exists in the drawings, you can still able to search for it and retrieve that piece of information that in today's day, if it's stored somewhere far, you will never be able to identify that.

Let's take [00:29:00] a quick break from the conversation to tell you about Avail. Is your team struggling to find the BIM assets they need? Avail's content management system simplifies access to all of your firm's content in one easy to use platform. No matter where your files live, or what type of files they are, you can easily search and access them from Avail.

Evan Troxel: Now, designers can consistently find and reuse all types of content. So what does that mean? Well, standards compliant models and drawings are easier to create. The documentation process is less chaotic, new hires are easier to onboard, projects are delivered faster with fewer errors. You get the idea.

Visit getavail. com to try Avail for free and request a free demo. That's getavail. com, G E T A V A I L dot com. My thanks to Avail for supporting this episode of the TRXL podcast. And now let's get back to the conversation.

I just wanna point out, [00:30:00] Natalia, that you just mentioned, element of a design that I think is so reassuring for you as a software developer. You, I mean, you talk about a grab bar, right? In a bathroom stall, and it's like, you know what that is, right? Like, that's gotta be reassuring for architects. Um, the, the thing I want to the, there's this mental framework and I think it might help here, which is. There's data, like you said, that access to data is, is kind of the, the common pain point, right? And so there's, there's data and then there's information, and then there's knowledge, and then there's wisdom. Like that's kind of the information hierarchy that I think of. And data is, is one of a, the smallest, low level piece of that.

And then wisdom, right, is kind of this high level. We don't even understand how that really works kind. It's kind of magic at some level. It's like, because it has experience, it has a lot of experience, years and years, decades of experience tied into it of real world outcomes and mistakes [00:31:00] and failures along the way to get to that point.

Right. And what you're talking about is kind of, you're, you're kind of hitting all those levels, and I think you're using the, the same word though, data, right? Or, and, and you said information maybe at one, one point there, but I really think that, you know, when you are talking to somebody who's, uh. A BIM technician, right?

Sometimes they're looking for data and sometimes they're looking for knowledge and sometimes they're looking for wisdom, right? And, and when they're coming prepared to a meeting with the right information, it's like, because this is the way architecture has been practiced forever. And you're talking about people who haven't had the opportunity to sit in an office and learn through osmosis of having a principle over their shoulder saying, move the toilet three inches that way.

Here's why. Right? Or, you know, you're, you're dimensioning these studs and you're not thinking about all of the different treatments that are going to be applied to that surface, and then all of a sudden it's gonna bust your a DA requirements, right? [00:32:00] And so it's little things like that, that, that you're right, people haven't had the opportunity.

And so I wanna find. An example, but I also want to understand that example. Right? And so when it comes to capturing that information, we suck at that. We don't capture it. We, we pass it on verbally, we pass it on through red lines without an explanation. There's a lot of different ways that that information makes its way through the generations of architects. And it's nuanced and it's complicated, right? And, and you kind of have to live it at some level. And so I, I'm just curious from, from your point of view, like what, how do you, when you're talking to leadership in firms who are paying for your services or paying for tools or, you know, making those decisions, like how do you that kind of information?

Because they aren't, like, sometimes there's a, there's a sentence in an email that, that explains that sometimes there's, you know, a conversation and, and it's like, how do they. [00:33:00] Capitalize on those people who are walking out the door with all that information. I mean, I recently had a, an interview on the Confluence podcast with Rob Otani of Thornton Thomasetti core studio, and he talked about like, they had this incredible resource, they had this project engineer who had decades and decades of experience and he got to the point in his career where they actually said like, don't work on any projects explicitly, just, you know, be in the office and answer questions.

And he would, in a very detailed way, explain in emails why things were the way they were when somebody came to him with a question and they were able to capitalize on that and build an AI system that kind of answered questions based on years of his emails with his blessing. Right. Um, I'm curious how you convey this to your clients or just now on the podcast to people who are out there.

It's like, like this is a. Like you're staring at a mountain right now of like, where, [00:34:00] here's where we want to get to. How do we get there? Climb the mountain, right?

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah, great question. And this, as you can imagine, comes up every day and, uh, when we do demonstrations or we talk. Talk to prospect firms. The concept of archive is not new concept and, uh, storing the data and searching through the data. So we get this question that, you know, what is so special about you guys?

And, uh, because we used this to certain way as architects, as engineers, sometimes it takes more work to undo what we think is right than actually explain from this blank slate. Because the problem today is that we still treat our data as a conventional archive. Yes, it is tagged. Yes it is labeled, but essentially we do the same thing we do in a physical library.

And before we put this book away, [00:35:00] we assign a number to it, and now it can be found essentially

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: what we do. And you're right, we are currently in the data ingestion mode. That's exactly how it works because that's a step number one. And that's what I always try to explain to people we work with. Because you cannot skip steps here, even though there is AI in the mix, even though the technology is way more capable today than used to be, there's still data pipelines, there's still steps in the product development that needs to be done.

So when you ingest the data, what we do differently essentially is that we process the data on the backend. So there is no manual work for you to do when you want to file your information. And you know, we started with construction details just because it's a kind of simple unit that explains work and it's applicable throughout geog different [00:36:00] geographies.

We are working with five countries now throughout different type of firm. If you are. You know, working in healthcare or in corporate interiors, you're still gonna draw a bunch of details to describe your work. So we moved away from construction details and uh, now we also include sections we include in large floor plans.

We include, uh, different types of information that can bring value, right? Because what we wanna do as a step one to ingest the data and the time that we save on manually tagging the data we can now use to actually start layering that information so we can move to wisdom exactly like you said. And by layering the information, you would be added notes, which we currently already providing.

And that came from a notion where I always saw principal architects or senior architects. At my firms [00:37:00] where they saw Revit, they never worked at it. They saw PDF drawings, they briefly saw them, and then they had an email. That's where they communicated. So I felt like there's never a place to layer up the business data to the drafting data.

What it actually mean to execute this detail when we build it previous time on site. Did it work for us? Was this product maybe discontinued? Maybe the code has changed. How do I deposit this knowledge? Maybe detail is okay, maybe I just need to change the thickness of the insulation and it's gonna be good to go, but where do I place that knowledge today?

How do I attach it to the piece of, uh, architectural engineering data? And then from here we can start collaborating on the data. That's something that we also missing today as architects in these firms, because again, it's either Revit or it's file server. Or maybe we communicate on teams or email. I wanted to create a [00:38:00] place where as a team we can bring bunch of learnings.

Maybe we worked on different projects before and now we wanna join our forces. We want to create this compartment where we add those pieces of information and then we have a conversation, right? We, we now can start from 50% and take it to a hundred instead of starting from zero. All of this, and as you said, needs data, right?

Like we know those, those systems are data hungry. We have the big data problem from day one. Day one, because for it to work work effectively, you need to be able to add information there. Like you need to have a good sample size of data. And if we are talking about the vision and the roadmap and where we going, that's where wisdom comes in because.

What we are working on today, and this is an active development, we wanna be able to quantify [00:39:00] the business side of things and layer it to the architectural and drafting side of things. Because today, I think the biggest problems, and that's why, for example, investors criticize us. They say that architects and engineers, they struggle with profit margins.

So it's very hard to build, to build a software for someone who is struggling with making a profit. We are going directly after that problem. We wanna be able to layer up the business data with the drawing data and almost assign a price tag to every unit of information, or the time tracker or some sort of.

Quantifiable measure that will tell us how we can predict future projects with our internal work today. That's our North Star. We wanna create a value in between that. [00:40:00] Currently they do not have access to because you know, like you can still figure out a way how to store the details you do on PDF. Maybe you do it on, you know, paper, like there's a work around that.

If you really committed to it, right? You can spend way more time. You can talk to 10 people, but maybe you'll find that, maybe not, but there's a chance. What we are really excited about is delivering value that currently is not being able to be extracted in house. Um, maybe looking at Revit metadata and layering it over business proposal data and figuring out the commonalities, figuring out the patterns, figuring out what can be.

Learned here that can help us to be more successful when we work on future projects.

Evan Troxel: That sounds really complicated. I'm, I'm curious how you're doing that, because often these are in [00:41:00] very silos

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: of an office, not

Natalia Bakaeva: I,

Evan Troxel: technology wise, but people

Natalia Bakaeva: yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: too. Right.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yep.

Evan Troxel: you do your thing, we'll do our thing. We're a well-oiled machine and I can trust you to do your thing, but there's literally a tiny amount of crossover typically, you know, even, even physically, if I think about like, pre covid offices, it was like somebody might walk over to that other department to talk to somebody about something or, or hit them up on, on a call or something. But I think most of the time it's just like, nope, we're, we're just, we've got this system working. We're going to trust that it works because. We've spent all this investment into the construct that and, and the, the, shared trust that it does work. And so I'm curious, like, how are you actually doing that?

Because, um, you are basically breaking down the established ways that that firms work. And I'm curious how open they are to that. Um, [00:42:00] versus, versus not, but also how you're actually accomplishing that.

Natalia Bakaeva: So. To sum it up, it's not a very easy task. And uh, as you know, construction is estimated to be about 25 years behind on digitalization, uh, as an industry. I don't know if that's a stat that you heard from any of the other guests, but we know that there is a lot of work to be done here. And we also know that professionals in our industry, myself included, sometimes I'm having a hard time changing my own patterns because we are so used to just repeating what we are, um, what we have established already.

And I think it also has to do with liability and, uh, professional insurance and all the things they have to carry. So we almost default to the ways we know

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: to be sure that, you know, we are not exposing ourselves to something we don't want to. And I think for us it's very important [00:43:00] to. Find firms who are not just saying that they're created for innovation.

They're completely self-aware that you cannot put Genie back back in a, in a bottle.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: not so much about we are changing the workflows a little bit or completely revamping them. The firms that are working with us, they understand that technology will change the landscape, and I'm not saying click one button, rendering ready, mid journey stuff, like that's not the way it's gonna go.

The firms understand that they can use technology as a sales vehicle. They can differentiate in front of their clients and they can communicate to them that they are enabled and they are en, they're enhancing their productivity day-to-day, and that is helping them to win work. Because the clients are interested in hearing that [00:44:00] because that's how, that's how they build this differentiator for themselves.

Other firms, they want to be better than the firm next door, just literally, they want to be able to compete at the higher level. That's their goal. Um, and I think that they understand. They're, again, self-aware. They understand that that will take certain disruption and that is why we are working so closely with them.

Because as a, as a startup, as a company that is constantly building and evolving, we are so intertwined with their processes today. And our initial goal is not to disrupt them. We actually try, and that's why we built integration with Revit. That's why we are working with firms who are in ArchiCAD, AutoCAD, you know, any software because we actually wanna learn.

There is a value there. You cannot just come, come in with an ax and just like chop everything up and then say, okay, now you do it this way. It's never gonna work in this [00:45:00] industry. And me being on a team is extremely helpful, as you can imagine, because software engineers half of the time don't understand what we are talking about when we say grab bar and we say, you know, those,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Natalia Bakaeva: especially when we start using the lingo and getting really, um, hard on acronyms and, um,

Evan Troxel: Yes.

Natalia Bakaeva: uh, I have to go sit down and decode all of this, uh, for my team.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: And they've been extremely good at, at, at, uh, learning about architecture, but still, like we understand that it takes a person coming from the industry to be able to execute this work because those processes so complex, they're so intertwined. So I think my short answer to this, it's a process and, um. To the firms that are thinking about innovating, thinking about their five 10 year as strategy.

My [00:46:00] advice, always start early. Don't wait on next best tool. Figure out what values you identify with and just start working on it. Start wrapping your head around how things work. Like we meet with our customers every couple of weeks, sometimes every month, and we just tell them what's happening in the industry.

And they, as architects, they don't have time to, to go and research, but half an hour call with us. They feel like they're already up to speed, even though we are talking about our product development. But we would always mention something about what we saw, what is happening, you know, what they saw, what they tested, and how it can be potentially used in the future.

And we are experts in this. That's what all what we do. Um, so I think that. It's not so much about changing everything from the get go, it's about understanding. It's gonna take us a very long time to get there.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I, I'm curious because you say you can't [00:47:00] just go in and start chopping with an ax. Like what has the transition process been like when you're kind of going alongside them and how, like, because they're the idea of disruption, like I, it sounds to me like these firms are interested in transformation.

They are interested in evolution. And like, there's different ways to accomplish that. Like burn it down, start over, right? There's

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and then there's the ex, there's the non extreme of like, oh, we'll just, we'll just take it in little bite-sized chunks. Eventually we'll eat the whale. Right. Kind of a thing. Um, sounds like you're somewhere in the middle of that because you have these firms that are like ready for transformation, at least from a leadership level. They want to see that happen. They understand the value that it could at least for the next five to 10 years, and, and that they'll be in a better place sooner. So I'm just curious, like what has been the appetite of transformation for these firms and, and what are, what feedback [00:48:00] are you getting where it's like, oh, the light bulbs are going off? Because I'm curious to tell that story to the people who are listening to this, who are in firms that are not doing that at all.

I mean, that's the low, let's, let's aim for that lower end because they're the ones who are yet to kind of see the possibilities there.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah, great question. I think that. It's somewhere in the middle, like you said, but it's more of a discovery for us today. We are still learning. We are asking questions every day and not because I don't know how it's done, it's more for us to, one more time, get to why, why doing this this way? We are asking five whys and really trying to uncover what is they're trying to actually accomplish.

Because there is a lot of buildup, like you just mentioned. I admit myself, we just used to do it this way. That's why we are doing it this way.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: think that the main theme [00:49:00] here is to go, uh, lead with collaboration, lead with education. To give you an example, when we use, um, visual search engine that we built, it is searching semantically.

In your data. So you have access to your visual information, textual information, metadata about the project. And we kinda combine all of this and we build a semantic cloud of meanings. And then out of those meanings you'll be pulling the answer. For example, if the drawing is labeled, Hm, you know, stands for hollow metal and you type hollow metal, our system would know even if there is.

Hm. That's what it means. So that's like that information that we like, it's data and then information that we are adding. And then wisdom is the next step, like you said, and, and kind of I [00:50:00] elaborated on that. And I think to be able to communicate things that never existed before and how they can use them, that's the hardest.

That's the hardest part because. If we are used to just go on servers, spend three hours, try to figure out information. If we used to talk to 10 people, like, I'm not exaggerating. Throughout our interviews we had one instance where a person told us if they need to retrieve information from the past project, they need to first talk to their manager.

And then the manager will try to memorize like remember which, which project I was on. And then they don't remember. So they go to accountant and then they try to find it in the accountant system. Then once they find it, they go to it, it has to make the file not readly, but actually downloadable from the old server.

And then they have to go and spend a bunch of hours trying to find like a classroom [00:51:00] layout from that one type of project that they've done several years ago. So that's a way we used to do it. So when I come to them and I tell them, just type whatever comes to your mind and you'll get an answer. All of a sudden we don't know what we're searching for.

And that's been the hardest challenge just to guide the, the team through the process.

Evan Troxel: Explain that. Explain what you mean by we don't know what we're looking for. Is it, is it like, well now I can't even think of a problem. Like what are you, what are you talking about when you say that?

Natalia Bakaeva: So they, like, let's say, okay, so just this week we have a customer who have their typical details set up on sheets.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: And for them to find them, they download that PDF full of details or annotation or you know, the data there. And they just flip through sheets and that they [00:52:00] memorize which detail on which sheet and that's how they search for it.

So when I come to them and I, I will tell them, just type what you're looking for in the search. They're like, oh, but I'm used to,

Evan Troxel: I browse, I don't search. It's like, yeah, you, it's how you go through a magazine, right? Oh, I'm

Natalia Bakaeva: yeah.

Evan Troxel: for anything in particular. I'm just looking to see what, what might catch my eye. It's a completely different approach. And so what you're saying is like they're kind of at a loss, like what do you mean search?

I don't know. I don't, I don't search. I

Natalia Bakaeva: Exactly, and that's where we come in as a team. And you know, I always bring my technical team as well, and I explain to them as an architect who would use the software in my practice, I tell them, you create the collection, you share it with your team, you code it and name a certain way. And then you use precision search.

That's another thing that we allow to do is similar to Google. If you put air quotes, uh, you can search for exactly the name of the view [00:53:00] or title of the sheet that, that, that, that you're looking for. And I educate them about that as well. Um, sometimes I have to remind that that's the option as well. And uh, I offer them best practices.

I guide them through this process of transformation. And I think that's why I always tell the, the firms that are deciding whether to go go with us or not, it's not only about the product that we are delivering today, it's about the best practices. It's about what we learn from this, hundreds of people we talk to in different countries.

Everything from Singapore, South Africa, Europe, north America, you know, south America. Like we, we've done it all and uh, we can help you to, to, to do better in general.

Evan Troxel: I mean, yeah, you're talking about this educational component, right? Where it's like, like they actually have to relearn. I'm curious what you call this, like I would call this a behavior change, but I don't think [00:54:00] people like that word. They don't,

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah. No.

Evan Troxel: don't need, I don't need you to change my behavior.

What my

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: What are

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: about? But, but that's how I kind of have always previously categorized it. But this idea that they need to learn a new way because like even growing up on the internet like I did, right? It's like that wasn't a thing when I was a kid. And then it became a thing and we had to learn how to use it.

And now I have behaviors. I have to relearn in the age of AI because I search Google with keywords,

Natalia Bakaeva: Yep.

Evan Troxel: Like that. I don't even, it was so funny. At one point I'm like, how would you find this? I asked my wife, how would you find this on the internet? And she's like, well, I would ask this question on Google.

I'm like, what do you mean? You ask a question? This was like. 10 years ago, you, what do you mean? You ask a question on Google? I I've never searched, used Google like that before. And she's like, oh yeah, I use it all the time. I actually literally just ask a question and, and now AI is, is even different than that, right?

Where I think people are still very rudiment rudimentarily using it like that. Where it's like, how, how, tell me [00:55:00] about this. But no, there's like way better ways to use it. And you're actually holding their hand and saying, I realize that you used to maybe search for hollow metal, but here's what I would do, right?

And now in this context, it's different. And so that educational component has gotta be, I mean that you, you're right. It's not just the product. Here it is now use it. Everybody like that actually doesn't work in a EC if anybody's still wondering. Um, but, but you actually have to. people, and I had a previous colleague on the show, Cody Winchester in an episode to talk about that specifically.

It's like, no, let's take the burden on ourselves to actually train our employees how to do all this stuff and how to keep them up to date with the latest things. Because if we don't, you can't just expect them to figure it out. And then we're spending all this money on tools that they're actually not gonna use because they don't know how to use it.

Right. Why would you use something you don't know how to use? Right. So,

Natalia Bakaeva: a hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: curious how you kind of, what, what do you call that? Do you call that a behavior [00:56:00] shift or what you just, I mean, you said best practices, maybe you call it that.

Natalia Bakaeva: We call it best practices. We call it AI strategy. I always try to use the words that are already, uh, people familiar with. I don't want to reinvent the new terminology. You know, architects know what best practices. Are, and we are essentially implementing this, uh, this lingo in the same time. Evan, I think it's, um, it's a multifaceted, um, question because we also build a thing called Arche Academy, uh, short videos where we explain to them how to use the software.

And, uh, it's done very interactively. It's not a stale content. Uh, you can always add more, and we actually want firms to be able to add their own content, how they using ARKI or how maybe ARKI spills out into other processes and then that's something they learned because we are learning from them every day.

As you can imagine, they'll try to break our software every single day. But that's good because we [00:57:00] are going then. Diving into the logs and all the information that we have on established like to track all this. And, uh, we are improving every day. And that, that's wonderful. So I think the patients, the ability to see the larger picture, the ability to see the outlook, the ability to see the goal, I think that's what we should be focusing on in this game as professionals.

It's not instant. And I think we shouldn't be in the mindset where, you know, today we have nothing and then tomorrow we just have it all fully established

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: is working again, out automatically. It's never gonna be the case. And um, I think in terms of like just communication in general and um, being able to, we call it build in public, right?

Because if you see my LinkedIn, I always talk about. Things we have done and, [00:58:00] um, things that are upcoming. Essentially, it's not a easy task because you get criticized, you get a lot of, um, positive feedback, but also, um, you know, it's not, it's not, um, it's not as comfortable as just locking yourself up in the room and just assuming you know everything.

So, but in the same time, we de-risk our decisions because we come up with a concept because we know there's a problem. And then we go and we sit down with our customers and we source feedback from, you know, five, 10 firms. And based on that feedback, then we digest it and we decide what to do next. And not to say that we always just take what they tell us and we just.

Digitize it because that's another problem with, uh, some of the [00:59:00] existing, uh, pieces of software that we have in the industry today that, um, it feels like we are just digitizing the processes that we know of. The goal is to hear the feedback, have an ability to digest it, and that is why for me, it's very valuable to work with, uh, our CTO who is coming from 15 plus years of pure software engineering.

And one of the companies where he was a lead engineer at is Salesforce in Tableau, and then essentially building the best software practices inside of our firm as well. Because a lot of things that we have today access to, they unfortunately do not rely on those best software practices. To give you an example, uh, our Revit integration is evergreen.

We never want our beam managers to chase their team and being like, update this, update [01:00:00] that. Like, this is a new release. We do it all for you. We send you a change log, you just restart your Revit and it's there.

Evan Troxel: right? And the, the app is updated automatically, kind of a thing.

Natalia Bakaeva: And Evan, in full transparency, sometimes it means that we say no to certain things because we know that maybe it feels on the surface like it's gonna solve something, but if there is no real use case for it, there is not truly a proven kind of record of this workflow or this uh, piece of automation that is needed, we will sometimes not do it.

And this is part of going back to being an apple of AC software. Um, we just very protective of what we put in the software.

Let's take a short break from the conversation to invite you to join the most influential technology leaders in the AEC industry at Confluence. Composed of in person events and a [01:01:00] podcast co hosted by yours truly, Confluence is designed to foster conversations between AEC firms and technology companies so they can learn, share, and engage with each other to support industry innovation.

Evan Troxel: Software company Avail, which creates content management solutions for the AEC industry, started hosting Confluence events in 2019 to understand what firms are needing, wanting, and thinking around technology. To learn more about Confluence, explore upcoming events, and listen to podcast episodes, go to confluence.

getavail. com. My thanks to Confluence for supporting this episode of the TRXL podcast. And now, let's get back to the conversation.

I'm actually glad to hear that because I think there's probably a lot of ideas that it's like maybe someday, right? But as a startup, you have to focus and you have to put your energy to what does the most for the, the most amount of people. Right. So I, I'm curious, you said earlier, um, [01:02:00] so maybe a couple more questions here.

Um, you said earlier that, like you talked about the idea of removing buttons, right? Or removing features. Have you done that? I mean, maybe you have an example of that kind of a thing throughout ARKI lifetime, because I. just curious if the rubber meets the road there because it's like I've, I've lived through software products.

I mean, talking about Apple, like at one point they had to com, they, you know, keynote was a great PowerPoint comp competitor and it was super featured, but it was on the Mac only and they wanted to bring it to the cloud. They wanted to bring it to iOS devices and at that time, iOS and the Mac were completely different development ecosystems uh, basically like set fire to keynote as everybody knew it and the whole kind of productivity suite and said, we're going to regress so that we can then. Put it on all of these platforms at the same [01:03:00] time with the same feature set, and then we will rebuild it. And I, everybody screamed when they did that. Like, what are you talking about? And of course, they still let the old version live while they did all that. But then it was different, but it was for the better.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yep.

Evan Troxel: they had to go through that kind of painful process for their users, but, and ultimately to serve their users when it, when it, when everything kind of came back to quote unquote normal. And so we lived through that. Like, oh my gosh, this is, doesn't have the features, it doesn't have these buttons, it doesn't have these things that I rely on.

But it also gave them the opportunity to say like, wow, we really had a lot of scope creep and features that like nobody was using. Let's get, let's actually never put those back in, for example. So I'm just curious in your history here with Akey, what, have you done anything like that to actually remove something because it wasn't valuable enough or not enough people were using it?

I don't, there's a lot of ways you could frame that.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah. Uh, great question. So. [01:04:00] The answer is yes. And I will give you a few examples. When we were starting to build ARKI and me as an architect coming with my brain from the industry, um, I wanted to bring as much information from the project, from the initial project to Akey as we possibly can. Like, I wanted to have as many parameters, so it's as descriptive and you know, it has the address, it has, the client has all the consultants.

And, uh, my initial list was extremely long. And then we just started to chip in away from that list. And then we realized that the list that they care about our customers, it's actually very short.

Evan Troxel: It's a different list than yours. Yeah. Right.

Natalia Bakaeva: And, uh, that's just to, that's just to, to kind of. Show you an example, you have to be [01:05:00] able to have confidence to do that too, because it's not always a nice feeling to, to be in this situation. Um, but ex you have to be extremely open and also extremely flexible and be able to hear from your customers, but at the same time be able to truly understand what they're trying to tell you.

And I think that's what I've been learning myself and kind of personally, that have been a huge, uh, steep growing curve for me. Because, you know, you hear something like we used with our, you know, customers, clients, um, on the design side, right? Like they tell you something, you try to implement it. Of course you check the code and everything, but you generally try to make them happy.

You try to make it work for them. Here, same thing. We also want our customers to be extremely happy, but in the same time. Because they're best product practices, because we [01:06:00] have software engineering expertise, sometimes what it seems, it's not what it's gonna be at the end. And I actually really appreciate that and that's why I like this multidisciplinary collaboration because if I would partner with another architect, we probably just gonna build another software that already exists on the market.

And, uh, we have this unique angle of bringing those, um, this expertise in house today. And I think another example I wanted to give you is that what we saw in the industry and what is available for our customers today is something that, you know, on the surface might solve the same problems. But I think with the technical capabilities that we.

Discovered and we were able to build, we came up with, uh, something like, um, asset deduplication with AI and asset versioning with ai and that I think [01:07:00] initially we didn't realize the depth of the asset versioning. And when I say asset version, meaning that, let's say you have a floor plan or a construction detail, let's say, and uh, you want to take a snapshot of that information and you wanna keep tracking it as you develop this detail, maybe as it changes, right.

Initially we thought about it as, you know, you put a data on it and it's good to go. But then we realized that, you know.

Evan Troxel: versions that day. Yeah.

Natalia Bakaeva: And there are also some typical details that are seen in multiple projects and there are also variation of that, the same detail, just because something changed, but maybe not by 30%, but maybe by 5%.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: had to develop a new framework, new way of thinking about this problem. And today, with the visual search and uh, be able to visually deduplicate and, uh, timestamp those [01:08:00] assets, it's actually working way better. But again, if we haven't made this mistake early on, we wouldn't be able to be where we are today.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I, I'm curious, you've talked a little bit about kind of solving problems for firms and there's this kind of industry wide, or, you know, you con you, you, you're working with firms in, in lots of different countries and, and you're getting, ideas and feedback into your software that then, I don't know, I want you to explain, does it benefit everybody?

How does, like, it, it sounds to me like the data, the information, the wisdom, the knowledge that is, is, is kept within a firm like a little bubble, but there's these other things that apply to the platform that everybody gets advantage of. I'm just curious how kind of you separate those things, uh, when you're talking to different clients.

Natalia Bakaeva: A hundred percent. So each firm gets the private secure cloud. We know that data is the main source of income for architects, engineers, and we [01:09:00] extremely. Serious about how we treat it. And each firm sits in their own, we call information silo or data silo. So once you log in, you log in into your own ecosystem as a firm.

In the same time, if you submitting a feedback or if we are inviting you to continue developing software with us, like for example, today we are building a fee estimator proposal generator. And, uh, we invite firms to join us. And some firms actually enjoy, develop a software with us. They don't get to do that very often.

And for them, that's another avenue to learn, um, to engage their maybe junior or intermediate to senior staff, depending on what we are working on. That's like a, it's like an activity for them as well internally. And, uh, essentially we, we go about, uh, this, uh, process. [01:10:00] Very, very methodically, right? So we hypo, uh, we have a hypothesis.

This hypothesis, and again, based on jobs to be done right, there's a, there's a problem, there's a job to be done. Uh, and there is solution that we assume should be there. We come with this hypothesis to multiple firms and multiple stakeholders inside each firm. We talk to principals, we talk to, uh, senior architects, intermediate architects, and then users.

So drafting staff. Sometimes we'd bring a business person to the mix. Sometimes we'd bring cybersecurity IT person to the mix, digital practice lead. And we, again, as I kind of started this conversation, we look at the problem from different angles, depending on what that problem is. We source the feedback and uh, we put this feedback on the canvas from different firms, different geographies.

And then we digest it. So we turn it into statements or features or workflow processes or [01:11:00] workflow automation. And then we go back to them and we ask them, is that what you meant? And then when they tell us that's either yes or no, we continue. And little by little we release those two versions to them that they can play with.

Again, we source the feedback, we implement it, and that's how we grow. And that's how we've been building for past year and a half. As soon it's gonna be two years. And, uh, we planning to continue doing it this way. As I already said, it's um, it's an interesting process, not something that I've done in the past, but as you mentioned in the beginning of this conversation, it's very similar to the way you design a building.

There are phases there are. Processes that run in parallel the processes that tie to each other and they're sequential. And I always try to map what [01:12:00] we do to how I would design a building, and that really helps me to digest this information

Evan Troxel: I bet it helps you translate it to communicate it to your clients as well,

Natalia Bakaeva: a hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: language they speak. So it sounds like you're constantly iterating and evolving your product instead of like a yearly big release cycle with small patches along the way. Is that safe to say? I mean, this is, again, this is kind of a shift that I think I remember somebody. Really another version, like a new version of Revit. Like why can't, and and they were frustrated because every year we change the version, right? At Revs, Revit 20, 20, 21, 20 22, 20, right? And so it was like, and, and to me, like looking at my phone again as the model, it's like, what do you mean? Like this is happening all the time and you're okay with it on your phone, but you're not okay with it in business like this.

The stakes are way bigger here, right? So why wouldn't you expect that? is a shift, right? With. [01:13:00] Cloud-based kind of software development. It's just constantly evolving and constantly being updated. And firms are, it's like, oh, the button moved today. Right? Um, where do I find it now? I mean, uh, as an extreme level maybe of, of, of a kind of a thing they would see, you know, probably not, you know, most of the time, but it's like there's this constant change going on versus once a year or once every couple years, we might go through this process.

And I'm just curious kind of what are, are people talking about that when you're, the way that you're developing, when you're working with these firms? Or, or is this just expected now?

Natalia Bakaeva: So, uh, great question. I, I actually really love this, uh, stream of thought and kind of this, uh, side of this conversation. We do communicate to our, uh, customers and people who are on trial or any sort of prospects. Uh, our product updates, they go out weekly and weekly. We build new things, and this is again, uh, going back [01:14:00] to software practices and, uh, bringing the team that is coming from the software development background and, uh, being able to bring the best practices, uh, and implement them here.

So instead of waiting, we release, uh, those features in a very small, digestible. Bite-size, uh, chunks. And that's good because they're able to go test it right away. Ask a question. We release a feature, we set, send a product update, product update. You can sign up on our website. It's, it's like a one page, uh, summary, and they immediately go test it.

And they ask a question, that's it. We answer. It's done. And we don't have to go through this painful process of now we need to push an upgrade, we need to install a hot fix. We need to do all of that. It's all taken care of in the background because we trying to get to automation and, uh, going through version updates every year.

That's, uh, the opposite of that, in [01:15:00] my opinion, at least.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I mean the, the once a year, um, release cycle can be really painful for organizations to deal with. I mean,

Natalia Bakaeva: It is painful.

Evan Troxel: why it can be painful, right? It's like, okay, we gotta educate users on how to use all these new features. If there are a lot, maybe there isn't, um, maybe it's a new ui.

Maybe it's like we have to upgrade the projects that, you know, the data is that, that those of

Natalia Bakaeva: Yep. Yep.

Evan Troxel: And, and that takes time. And there's so many things that go along with that. there's time, there's downtime to actually deploy it. You know, a lot of people had to get really smart about deploying thing, leave your machines on overnight so we can do these upgrades and, and then you have more behavioral changes there.

It's like, what do you mean I don't leave my, my computer on all night? Like,

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: things that our industry has gone through,

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: time. And, and it's, it is just kind of a, it, it's, it makes sense. I can totally see why you've designed your business to work like that. And then also your, your really strong [01:16:00] point, um, I don't wanna skip over.

It's like, well now they only have to digest it little pieces that have at a time rather than big changes all of a sudden. And it's like, what do you mean? Like, I don't have time for that. I'm not gonna upgrade. Right. Like that's what we've seen too because of the, you know, legacy software release cycles that, that are still, still happening in, in many regards today.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yep.

Evan Troxel: a pretty fascinating way to kind of, you know, it for, for your, and it's good to hear that, that they're actually jumping in and testing that right away and kind of, oh, let's, let's check this out, because it is such a small hurdle right. At that point, and it's,

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: something they can take on.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah, we really try to minimize it because it's already new software, right? Like there are new things that they need to learn about. And if we again, go through this process gradually, it feels very natural, right? Like we are not coming one day and say, forget everything you knew.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: this. [01:17:00] And then adoption becomes a real problem.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Natalia Bakaeva: they almost at the point where once they know more about the software, it's more inviting for them. Once they receive this product updates, they're more engaged. They can actually go and, um, you know, see for themselves, oh, I learned this. Thing. I wanna go quickly test it and you know, it's already now kind of in my back pocket.

Next time when I need to do it, I can go and just quickly search or, uh, use precision search like we, like we said before, um, something that I want to mention in terms of the interoperability and rev versioning and, you know, all the software versioning, that was one of the biggest problems that we saw on day one as well, because everyone would talk about it.

Different tax stacks, you know, you switch between the firms, things are done differently. That is why we, even though today we started with Revit as a first integration and then expanded to CAD and PDF, but [01:18:00] we are aware that for us to be successful, we need to be software agnostic because we want to be able to bring all these pieces of software together and cut through the silos of software.

Um, you know. Uh, information that sits in different, um, in those different compartments. And then what we did as a first step, we allowed them to upload the data without upgrading their models, and then we upgraded for them. So once they bring the data forward and they want to tweak it, they essentially don't have to worry about any of that.

And once the data is being consumed again for the future work, we just do it for them and they don't have to be.

Evan Troxel: know about that and they're on board with that. It's

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: I can hear some IT people and, and digital practice people like what? But obviously this is something you're working [01:19:00] directly with them about.

Natalia Bakaeva: yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Natalia Bakaeva: And it's also because it's done in chunks, it takes less time. It's very digestible. Again, we're trying to always break this big massive tasks and make them. Very interactive, almost like small, so they don't, they don't feel as overwhelming and this whole transition doesn't feel as, you know, painful.

Evan Troxel: Nice. F Okay. Final, let's wrap this up here. I I, I'm curious kind of from a big picture perspective, like the why you, you say, you know, you talk to these clients and you ask the five why's, and I'm curious why you're doing what you're doing because, um, you know, and, and I'll lead the witness a little bit here, I think, and, and people might not like that.

I'm gonna say it like this because I am leading you in doing this, and maybe we want to hear your actual authentic reaction, but I'm, I kind of have a sense because you're, you're like wicked smart, I can tell. Right? And, and the. The thing that I want to [01:20:00] put out in front of you is like, why is this important?

What is the true value of an architect? I think that's why, because it's like, well, let's do the valuable stuff and not the stupid stuff. And we do so much stupid stuff. Like, and, and stupid is, is a, it's a negative word, but, and, and, and like we do, stuff we have to do is maybe a better way to put it, like this is all stuff that has to be done on a project.

Maybe we don't have to do it like this, but because of contracts, because of standard of care, because of insurance and risk and all of these things, like there are still all these things that we, we have to do, which I categorize as stupid stuff. So, so I'm just gonna throw that out in front of you, why are you doing what you're doing?

What, what is what, what is the goal? Like, what are you trying to get to? What are you trying to help firms achieve?

Natalia Bakaeva: I have two stories for you. We are in conversation with one of the biggest firms in the [01:21:00] world. Can I say name here? We can say names, right?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Natalia Bakaeva: uh, we've been talking to Zaha, did architects for a while now, and, uh, just learning about the challenges. And this person who I met at one of the conferences last year, uh, just told me and shared with me, uh, very candidly that we have the most creative, the most design driven architects from the entire world.

They come to the Haid architects and they work crazy hours because they love design. No one wants to draw construction documents so they see the value and tools like Akey to help them bridge that gap. We want to still have the most creative people in the world coming and helping us to create this incredible project, but [01:22:00] at the same time, we are living in real world and every design needs to be executed.

That is why if there's a way to shortcut this, they would love that. And the same time when we come to architecture school, and that's kinda looping nicely. Back to my first story,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Natalia Bakaeva: have promised this unleashed creativity. This like infinite options for design decisions.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right,

Natalia Bakaeva: And then you start literally on your job number one, and the reality hits, and it's very different what from what we promised to.

So I wish to our profession to be able to be more creative, to be able to get and to remember what they come to this profession to do. Great design, changing the world, building the spaces that will change people's mindset, do less redundant task, and, [01:23:00] uh, just be excellent, profitable, fulfilled professionals and just don't quit their job and go work for developer, but actually love what they do every single day and, and feel like what they were promised to is what they got.

Evan Troxel: Isn't it interesting that somebody from, I mean, I, I'm similar to you in the way of what I'm about to say here, which is like you went outside of the profession to, to help the profession, right? I call it going from working in the profession to working on the profession

Natalia Bakaeva: Yep,

Evan Troxel: this idea of. actually need those people who would've thought, because it's so hard to do it from the inside, it is so difficult to change firms from the inside.

Change the practice from the inside there's so much pressure already. There's so many things. We, there's so many boxes to check, there's so many deadlines. There's all these things that you're fighting with because that is what you signed up for, right? Like you're delivering projects. But [01:24:00] it's so hard to change that from within. Um, I've experienced that firsthand myself. And,

Natalia Bakaeva: me too.

Evan Troxel: are, there are people who are willing to stick around, but in a different way, right? And really try to make a dent in the universe of the profession of architecture. So, well done, well stated. Uh, I would love it if you would tell the audience where they can learn more about you and what you're doing.

Natalia Bakaeva: Yeah. Thank you, Avan. This is a great recap of what I said, and I agree that we are on the same page here. Um, our website is get ARKI.com. It's G-E-T-A-R-K i.com. Uh, my LinkedIn, uh, I write a lot about the subject, about the, you know, AI workforce and AI and AC and I'm very critical about the buzzword ai. So if that's something that you are interested in.

You can just follow me or even send me a friendly message. And [01:25:00] um, yeah, so that's the best, uh, channel to connect with us. If you want to see what we do, you can subscribe on a website and get in touch with us. And I'm very open and showing and presenting what we built so far and hearing your opinions and thoughts.

It's not only about the good stuff. Sometimes it's important to hear some critic. We are open to that. Uh, yeah. And stay in touch and I would love to hear from you.

Evan Troxel: Thank you, Natalia. This has been a, a great conversation again, that it's get ARKI.com. I'll put links to that and to your LinkedIn in the show notes for this episode among things that we've kind of touched on. So thank you for taking the time to have this conversation today. It's been really, really wonderful and I hope a lot of people get a lot of things out of it.

And it's, I hope that it actually starts conversations like that to me is like the overall outcome that I could hope for is that we have to have this discourse. It's great to have it in public here on the, on the podcast, um, but I hope [01:26:00] that it continues beyond this podcast, so thanks.

Natalia Bakaeva: I hope so too. Thank you, Evan.

Evan Troxel: Before you take off, in the introduction to this episode, I mentioned that architecture firms are losing talent because of a problem, and the problem is the lack of innovation and poor knowledge infrastructure. Natalia has shared multiple points in the conversation that clearly explain how the failure to innovate internally, especially around data access, process improvement, and knowledge retention, is directly leading to burnout, dissatisfaction, and ultimately loss of talent in architecture firms.

Let's break this down into five key takeaways. Number one, burnout from redundant manual work. Natalia has said, I found myself one day at 2:00 AM drawing a simple kitchen for a staff lunchroom. I was just thinking to myself, this firm is 65 years old. I'm sure what I'm drawing right now has been drawn at least a thousand times.

She highlights the soul crushing redundancy in [01:27:00] architectural work done repeatedly across firms with no shared system to access or reuse it. This inefficiency directly contributes to burnout. Number two, no time or space for innovation. She said that she always felt like there was not enough room for innovation because we want everyone to be 100% billable, even if there is a desire to innovate inside firms.

There was also never time allocated to it. Firms are unintentionally stifling. Creativity and innovation, the very things that draw people to architecture in the first place. This disconnect pushes talent out of the profession or into other industries like tech number three, knowledge is lost as seniors exit.

While juniors struggle. Natalia mentioned how intern architects who join firms during the pandemic don't get proper training, retiring architects. Are not able to transfer that knowledge. A huge gap in knowledge transfer exists and there's no systematized way to [01:28:00] capture wisdom, which means new talent isn't empowered and senior expertise walks out the door every year.

Number four, digital tools are here, but underused. Today there is a literal search. You can search if things are being tagged.

And because today with AI tools, we can search semantically and visually, which clearly shows that firms have the potential. And number five, lack of strategic vision. She said, you can't hope innovation will just happen. Firms think that that's just gonna happen without enabling it from within the business Leadership often lacks the mindset or systems to encourage innovation. When firms don't invest in better workflows, purpose-built tools, or even education around them, their teams feel stuck and unfulfilled. So in conclusion, with all of the anecdotal evidence and the reoccurring topic with my guests on this podcast, firms are failing to support innovation and meaningful efficient work. Even though technology [01:29:00] accessible data and knowledge sharing systems are all here right now. The result: architects leave, talent is lost and firms struggle to grow sustainably. Firms are bleeding talent and not because architects hate the work. Well, they do hate some of the work, but it's really because the practices themselves haven't evolved.

So like many of us that have moved adjacent to the profession that we love, Natalia is building the solution from the outside in. I hope that you'll support what she and others like her are doing. That's it for this episode. Thanks again for listening and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye.

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