186: ‘Bringing a Bazooka to a Banana Fight’, with Clifton Harness

186: ‘Bringing a Bazooka to a Banana Fight’, with Clifton Harness

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Clifton Harness back to the show. Clifton is the CEO and co-founder of TestFit, a company that's revolutionizing site planning and feasibility studies in architecture. As an innovative leader in the AEC technology space, Clifton brings a unique perspective on how software can transform architectural practice, and he is not afraid to challenge industry norms.

In today's conversation, we dive deep into the future of architectural technology. The challenges of competing with established software giants and the importance of staying true to a focused vision. Clifton shares insights about TestFit's journey, the role of AI in architecture, and why attempting to compete directly with Revit might be missing the bigger opportunity.

We also explore the human side of architecture, discussing the industry's spirit, its challenges and the passionate people who make it what it is. The main theme that emerged from this episode is about bringing the right tools to the right problems, or as the title of this episode suggests, bringing a bazooka to a banana fight.

It is about understanding when to compete head on with industry giants and when to chart a completely new course by challenging industry norms. Clifton's experience with TestFit demonstrates how focusing on specific high value problems can lead to meaningful innovation in architecture. And this doesn't just apply to tech startups and AEC firm strategy.

It applies to your own personal journey as well. Stick around to the end of the episode because I'll break it all down for you in summary. And as always, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes to hold you over until the next episode, which you might wanna check out after listening to this one. They are in your podcast app. If you're a paid member or if you're a free member, you can find them on TRXL.Co. And so now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Clifton Harness.

It's like you've come to the, the here's the couch, lay down. Tell me about your father. It's a therapy session. I mean, and, and I mean a lot of, I think a lot of the beauty of kind of long form or media, however you wanna put it, is that you can actually just like, like use this time to think out loud about things. And then that will then like, show up in different ways. But like there,

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: sometimes it goes the other way around.

Sometimes people have to write it all down first and you know, maybe it's a, a blog post on only plans, and then, and then it comes into this where you can get into more nuance about that. But sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes you come, you, you do something like this. It's a call, it's a, it's a recording, whatever it is where you're, you're just thinking out loud and, and formulating or, or making those thoughts more. by doing the talking. It's just like architecture, right? Like you

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: process get to this in, you know, who knows what it's gonna be in the end, but you gotta go through all of the steps of doing the thinking and the discovery and that, whoa, I didn't think of that. Like, and then breaking it on purpose and then, you know, iterating, uh, that, that's to me what's, what's, you know, there's no right way to do it, right?

You could do it anyway, but it's, this is the process.

Clifton Harness: Well, so, uh, in the process of building TestFit, um, call it from 2017 until the end of 2024, like. You know, Christmas break, I kind of was like, okay, I need to reconsider a few things. But your, your limbic system, your fight or flight response when you're so heavily invested in a company like, uh, you and the company.

Like you don't know where the, where the separating separate,

Evan Troxel: the next one's, yeah.

Clifton Harness: right. And, and yeah. And so, so like, sort of like an attack dog for all that time. Like I was just like focused on our mission, you know, making sure that, uh, we keep growing, um, have the right people, you know, the right marketing, the right sales, the right operations.

Figuring out, you know, what, even a culture for a company like ours looks like. Um. And, you know, the product and the vision and all that. Like, it just, it, it just keeps going. Um, and it keeps going and it keeps growing. And, um, seeing like our, you know, head of new markets, Jack sold more than a million dollars of test with software now by himself, you know, on his own, his own book of business.

Hey, like, why are you doing this? Why do, why do you keep going to bat for TestFit? Um, you know, he believes in our, our mission, you know, Kelly, holy crap. Like, so we we're creating something here that, um, is having outcomes like I, I never even dreamed possible. Um, and, you know, you're, i four months maybe now into trying to.

To actually think strategically, you know, as a CEO here externally. Like, I'm no longer spending 99% of my time internally,

Evan Troxel: in the

Clifton Harness: know?

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. And, and so like my relationship to work is different. Um, it's, you know, it's maybe why I had to, to make a blog. It's like I don't feel like I ever complete any actual work and, you know, most of, most of my work is like intellectual or, or something.

Um, and then being the CEO, like, hey everybody, I want to have a debate about, you know, about BIM internally. Well, there's really only one viewpoint that's gonna win, uh, when it's the CEO talking about, you know, BIM or something. Um, so there needs to be more intellectual rigor, uh, at least from my point of view.

On our path forward, uh, the industry's path forward. I, I do believe that, uh, the strength of our vision is inspiring to a lot of people. Um, so I, you know, I, I feel like we have some modicum of leadership, uh, amongst the startup community. Um, and, you know, AEC is dying, like death by 10,000 paper cuts or something.

And I, you know, I, I think that it's the contracts mostly,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, you, you said to me one time, if you really want to change AEC, start with the the owner architect contract.

Clifton Harness: yes. Yeah. Like there's no amount of automation. Like there's no amount of incredibly well made automation software that we could make, um, that will change that relationship. Um. And, you know, as TestFit's, automation becomes more powerful, um, more intelligent because that's just what we do with customer feedback.

Okay, here, Hey, it's doing something stupid here. Can you make it not do this stupid thing? Okay, well, yeah, we can do that. Uh, well, you start stacking that over eight years and you know, there's not a single person out there that could probably draw a better parking lot, um, than what we can, what we can do, you know, with the procedures that we've, we've made, um, you know, that's just like one example is parking.

Um, there's some life safety code stuff that we do that I haven't seen anybody try to copy it in six years. Um, and it's really important for how, you know, double loaded corridor buildings are solved. But you know. We are bringing lots of incredible automation, um, and architects, uh, in the first few months of paying us in 20 17, 20 18 are still roughly paying us the same amount for a significantly much more polished user experience.

You know, and I'm like, I'm looking at it. I'm like, wait, so we can't, we can't charge more. And then you go talk to the architects like, well, you know, like, I own this business development relationship with all my clients and I don't feel like it's a great idea to wheel out, TestFit in front of them. And, and I'm just like, okay, uh, if TestFit can't continue to become more economically powerful for architects, what are we doing?

Um, because the real goal isn't to. Replace your billable hours, it's to like force the, the owner to pay you more value, um, because you have more time to spend on design. Like, that hasn't transformed, you know, that hasn't come to fruition in a way that, yeah. Um, so I'm sort of like, okay, if our, the strength of our vision is professional grade automation that architects trust, okay, we need to start attacking more of, are we gonna go into sds?

Are we gonna go into dds? God forbid, are we gonna try to attack CDs? Um, like where, where is, you know, where is the value for you guys? Um,

Evan Troxel: the interesting thing is, I mean, you got this feedback way in the beginning, right? Was well, you don't handle the market that I'm in.

Clifton Harness: yeah.

Evan Troxel: you that,

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: It was like healthcare or schools or, or whatever it, you know, whatever it was. And you're focused on commodity, you know, this and that, and you've added a few things over the years.

Um,

Clifton Harness: Right.

Evan Troxel: but at

Clifton Harness: So the, the

Evan Troxel: like there's, you could develop a platform for everybody, which is then it gets to the, to your kind of provocative post or, or comment on, on a LinkedIn post where you said, you know, well you're using 10% of a, of a thing and paying a hundred percent for it,

Clifton Harness: Yes. Yep.

Evan Troxel: or there's the really, the specificity side of it.

And I think about, you know, the way I, I, the analogy I thought of was like, if you go into a woodworker's shop, like it's all tools. It's all like the walls are lined with tools. There's not one tool in that shop, but there's a lot of architects out there for years who have fought for, I just want the one tool, man, like, why can't you design in the tool that I use for production?

Why can't you? And, and it's, and this is pressure with even within the firm, even with on the team you're working in to streamline that kind of thing, which, which takes a lot of the magic out of what architects actually do. I always felt like, it's like, what do you mean? Why do you wanna put me in this box so that we can design shittier buildings?

Like, why, why would you want that? And it's both because it's from my convenience and, and, and that software exists. Everybody uses it all the time for all kinds of things, for lots of things they shouldn't be using it for. And then there's specificity of tools, like what you have built. you're getting away from that idea.

I don't know. But we can see a lot of different startups doing this where it's like, we're this piece of the puzzle and that's all

Clifton Harness: Um,

Evan Troxel: is

Clifton Harness: yeah.

Evan Troxel: of the puzzle. as a designer or an architect, there's a lot of tools in my tool. Like, like if I, if I showed you my, my desktop on my computer, not my desktop, but like my, my app switcher, my task manager, there's 20 things running all the time for my tool stack as a podcaster.

Right? As an architect. Same. It would be the same. And, and, and yet there's people who just really rally for this idea of one tool to rule them all, you know? And, and so I can see like where this tension's coming from.

Clifton Harness: So for our part, I mean, I don't think the, the go-to-market strategy ever really changed. Like we focused on housing, um, for the first several years it was, you know, highly fragmented market still is. Um, but it's 40% of the, you know, the commodity markets, our, our housing. And so. You know, we started with high density multi, like it's what I believe in most as a new urbanist.

We need, you know, God forbid we just need parking garages so we can pull our whole cities,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: you know, closer together. Uh, seems pretty intelligent to me. Right? So then we do that and then, you know, interest rates start to change and then people can't afford structured parking anymore. Okay. So we follow our customers.

Um, we go into low density housing, um, garden apartments, you know, the kind of stuff that is commod, like the, the beating heart of commodity housing is these garden apartments. And, um, focus on customer feedback again. And that brought us into like town homes and then tracked home planning. Um. Stuff that's wildly different than, you know, new urbanistic ideals.

Um, but at the same time, we've continued to develop the high density stuff and then you start, you start to get feedback about how you haven't done enough and the thing you've building for six years. Okay, so what else do we need to improve? Well, memory care requires these kinds of things. Okay. Support that.

Um, this construction type needs to support modular Okay. Support that. Um, and then we, uh, thinking about a problem that, you know, being like a one trick pony right now. And, um, how do you get out of just housing? Because like the vision for TestFit is all, like all buildings. You know, some fe, some, some manner of feasibility for all buildings.

Um. And we, you know, we started work on, uh, warehouses with, uh, an investor with Prologis. Um, and then that led to data centers. So the, you know, that whole DNA, the large box in a field is a very different design problem than maximizing your FAR in an urban core. Um, and so you have these two very different sides of the business.

Um, but all of these sides of the business require roads, parking, uh, simple massing tools, a lot of the same data sets to be pulled in. Um, so for our part, like there's, I don't know, 80% of our business that's these configurators that it's what we're known for. And then there's 20 part, 20% that is new and growing.

That's like, um. We call it urban planner. Um, but like we take any manual tool that we've made for anything in the automated, on the automatic side of our business, and we started to push that into urban planner. Um, and that's new and growing and it's positioned to compete, you know, against like SketchUp, um, form a, um, to name two.

And that's growing and like, wow. Uh, so we're shipping a product that wasn't full. Automation wasn't, you click a button, you get a building and it uses all of the great math and solids, uh, stuff that we've built and the rest of our rest of our configurator business and we're just putting it in there. Um, and so that was a, a major kind of data point, at least in my own understanding of the market.

Like, hey. Thoughtful manual tools are still, uh, in high demand. Um, and so back to your analogy about the, uh, you know, walking into a carpenter shop, like they've got 7,000, or you walk any kind of wood shop, there's so many tools you don't really know. And there's ideally, you know, at UT when we had a wood shop, there was a guy there, John, uh, and you'd ask him, you know, how do I use a lathe or whatever, and he'd walk over, he'd be like, don't kill yourself, please.

And then he'd, you know, show you how to use it. Um, and then there's 75 other tools, you know, um, you know, same thing with, you know, I think with, with like Rhino and, and Revit and Grasshopper, and Dynamo and AutoCAD and Arc, GIS and Bluebeam, uh, and Procore Construction Cloud, Autodesk Construction Cloud, these are all tools that are used to get from.

You know, point A to point B, to point C to point D.

Evan Troxel: Don't forget Outlook and

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Well, I mean, then there's the, like, the even more important stuff is communication, coordination and like I was a young guy building, you know, TestFit the first time you met me. You know, I don't even, it might not have been tested at the time and like I didn't understand that there's vast complexity, um, just in the amount of communication happening, you know, from, you got, uh, 14, I, I have this diagram.

It's got, you know, 14 people and, uh, you know, uh, real estate owner of a piece of land doesn't necessarily know how to get the most, uh, sale for that land. So the higher broker and a broker doesn't quite know exactly how to find the highest and best use for that land,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Clifton Harness: so that they can charge the most for the land.

So they'll call their, their development buddies. And the development buddies, well, they'll have a pretty good idea, but if you want to get them at a hundred percent of what they need, they gotta go call an architect to design, you know, a spatial diagram to back up this highest and best use. And sometimes that spatial diagram, the architects might require, you know, structural engineering or, uh, interior design effort to really bolster the quality of the design.

And you roll that stuff up to the developer, okay, he is got a site plan, he is got kind of what he knows what it needs to be, and he's, but he still has no idea what the price is. He doesn't know what it's gonna cost. So you gotta go call a, a GC to figure out what the cost is. Now GCs, they do a lot of deals, so the general idea of what the cost is, but again, if they want to get a hundred percent on the nose about what the cost of this building is, they might require a GMP set.

They might require so much information. That you're not really able to get there. Um, and if you are there, then they need to call subs to get updated to the minute information on what the pricing is.

Evan Troxel: And this is all based off a design that is absolutely gonna change, right?

Clifton Harness: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The design is in flight,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: uh, and, you know, so, so you're spinning, you know, all these wheels, uh, or, you know, plates are spinning in the air. And, uh, you know, architect right now, you know, said one of my other only plans posts was about like, I never want to be an architect. I wanna be a master builder.

Like I want, I want to understand why I can't have steel and why everything needs to be built outta wood. Um, and I don't want to take your word for it because I don't trust you. Um,

Evan Troxel: There, there's another root issue right there.

Clifton Harness: yeah, there's, there's like, you know. Opaque, it's all opaque because, you know, everybody's profit margin is under attack and it's being, you know, preserved. Um, I don't have a problem with that. Uh, but if the groan knot of the bullshit I just explained is ever going to be cut, like, I think it's gonna come from the contracts.

I do not think it will be software driven. Um, I think software could be a catalyst to drive business, uh, model transformation. Uh, you know, like Cove, uh, Patrick and Sandy, like they did sas. Okay. I think they were moderately successful in, in doing exactly what they were trying to do. Um, and then

Evan Troxel: Probably the most publicly successful, at least that I've seen in that space for

Clifton Harness: yes. Yeah. Like, you know, but, but shit like, because of the whole circumstance I just described. Like, you're not gonna get the owner and the investor and the equity to invest in, you know, the, the right green stack for right now. 'cause they're worried about interest rate, risk and, you know, keeping their, their house in order.

Um, you know, so they go into AI and, you know, holy shit. Like, some of the stuff they generated with AI was like, you know, zoning reports and stuff. Like, it was really the first time I saw like AI driven services and I'm like, okay, like maybe that's another, you know, business model for, for an architecture firm at least.

Maybe you could go attack it.

Evan Troxel: Which is

Clifton Harness: Uh,

Evan Troxel: talking about doing. Right? Like an

Clifton Harness: right. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: Yes. Yeah. And like, that's why it's so interesting to me is like, wow, okay, so they might go, you know, attack the contracts. Like, that's my read is like, like if, if they're gonna go get an AI driven architecture firm and, and make it AI driven. Then I think the contract's the first thing to fall because like, hey, uh, we're AI driven firm here.

We're not gonna do design bid build. Like, you might want us to do that because that's what you're comfortable with. But it, it, it doesn't create a culture of, of wealth creation and architecture. Uh, the current contracts don't. So, uh, invariably I end up at culture, like what is the culture of architecture?

Like, what is the culture of architecture need to be? And what we have currently is not, uh, not something that is scalable and that Gen Z is gonna be delighted to go jump in in, into that. Um, and so you're competing against the AI generation in a way for the labor that you need to go do the buildings that you want to do.

Uh, and it's, you know, culture I think is a major problem.

It's

Clifton Harness: Um,

Evan Troxel: Right. Like that, I think that's

Clifton Harness: yeah.

Evan Troxel: read on what you're talking about, like just this successful, like the, the monetizable future of architecture is just this constant whittling down instead of up and out, right, up and

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: this trajectory, this

Clifton Harness: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: it's currently stuck in.

Clifton Harness: I'll, I'll give a parallel. Um, I've sold a lot of software to owners and real estate developers. Um, they're the reason why I think we've continued to have the fighting power that we do. Probably the reason why I can say a lot of things that I say is that, um, the vast majority of our revenue is not dependent upon architecture alone.

Like it's

Evan Troxel: you can prod

Clifton Harness: prod.

Evan Troxel: because,

Clifton Harness: Yeah. I'll be the, I'll be the resident lab person.

Evan Troxel: on it. Yeah. Okay.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Well, I'm not dependent, but I'm hopelessly in love with it. So it's, it's like, how do you.

Evan Troxel: It's like a critique. That's the point of a critique,

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Point of the critique.

Evan Troxel: stroke your own ego. I like the real point of a critique is not is, is to actually

Clifton Harness: Oh,

Evan Troxel: out the flaws in to ho because you want it to be better. Like that's

Clifton Harness: yes.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. All right. So the, the parallel, you know, go to go to architecture, you know, go to architecture au conference, uh, very little new innovation announced sadness.

Evan Troxel: Did you just call it architecture au conference?

Clifton Harness: Well, I'm just, uh, architecture conference typically is like au for me. Um,

Evan Troxel: Okay. That's where your, that's where that audience is. Okay.

Clifton Harness: yeah, if the a i a ever wants me to come talk, I'd be happy to. Um, but, you know, I don't, they'll have to invite me. I don't, I don't, I'm not gonna pay for that speaking slot. Um,

Evan Troxel: I think they even changed their rules this year. Like even people who did get chosen to speak actually still have to pay to get, to actually go to the conference.

Clifton Harness: it, all right. All right. If you tell me, if you tell me. You gimme a microphone in, in 15 minutes, I'll pay for, uh, I'll pay for my ticket.

Evan Troxel: right.

Clifton Harness: Um, yeah.

Evan Troxel: a i a leadership, let's do it. Make it happen.

Clifton Harness: Uh, but you go, you go to real estate development conference and like the disparity on like, there's so much hope and I, I've got these deals going and I think they're gonna hit and like they are invested in the future. So they have this, this mentality of like, the future is always, you know, gonna be bigger and better.

Um, and I do think it's this act of them having skin in the game on these deals. Um, and that if one of them hits, you know, it, it turns into a real deal. They can get the debt equity, you can grow it. Um, their drive is insane to go get that building built. Um, and I don't know, in architecture it's like. What, what's the drive?

Well, I got this commission, you know, I, I got this, uh, you know, won this project or, you know, finally get to design. You know, like it is just harder for me to see a scalable culture of plenty. Um, and it is just remarkably different, like going from one, you know, one conference to the other. And, it makes me feel, God, am I gonna do a feeling, you know, I'm gonna do a feeling on a podcast.

I,

Evan Troxel: in the, you're in the psychiatrist's office right now. You're laying on the couch. You are. You're gonna talk about your feelings.

Clifton Harness: it makes me very, very angry. I think. Um, I, I mean, I'm not saying that developers are, are, uh, limited in, in like their understanding of the world, but, um, they didn't have to go figure out. The complexity of all of the, you know, innards that go into this building, they, they figure out the financial complexity.

But I, you know, I feel like if 10% of architects wanted to go learn finance and kind of understand that game and respect it, respect being the operative word, you have to respect finance in order to win and finance. Um, but then you would like go back to the architecture industry and they'd be like, why are you trying to go make money?

Or like, this isn't about the money, it's about the buildings. You know,

Evan Troxel: right, right, right.

Clifton Harness: so, so it's like.

Evan Troxel: that's an interesting mentality. Right? And, and what you're talking about is kind of this idea of it being a game to me. Right. And, and finance and real estate, like they're playing a game and people know how to play the game. Like that's how they win the game. And architecture is not a game. It's a what, what is it? What's the right word? Like, it's just escaping me. But it's like, it's like this loyalty. And it's not, it's very different than the game that you're talking about.

Clifton Harness: Yeah, possibly it's, I don't know, maybe it just starts in, in studio, you know? And

Evan Troxel: Absolutely. Starts in studio.

Clifton Harness: you know, like nothing's good enough, so you have to keep trying to make it better. And one of the core tenets of development is like, when it is good enough, you need to stop. You need to, you know, let the building get executed by the construction team.

Um, I don't know, like that's maybe there. It, it is two different mindsets. Um,

Evan Troxel: you're, you're a CEO of a software company and like a mantra of softwares work smarter, not harder. And how does that land in a profession where all we know how to do is work harder? Like that's all that, that's what

Clifton Harness: ooh.

Evan Troxel: What do you mean? Like we're up for the challenge, of course.

Clifton Harness: All right. So, so if you work harder, you build more hours, great. How about decoupling billing by the hour, like Bill by

Evan Troxel: talks about that, but

Clifton Harness: Value created?

Evan Troxel: Who's doing it?

Clifton Harness: Yeah. All right, so, um, let's get back to BIM for a second. Um, so I wrote a post, it's called BIM poster syndrome or BIM Posture, however you wanna say it.

Evan Troxel: I, I, I don't, I don't see a poster on the wall when I, I hear it. When you say BIM posture, yeah.

Clifton Harness: Right. So it, it is just, it's just me like, Hey, uh, culture of AEC. Let's, let's check our assumptions for a second, uh, about, um, you know, 25 years old this month. Um, it's a very old software now. Um, its trajectory into AEC was absolutely incredible. Like, I, I've got another blog post in writing trying to understand.

Revit's initial feature set, its initial go to market effort. Um, and they killed it. Like they absolutely killed it. Um, and, and I, I, I did another research about like, when did, uh, parametrics enter AutoCAD 2006? So, so AutoCAD had very limited parametric support, uh, until, uh, you know, 2006 and the, the graphical parametrics, not the, uh, li routines that you could write.

So, so you either, you know, before Revit came in order to to do parametrics, um, you had to like write your own code out of Lisp. Um, and, you know, you can still get on the, on the internet and find lisp routines that can do entire, uh, you know, kitchen layouts. It's pretty incredible, uh, the kind of stuff you can find.

Um, that's all just procedural stuff. Um, but they, they built this parametric interface for families that made, you know, doors and, uh, windows really actionable in a way that, you know, CAD block, you know, CAD blocks were not. Um, and then the parametric propagation engine, um, coordinating plans with elevations.

So like you'd move that door and then everything would update. Um, that's got incredible product market fit. Like there's no one out there that wants to, I mean, I've done thousands of elevations in CAD and not, you know, you're manually coordinating plan and it's annoying as hell. Um, and so, you know, okay, so we, we built,

Evan Troxel: back in the day.

Clifton Harness: yes, xfs, I mean, there's, there's so much you can do with XFS that, um, man, they're.

They're an amazing, you know, technology, but it's just like, it's a lookup table, right? So you have 38 xfs pulling in. Okay. It's just a lookup table of information that that exists elsewhere. Um, and then there's one other thing that Revit did really, really well. Well, two things that I'll say. Uh, collaborative editing.

So you could check out part of the model, even in 2000, um, while somebody else checked out a different part of the model, and then you could sync it and update. Um, and then work sets, sorry, that was work sets, uh, phasing. So like you're, remember, AutoCAD got maybe one base drawing and then you've got seven X refs, one's for existing conditions, one's for demo, one's for, you know, architecture, phase one, architecture, phase two, whatever it might be.

But this was like built into the same model. So, you know, if I dragged a wall, uh, in one, you know. A time it would update in a different time. Uh, okay. Mind blown. Right. And if you want to achieve that in AutoCAD, it's a bunch of xfs and a lot of, you know, attention to how you're managing your

Evan Troxel: think

Clifton Harness: xfs

Evan Troxel: design options too. I'll just throw that out there. Right.

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Design options. Yep.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Clifton Harness: Yep. Uh, so, so they, yeah, they, they killed the product market fit. Um, it was monthly only. So they're counter positioning to the annualized software payments or perpetual licensing. So the business model, I think is, is very important when you bring a new technology to market is it has to have a very different monetization strategy.

Um, that's something I didn't understand I think until maybe the last couple years at TestFit is how we go to market, uh, with the sort of business model, uh, as important as the technology itself. Uh, so they had all the right things happening at the right time. Um, now in order to get the amortization, uh, or the, the payback of building all of the parametric propagation engine, uh, past the basic buildings that it was able to do in the early two thousands, um, meant, uh, that it needed a very big go-to market effort.

And so what we see from Autodesk is them amortizing their investment in Bim, uh, over the last 25 years. Uh, so I, you know, I don't know how, how much it costs to build the, the engine, the Revit engine, but, um, hopefully they're making money on it by now. And if they're not, I, you know, I, I'd be worried. Um, so is the path forward for us to go build a parametric propagation engine?

Like, it was kind of me sitting there like, oh, okay, is it, you know, very quickly I found myself falling into the trap of, well, what if I just build an existing technology that somebody else has and that's how I'm gonna compete i's like the biggest mistake because you don't have the, the business model figured out.

You don't have how you're going to win in the long run, figured out. And worse, you're aiming your sights not for the stars, but for something that is very similar, uh, to what, what already exists out there. you know, it leads me to this next conclusion that's like

perhaps CAD had really good market fit. Um. And then you're like, well, CAD's just drawing. So then it's like perhaps drawing literally has really good market fit and, and the challenge is to reduce the amount of friction to getting drawing done.

Evan Troxel: like you're asking the five why's kind of a thing and you just keep going back, back, back. Right.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. And you keep noodling, noodling, going all the way in to what if, what if, what if? Um, and I will say like the Figma for bims I think are really interesting, um, for me to look at because it's, you know, a technology for a technology. So hopelessly, I don't know how you do your go-to market effort with selling a technology to people when they wanna be sold a story.

Um, but some of the sort of product market fit that I can see from that, which to me is people are using it and paying. Hundreds of thousand dollars for it or something. Um, you see products like, um, perhaps you could sell chairs or, or desks or, you know, sort of the product catalog, the ff and e product catalog idea.

So Revit has the, you know, the doors, the walls, all the stuff that the vendors can plug in. Well, perhaps this Figma for BIM idea is that we let the people that make the FFF and e sort of start to sell their wares, um, in this interface that, you know, we're, we're controlling. That's really interesting to me because it, it starts to solve like this ff and e problem, um, which sourcing good stuff and putting it in plan is, is basically the complexity that they, it's, it's a hard problem to get solved because it's gotta be a cohesive vision.

Um. But it's an interior design approach, right? Like, you know, what do I know about that we're, you know, we do site planning. Um, and that I ha I think has a lot of, you know, potential growth. Um, looking at the interior design, you know, how do you solve for existing space really well? Um, so it's not that I'm against Figma for bim, like what I would be more for is, you know, data rich interior design tool.

Just say that's what you are. Um, and then you can build your story on top of that, um, your go to market effort on top of that and build a corporation similar to TestFit, getting lots of recurring revenue. Um, that's what I hope for out of my competitors is that they stop building a technology and they start focusing on like one problem and focus on it really well for five years.

And you own it like. There are now copycats trying to create TestFit because we've owned housing so effectively for so long.

Evan Troxel: Hmm

Clifton Harness: Um, and you know, there's 7,000 markets that you could go attack in AEC. That was a lot. Any questions from that?

Evan Troxel: me, it makes me think of this conversation I recently had with John Cerrone at Shop Architects, and they talked about this idea of really having, I, I wrote a newsletter about,

Clifton Harness: He's awesome. I love John, by the way.

Evan Troxel: amazing.

Clifton Harness: Yep,

Evan Troxel: the newsletter really focused on this idea. Or one of the things I focused on, I did a follow up post on it, on, on my website, is about this idea of a lightweight like model of, it's basically just, it is design intent that everything gets hosted to, and

Clifton Harness: yep,

Evan Troxel: this idea because it allows you to stay flexible for as long as possible. Knowing whether or not you're breaking things

Clifton Harness: yep.

Evan Troxel: Right. And so to me, like when, when people say Figma for bim, you're talking like the audience that you're, you're saying that to doesn't know what that means. I mean, I might know that Figma allows multiple collaboration a file. That's all I may know about it.

All I know is it's like Illustrator and that's why Adobe bought it. But it's Illustrator on the web. Right? And so, okay. But the real truth about Figma is that it has all these smart constraints built into it. Like people wireframe apps in there. And you

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: pretty legitly build an app Figma, right? All this functionality, all these different screens, functioning buttons that look good.

But the important part is like. You're linking this to that, like it's this idea of smart constraints, the way things are flexible and the layout changes and does all like, it's it that's bim, right? And so

Clifton Harness: It is a, it is a,

Evan Troxel: to

Clifton Harness: it is a configurator.

Evan Troxel: you're saying the wrong word to the, to the, to the audience because they, they never used that tool to do

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Right. And so a younger generation may know what that means, but, but the older generations who make the decisions about what to buy for my firm, they don't know what that means at all.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. I, all right. So Figma, I mean, not that architects need to be designing, I don't know, graphical interfaces. Um, it's like when I use it for TestFit work, it's like we have a, a GUI that need, you know, you can see our graphical interface and we have a Figma file that's, you know, here, here's our gui. Um, or here's what we want our GUI to look like more of the time.

Um, and it's, uh, auto layout tools are, are really incredible. Um, and it's a parametric configurator that, that runs all the buttons, you know, button placement. And yeah, I would say like Figma is like a 2D bim. Maybe if you really wanted to build, you know, a BIM model in Figma, maybe you could, but it's, it can only do 2D.

Um, and it's, it's user experience and its story, uh, and its go-to market effort, like absolutely killed it, um, in their story. So they have all story, like you have to go in and see their story about how they were able to go build this thing. Uh, they didn't have any meaningful customers for a long time.

They just built and built and built and built until they felt like they had something that had market fit. Um, I think cad, like 2D cad is likely good enough for most buildings. Uh, and I'm, I'm saying by volume, not by. You know, I'm not saying it's good enough for 10% of your K through 12 deals. That's not what I'm saying.

Um, I'm saying there's commodity markets where, you know, you don't need to have a fully coordinated BIM and you can go make a lot of profit margin, uh, just by having really well coordinated drawings that are thoughtful. Um, and to the point on the market penetration of bim, like, it, it, it, I don't, it's not at, uh, well it might be at 50%,

Evan Troxel: I was gonna

Clifton Harness: but,

Evan Troxel: say, that was my guess. Yeah.

Clifton Harness: but if you look at that 50%, only 10% of it is, or you know, call it 20% of the 50%.

So 10% overall, uh, is deals that are 100% building information, modeling soup to nuts, nuts to soup. Um, you know, so. Okay. Noodling even further, like what are, what are the kinds of buildings leveraging, you know, bim to its entirety? Um, it's billion dollar, you know, it's the, it's the, it is the most complicated buildings that we have.

Um, and I'm okay with that. Like, holy crap, like, yeah, uh, you gotta go do a billion dollar hospital that has 78 different services. Good luck doing that in cad. You should go do that in something else. Um, but if it's a, you know, 500,000 square foot warehouse and my structures set is three sheets and my mechanical page is one page, um, it's like when you, okay, we're gonna use BIM on this.

I'm, I'm bringing a, a bazooka to like, like a banana fight or something. Um, it's very. Like he doesn't need it, so why are we gonna use it? Um, and my co-founder is a brilliant software engineer and like, one of our goals is to use the least amount of code to get the most amount of impact. And what it does, it keeps our overhead as small as possible, uh, as an operating business.

So if you say we are going to invest in bim, uh, you're gonna maybe build a template for every possible thing that you could possibly do, when in reality you, you might not even need most of that template. Um, and then there's like a whole cottage industry of people that are better at making templates than you.

Uh, so like you could just go rely on them. But instead now we're gonna have, you know, we're gonna hire a BIM manager and we're gonna have a standards committee, and we're gonna do. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna have all of this additional complexity to control the outcomes. Um, and I'm not like against that, but I'm just saying let's check our assumptions here.

Like, is all of that extra effort actually worth it? Uh, when you're just doing simple buildings that you have a great profit margin already in cad. Um, you know, if, if you know your floor to floor heights are gonna be like 11 foot the entire time you're doing a building, how much BIM do you need? I don't know.

Um, if you have very few, uh, services, how much BIM do you really need? I don't know. I build automation tools for, you know, site planning. Uh, but um, the coordination of services even seems to be an overblown problem. Um, because there are subcontractors that are highly. Skilled have vast intellect more than me on how the means and methods, uh, need to be executed.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Clifton Harness: And now we have to train them up on a new software system. So they're switching costs there. I mean, this is why people want to be a one software person because there is like a, yeah, there's like switching costs. There's very real human switching costs associated with learning anything new. And it's like, Hey, I need you to speak Greek.

Uh, you're good at speaking English, but now I need you to speak Greek. Uh, you know, we have a whole customer success. We have four people full-time at Testament, their customer success, and they're needed to help kind of lower the friction to firms changing, uh, their upfront behavior to, to be something different.

Uh, so there's no, there's no problem with change. Like, yes, change behavior. Uh, but if BIM doesn't actually achieve better profit margins for you as a firm, I don't see the point in it. Um, and I, I have a feeling that there's a lot of firms that, especially in the housing world, that are not gonna switch to BIM maybe ever.

Um, they have proprietary designs that were fleshed out in the nineties that are still being used today. Um, and they print money doing that. Um, you know, maybe my prayer is that, uh, some firms hear this and like, okay, well we just need to not fluctuate all of our decision making all the time on design be really solid and not change these decisions in this case so that we can execute faster.

Um, and that's again, the communication issue that run you run into is like, we need to communicate at a higher level what our goals are in all these buildings.

I mean, I could probably just keep talking for too long about all this.

Evan Troxel: I, it's, this is a, it is kind of fascinating to like really think about all this stuff and think about the whys. Uh, because I think, you know, when you think about the overall, in the US at least, what's the number? It's like 80% of firms in the US are quote unquote small firms. Less than 10 people, probably less

Clifton Harness: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: And

Clifton Harness: that's the long tail.

Evan Troxel: and they're not changing. Like they're, why would they, what, what's the incentive, right? It's, uh, you talk about switching costs like that, that might be the reason they say, but it's way bigger than that. I mean, it's, it's their identity. It's, it's, it's so many things. It's expense. Like they are running at the bare metal, right?

A lot of times. And they are living project to project and maybe, maybe they're living project to project and they have 25 projects going on at the same time. There's a lot of, there's robbing Peter to pay Paul kind of situations

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: these small firms because the margins are so slim and. It's, uh, it's, and they're not hanging out on LinkedIn all day long, reading about

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: have my feed of high-end firms doing high-end things and all the latest tech and what's the latest ai, this, and they, Nope, not at all.

Like bare, barely even check to see if somebody sent 'em a message. Right.

Clifton Harness: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: they're

Clifton Harness: mean the, the.

Evan Troxel: with that, that marketing all the time. I mean, it's, it's marketing on the behalf of the users. Right. It's, it not even necessarily the people who create the software who are doing that marketing.

Right. They're, they're hearing it from peers and colleagues in the industry.

Clifton Harness: Yeah, I mean it's, uh, it kind reminds me of like, uh, that movie Mean Girls where there's the really popular girl and she's got the three other girls that won't let anybody else say she's not that popular. Um, you know, you feed the industry or the BI managers, you build them up marketing wise to be, you know, the best use of a firm's resources.

Um, then, you know, I, I don't know, like maybe here's what happens is like the BIM leadership is completely separated from firm leadership. It needs to be the same. If it's not the same thing, what are we doing like. Our technology needs to be like the first thing that the firm leaders are understanding and embracing and growing.

Um, and, you know, for the small firms like this is why chatbots are, are maybe, you know, if I, if I'm chaos or you know, rendering company, um, maybe a little worried 'cause like, you know, 10 person firm, okay, I've got 30 minutes to sketch out this idea for this client. Um, I can sketch it out, trace paper even.

And you know, if it's the scale, um, and you just put it through a filter on a, on a chat bot, hey, make, make this look like,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: you know, architecture, um, you know, all of a sudden you didn't have to go grab the intern to go make a rendering. Uh, it's been, I don't know, like. I did Photoshop renderings when I worked in an architecture firm, and I billed like 40 hours for some of those.

Um, that $400 that I made from that is probably never gonna be made by an intern again. Um, so, you know, even that's like a different, it's completely different rendering. Um, I don't think that rendering in a firm has a moat anymore. Like it, I don't, there's so many different filters and so many different things you can do with it.

And you see people sharing AI rendering on, uh, social media a lot. Um, and it is getting so much better every single time. They, they update their, their models. Um, you know, so then that, that quote from, um, Lord of the Rings, the two towers comes into my head is like, what can man do against such reckless hate, like.

Like it, like what, you know, how are we going to save, like, I don't like if they're successful in, in validating copyrights, architecture, professional services firms that had a copyright and they used it to create value, which isn't very many of them, but some of them did. Um, that might be invalidate. And then even what the software generates, you know, if you generate a TestFit site plan and you don't touch it, who owns that copyright?

Like, I don't want to own it. Uh, I'd like for my customers to own it, you know?

Evan Troxel: I don't want that risk. I don't want that liability.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Like, so, so like. I mean, I can foresee a future where like we just have to like fire up a prompt at our users and be like, Hey, please manually adjust anything on this site plan so that you own this. Um,

Evan Troxel: Totally.

Clifton Harness: you know, like our, the a i a's goals right now are like housing equity, like all the stuff that maybe it should be their goals, but like maybe the top goals should be like figuring out how to compete with AI.

And, you know, if you don't change the contracts, I've worked with some of these developers, they don't respect architecture enough to care. Um, they'll go ask a chat bot to do it, do it all, and then they'll hire some firm in, you know, the Philippines that promises CDs. Um, you know, your relationship to your architect is, is very different, you know, maybe two or three years from now.

Um.

Evan Troxel: it, is it that, that they just see it as well? I mean architecture, if you think about it, right? Like the production of plans is a wasteful process, right? It does. It's not the final thing. Right. And so is that where that's coming from or is it more of like, um, like it's just this. Red tape that I, I don't want to deal with if I don't have to kind of a thing, or maybe it's both.

Clifton Harness: Um

Evan Troxel: I mean, I would argue it's

Clifton Harness: The,

Evan Troxel: a necessary waste

Clifton Harness: there's,

Evan Troxel: get to that outcome.

Clifton Harness: I,

Evan Troxel: get to that outcome without it. So I'm not just saying it's just like a hundred percent pure waste. Right. But at the, the same idea is like,

Clifton Harness: yeah, I'm, I'm gonna answer it a different way. Like, like the, the contracts say you get like 40% of your money from CDs, which are, which are risk adjusted drawings. Okay. And then you, you get like 30% from dds, you know, maybe 30 per. Is it 20%? I can't remember, um, the specific numbers, but like 70% of your value as an architect is in making drawings and like, so those are contract documents, so it's, they have legal weight associated with them.

Um, so I, I think I get very worried when it's like, yeah, we're just gonna generate with ai, you know, contract documents. That's nuts. Uh, they, they hallucinate, like I, I, I did a bunch of, uh, tests last year. I made a bunch of random software. I did some vibe coding, I guess, uh, with,

Evan Troxel: kitchen generator, your ca cabinet layout thing?

Clifton Harness: yeah, like all of it was, you know, maybe 20 little MVPs to get to that where, where it was something meaningful.

Um, it was a very stupid, uh, coder relative to the guys I work with. Uh, but the scary thing is like I was able to get something workable. Um, you know, I think I'm just more worried that like someone younger than me with a bigger cr you know, bigger, um, grudge to, to grind on the industry. Like just can you go embrace AI completely And like I might kill some people, you know, like, uh, 'cause it's contract documents.

Um,

but you know, small firms like how like if, if the chat bots are able to generate CDs, which maybe two year, three years from now they can, like small firm with three guys. Yeah. They're going to leverage to the hilt every automation tool they can. Um. Um,

Evan Troxel: Or a real estate developer, right? Like I, I would,

Clifton Harness: yeah, or they'll just hire an architect and, you know, in-house, Hey, I'll pay you, you need to stamp these drawings, you know, we'll take out a professional liability insurance. Um, you know, people will be smart about it, I think. But, uh, I think the real risk I'm trying to raise is like the a i a or you know, the architecture industry already fought for that stamp.

Like maybe it's time to fight for, for more protection. Um, you know, 'cause you're not gonna have much of a industry if, you know, copyright dies. If the ai, you know, LLMs specifically and test, it's a different technology than LLMs, it's procedural generation. We, we write all the automation code ourselves. Um.

We, we also have to like, get customer feedback from people. Like, Hey, this is how you could improve this. In the chat bots, you know, you'll generate an image and you'll say, okay, I need you to change this, this, and this because of this, this, and this. And like, in the act of telling it that because, um, you're giving more information into the LLM that you know it can then compete with you.

Um, so never have the free version. Always have the paid version where they can't have your data.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Clifton Harness: Uh, but if you're a small firm and you don't care, uh, you're in inadvertently training, you know, uh, the chat bot on how to get better at your job, um, simply because you're telling it, here's what it needs to be.

Uh, and that was, that was one of the things that freaked me out when I was. Building the kitchen generators that it got more intelligent after what I was trying to do because I, you know, it's all in one big, uh,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: And, um,

you know, you could probably even go back, uh, 'cause I, I think I built it with 3.5 and, you know, hey, 4.5, try to do all this again. Um, and I'm sure it'd be sharper, better, cleaner. Um, the rendered layouts maybe would look better, but all that improvement isn't coming from my session with the ai. It's everybody else pouring their hopes, loves, and dreams into the machine.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: And that's the big risk architecture is that it will slowly, maybe it's three or 4% today, but it'll slowly erode for a very long time.

Evan Troxel: What do you think the chances are of like, okay, so, so if you look at the numbers of like autonomous cars, like Waymo's and you know, what, what, whatever's rolling around taxis and stuff, and like the number of accidents versus human drivers and like, it's way smaller, right? The number's way, way, way, way smaller. I mean, there's definitely still this kind of moral argument happening and stuff. Um, for sure. But, with, with this kind of thing, you know, if you go back to your, your about what the a i a fought for, I mean, I remember hearing somebody on the board of NCARB say, well, it's a good thing, you know, architects have to stamp drawings that are of a certain size scale, you know, type whatever. And it's like, well, well, what if that doesn't exist? Like if you ask an accountant or a dentist, or if, if they could do a house without an architect versus with an architect, which one would they choose? Right. Would, because I think a lot of times for them it's like they're giving up control of whatever to an architect.

Right? They see it that way and architects are like, yeah, we

Clifton Harness: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: right? Um, we're, this is what we're trained for. But I think a lot of 'em would choose not to, right? Because it's red tape. Just because it's red tape. And so like applying the analogy of the, the. The driverless automobile, you know, the autonomous driving to architecture.

What if the AI and there's insurance involved and there's all these things, and they say, yep. Like, we're willing to accept the risk that it's right because it's, it's faster. Most of the time it's cheaper. My subscription is cheaper. I don't have to wait, I don't have to do all these things that are involved with the typical architectural process. We're willing to accept the trade off and therefore, you know, maybe you have an architect trained AI that stamps your drawings so that you, then it ties back into that insurance policy and just say,

Clifton Harness: Man.

Evan Troxel: here we

Clifton Harness: Yeah. I mean,

Evan Troxel: look at the numbers.

Clifton Harness: mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: let's just look at the numbers. We're willing to try it out in these controlled conditions for this amount of time.

And then we say, yep, that's totally acceptable Now.

Clifton Harness: I, uh, all right. There's gotta be some lawsuits or something, but I think the, I mean, here's, here's the most eloquent, uh, way I could defend architecture. Uh, you all are technically enabled storytellers and you efforts are to know 10% of what everybody is doing, uh, about your building. So, you know, you gotta, you know, I need to know at 10,000 feet what mechanical, electrical, plumbing, what they're doing, what structurals doing.

You know, maybe structure is, is closer to 50 'cause it's 40% of the cost of the deal. So you need to really be on, on, on top of structure, um, and defending that, that you are the ch the storyteller in chief. And there isn't a single deal, uh, in the real estate world that is done without some meaningful story.

Um, you know, this is a housing complex, you know, near, uh, these, uh, schools. Um, and we're able to get, you know, slightly more density because we're near, you know, a, a bus stop or a train stop or something. There's some meaningful story for every deal.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Clifton Harness: if you, as the architect, can't thread that needle amongst all of the consultants.

Uh, then I think chatbots like, deserve to take your job.

Yeah. And like, like too many of them think that their value is the drawings, the, the drawings. What you get paid for the value is, is building the story and keeping, you know, keeping everybody rowing in the right direction. Action. Um, you know, another thing I'll say is like, maybe the promise of AI is that that 10% grow grows to 20% and, and you, you might have more empathy for what, um, some consultants trying to bring to the table.

Um, and you might get that empathy even faster. Uh, and so maybe a story on that is, you know, I was kind of shocked when you get into practice where there's a landscape architect, there's an architect, there's a, a master planner, there's um, the housing architect, there's the office architect. And so you're like dealing with seven or eight designers, um, trying to weigh in on a master plan.

You know, that was crazy to me. I'm like, how is there, why don't we just have, let's just pick one of these people to be the one that has the master vision. And you kind of do, but then you gotta wait three weeks for, you know, all of the visions to come in and you gotta recoordinate. Um, and I think having, uh, LLMs maybe in the room, taking notes or something so you can try to understand what a person, like why a person did something before asking them, what the hell is this?

You know? Um, and that, that is the role of the architect is, is managing at scale personalities. And you know, the goal is the building and you gotta use all these people to get there. Um. And I, I, I think I just like, you know, architects, they, they like to own their business development relationship and they look at TestFit and they're like, I'm not letting you compete with me directly.

It's like you get paid on all the drawings, later you get paid. Like why do you care about like, spending all of your opportunity cost on, you know, yourself? Uh, 'cause smaller firms are not gonna do that. They're just gonna have, you know, render the, the sketch. Um, so yeah, like I, I think just reframing like your value is the vision.

You get paid by the drawings and like, I don't, like, it would be better if those two things were in much better alignment. Um, but they're not.

Evan Troxel: Right.

That's where it gets back to that conversation with John Cerrone because of this idea of this super lightweight. Thing that things are hosted to, like the, because the, you, you're spending your time the big, big ideas happen and the other stuff just falls into place. I mean, I don't know how perfectly it works, right?

But that's, that's been their goal for a long time is like really lightweight, flexible, because we want to, we want to iterate, we want to explore, we wanna do all these things. And we have the confidence that things that, that these assemblies work, that the numbers are penciling out, that we're achieving all these other goals all at the same time while keeping that really flexible going on because they realize that that's where the value is.

Right. And the

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Automate a way, like he said, he said like, like, we run away from abstraction. Right. Even though like they're, they're really dealing with this super abstract, lightweight model. Like they're not trying to come up with ways to represent, they're trying to go direct to fabrication.

That's what they're trying to do. Right. But what, but not having to model it LOD 3 50, 400, whatever it is that, that a fabricator requires. Right. So I think that's, that's super interesting, right? Because it actually does really talk about where they see their value in that process,

Clifton Harness: I think it's, they've figured out how to save intent. Um, so yeah, saving intent and keeping it, making it, it persists as a designer might be one of the most annoying things. 'cause you had an intent to do X and then, and then something changed. Um.

Evan Troxel: Because you get judged on the outcome. You don't get judged on the intent.

Clifton Harness: Yeah, yeah. You don't, but the intent, the intent kind of drives that larger than life outcome. You know, like, you know, you could hire a bad architect and he'll, he'll do, he'll make a building worth a hundred dollars. Like you hire a good architect to make a building that same exact thing worth 1 20, 1 30.

Um, and it's totally about intent management. And here's another plug for, for only plans is my, my white paper, which is sort of, um, you know, I really start on April Fool's Day 'cause he expects Clifton to have a white paper. But, um, it's, it's more about saving intent, uh, is I think the next stage for bim.

Um, and let's give a very specific example. And my kitchen cabinet configurator. I, I wanted to save the intent that the dishwasher would always be to the, you know, bottom right hand side of the, uh, of the sink. Um, that's, I don't know, a fairly consistently good design for where you put your dishwasher, um, and like

Evan Troxel: practices, right.

Clifton Harness: best practice maybe.

And, and so, you know, embedded into the logic of every single one of those permutations of the cabinet generator is like, you cannot break this rule. This rule must not be broken. Um, and it, it's just like an example of saving intent into, um, into a lookup table actually. Um, so that way I can call that same logic again.

At any dimension for any kitchen in the future and know exactly, you know, where a 24 inch wide dishwasher's supposed to be. Um, and then you can sort of start to build the logic of, of how you would save intent. Uh, for, for other things, like if I have, say my intent is single family residential and I, I want, uh, to make sure that closets have sliding doors or bi, you know, bi-fold doors or something, I could just save that into like a door schedule.

That's the intent for Clifton harnesses way of designing a single family home. Uh, and when I mash those two rooms together, the door pops in, you know, maybe at the midpoint, so I don't have to go figure out what door goes between closet and bedroom. Like it's just known.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: Um. And that maybe is, is, uh, there's two different ways to model.

I think there's, there's the tectonic way, um, which is what everybody builds, which is we draw a wall, draw a wall, draw a wall, draw a wall, place the door. Uh, I don't want this door. Delete the door, go find some other family door, put the door in. And there you have, you know, a room with the door. Um, there's, you know, you're adding elements to it to make the, the final, you know, kind of design, um, TestFit for its part works very differently.

It's, it's sort of stereotonic, like it shits out everything that's possibly possible. I shouldn't say shits out. Um, it generates everything, you know, that's possibly possible. Uh, and then it's up to you to delete elements that, uh, or edit elements that, uh, shouldn't really be there. It's very stereo atomic.

It's like removing as, as opposed to adding. Um, and we have so much data in these BIM models and like, in my mind, like, okay, well that data should be your intent and you should be able to apply that intent on any future model that you make. Um, and I don't think we've seen that leap, uh, from, you know, tectonic BIM to Stereotonic BIM yet.

And that, that might be like, where I think the future is, is like, we're gonna take these 300 BIM models you already made, and here's the decisions that you make between these two rooms on average. Here's the decisions that you make. Uh. On these facade orientations and what their, you know, facade orientation, adjusted for latitude.

Here's what you do, um, in this situation.

Evan Troxel: I think

Clifton Harness: Um,

Evan Troxel: see that, but you wouldn't necessarily know why. You wouldn't know the story behind it. And it seems to me like this kind of thing needs to, to do, achieve what you're talking about. It kind of needs to know why it needs to watch you do it and

Clifton Harness: yep.

Evan Troxel: it while you're doing it,

Clifton Harness: Well,

Evan Troxel: an art

Clifton Harness: you, you need to explain it to the people that work for you. And like, here's why, like, the best guys I worked for were ma absolute masters. Um, this guy Paige, he could look at, uh, survey at one to 100, pull out a flare tip pin and, and, and do the whole building in two minutes, uh, at every scale.

Like he would, he, he would even be worried about like, you know. Uh, how the, the windows on the bedrooms would, would need to be pointing in a slightly different direction for the best kind of view. And, you know, he'd look at the survey for four minutes before jumping in and, um, but hi, his intent moved so fast, uh, because of his 20 years of doing it that you, like, you could not keep up

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: a, as a, you know, so invariably he's going to get your, you take a sketch, you go make it, you know, machine precision and cad, and then bring it back.

And, okay, here's, here's 17 mistakes you made. Uh, please learn. You know, do do what I, uh, do what I mean, not what I'm saying. You know, sort of, sort of the reaction, uh, to some of the feedback. And like what he meant was for, for, for me to really understand his intent. Um, and that same thing needs to, like, if we want to, for, if your firm wants to build an ai, you know, and actually make it valuable, you gotta teach it intent.

You gotta teach it why you're doing what you're doing.

Evan Troxel: and my, I think,

Clifton Harness: I,

Evan Troxel: I think that's an art form. It's like going back to this idea of going into a wood shop. It's like there's people who can make stuff. That is not the same person usually who can explain how to do it while they're doing it. Right.

Clifton Harness: yeah.

Evan Troxel: totally separate skill. And I like architecture does have a mentorship problem,

Clifton Harness: Yes.

Evan Troxel: whole idea of knowledge sharing and knowledge capture is, is a serious problem for the, especially when you get to kind of the idea of implementation, like what you're talking about, of like, how do we make the next generation of tool that understands intent

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: based on my 20 years, 25 years of experience doing architecture, because I've never explicitly trained anything to do that.

And if I have had to have a mentee at some point, like it was touch and go, like it was, it wasn't in there. There was no intention behind sharing my intent.

Clifton Harness: Yep. Yes, exactly. So there's design intent that needs to be captured. Um, you know, so I, I don't know, like I, I'm just dreaming of like a BIM environment where, um, it just is learning from what you do and it, it stores graphs, you know, ba based off of

Evan Troxel: It looks

Clifton Harness: what you, what you did. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: And, and, um, it's hard to figure out. How to build a drawing tool for people that are really good at drawing. Uh, and I think if you can bring that logic or, all right, so I grabbed a bunch of, uh, slack, uh, messages, um, on our channels to try to see like what our, what our major problems are and just paste it into the chat bot, Hey, what are our major problems here?

Um, it sort list here's, you know, here's a bunch of problems that I see. Um, I didn't have to call a meeting and ask 10 people for sort of what

Evan Troxel: Their

Clifton Harness: problem.

Evan Troxel: told you. Yeah.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. So, so like a, like the valuable AI tools I think are the ones that just sort of slot in where, where you are and, um, so whatever it is, whatever drawing tool.

We'll be this intent-based drawing tool. Um, it has to just slot right in and it has to, to immediately start to try to help. Um, and that's really hard to do. Like, oh, we're gonna do RCDs in this thing that we've never heard of before. Okay. Uh, no, you know, like, I, you know, it, it's hard to, to, to the high switching costs, you know, and Autodesk for their part, they're one of the most impressive capitalists corporations ever seen.

They've got, uh, ecosystem lock in from everyone in AEC. They've got high switching costs to anything outside of their system. Um, they have not completely burned, uh, bridges on pricing. I think they might be getting a little bit close. Um, you know, like the escalating software costs. Um. You know, it's like people po post, like, oh, we're gonna go, you know, compete with Revit.

And I'm like, no, you're not. You can't. It's like, it, it's moat is so, so, so wide and the, it's, the depth is really, really deep. So don't try to compete with it. Try to try to moonshot for the thing that happens after it. Um, you know, that's maybe my goal with, with, with writing is, you know, I had this very specific vision that like, I didn't think we should be drawing a bunch of parking lots and a bunch of, um, you know, opportunity cost stuff and, and feasibility and, you know, stayed true to that vision for seven years.

And it is bearing fruit like lots of fruit. Uh. In, in an industry where it's really hard for, for fruit to be born, you know, and it's like, I didn't think, hey, let's make a faster drawing tool. It's like, no, let's just go make the site plan, you know? Um, I don't think that what disrupts Revit though is the same DNA, like, I think it's different.

Um, yeah. I mean, I, I, we never, like, I never, uh, never raised money to go compete with them or anything, so, you know, like not, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm sitting on a fence here. Um, you know, maybe begging for the industry to ask me to jump in or something. Um, but it, you need to do it slowly and, you know, with in intellectual rigor, which you know.

Hard to get me to sit still and think for a long time. So,

Evan Troxel: I heard this term this morning, Clifton, a squirrel on a double espresso.

Clifton Harness: yeah. Yep. Exactly that.

Evan Troxel: Oh, man. Thank, thanks. It's been a, a good conversation and I, I agree with your final words there. I feel like it's like inspiring. Yes. Will it, will it spark action is the question and, and, um, I hope it does. I, I honestly hope it does.

Clifton Harness: I mean, I, I think, I think if y'all are foolish enough to, as an industry to keep letting us go, um,

Evan Troxel: What do you

Clifton Harness: I mean it,

Evan Troxel: What do you mean by that?

Clifton Harness: well, I mean, people keep buying our software. They keep liking our content. They keep helping us. Well, you know, 'cause, 'cause you're gonna have a madman trying to. Build, you know, even more tech like you're gonna have to deal with this for a long time, and.

Evan Troxel: That's what architecture is though. It's a bunch of crazy people, right? Uh, so, so maybe there's room for one more in the asylum. You know, I definitely think there is, and I think we should think about it that way too. It's like this, I think one of the, of the reasons that there has been staying power is because of like what this industry, what this industry actually stands for.

Um, and I think we forget about it all the time. I think we, but, but we keep going back. Like I, I'll go to the Monterey Design Conference in California. It's every two years and it's like this homecoming of what we got into doing, why we became architects. And it's, it's purely about the design and the outcomes and the beauty and the experience and the feeling and the story.

Like it's, it's about that. And that, that to me actually is the core of the, of this industry. The people, the core of the people of this industry. and for some, somehow we haven't maybe lost that, but I think we're distracted about it all the time. All the time.

Clifton Harness: Yeah, I would say

the heart of architecture. Uh, actually I did another blog post, some, it's, I call it the spirit of architecture. It's, um, you know, I'm from like a very well do background, like I didn't. Want for anything growing up. And then I'm in my first summer internship, you know, outta college and, um, was able to, you know, say what I was doing that week in front of the whole firm.

And, you know, I'm like, oh, I get to go on a vacation to The Bahamas on Friday. And everybody was really happy, excited for me. And, um, my mentor, you know, intern mentor took me aside and goes,

I think you need to understand that there are people that have been working here for 20 years that cannot afford to go on any kind of vacation, much less to The Bahamas. And it crushed me. I was like, you know, white Anglo-Saxon male. That I am. Okay. Um, and then I kept having observations like this because, you know, I come from real estate development family, and

there's another guy, uh, who I think it was a church. He had, you know, we were working on a church and the pastor couldn't, he couldn't really afford, you know, what, what we were trying to do. And he spent, uh, every night for two weeks, like basically pro bono, making sure that, you know, this church would get, get its day in court for design.

Um, it wouldn't paid anything he desperately wanted for the building to, you know, to serve the people that you know that it was for. And. It so humbling. Like I, I think about that all the time. Um, I don't know. And then I just get really angry 'cause it's like blood, sweat, and tears goes into these buildings and we can't even ask for a better contract.

What are we doing?

Evan Troxel: Existential

Clifton Harness: Sorry, I got emotional there.

Evan Troxel: more so more, more existential now than it, than it has been. And there's always been kind of an existential threat, I think at least a perceived one. And now I, it like really feels like it. Um, yeah. And what,

Clifton Harness: AI for sure.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Well, only plans is the name of the blog where you can get more of this kind of thinking.

And I feel like it's, uh, it's needed. I appreciate you doing that and you didn't have to do that. I think it's a little bit of a, I mean, I didn't see it coming and when you did it, it's like, of course Clifton's doing this. Right. So I, I appreciate you actually being real with the industry in, in that way.

And, uh, and it has garnered some, I think, constructive. Maybe not all the time, but back and forth when you do that, when you post those posts. And, and so I, it's critical to get people thinking about this stuff, so

Clifton Harness: Yeah, can't just be me screaming into a box.

Evan Troxel: Right.

All right. Let's wrap this one up. One of the key themes from this conversation that really stood out to me was that professionals have to challenge industry norms to thrive because I believe that the AEC industry at many levels is broken and stagnant and blindly following tradition is pushing professionals towards irrelevance and obsolescence.

Let's break it down with five key takeaways around this topic from mine and Clifton's Conversation number one, the existing system is outdated and inflexible. Clifton points out that despite advancements in automation and technology like TestFit, the entrenched contract structures and business models of AEC have not evolved No amount of automation can fundamentally change the broken owner architect relationship without rethinking the contracts that govern them. Clifton said, there's no amount of incredibly well made automation software that will change the owner architect relationship without fixing the contracts. That is a brutal truth about the systemic barriers that tech alone can't solve.

Number two, staying in the box means diminishing value. Architects and designers are often trapped in roles that make them seem like commodities rather than valued creators. the profession has become disconnected from actual outcomes that matter to clients, like cost and timelines and flexibility.

Challenging norms is essential to reestablish relevance and value.

Number three, culture must change to attract and retain talent. Clifton talks about how the outdated culture of architecture working harder, not smarter, won't attract Gen Z or the AI generation without change. The profession risks a massive talent drain. He said architecture isn't scalable in its current culture.

Gen Z isn't going to jump into this broken system warning that without cultural change, the profession will lose the next generation of talent. Number four, current tools and processes are misaligned with reality. Clifton shares how forcing BIM onto every project, even when it's not necessary, is like bringing a bazooka to a banana Fight.

Professionals must rethink tools and methods to match the actual needs of projects, not clinging to the industry mandated defaults.

Number five, real estate developers lead by innovating, not by conforming. There's a stark contrast between the energy and future thinking seen at real estate development conferences versus the architectural ones. Developers invest in new ideas because they have direct skin in the game. Architects by clinging to old processes and slow innovation cycles risk fading away. Clifton said that developers are invested in the future. Architects are still waiting for commissions. This illustrates a stark contrast in mindset, proactive versus reactive. In conclusion, AEC professionals must challenge the norms because the norms themselves are outdated, ineffective and harmful to both individual success and the industry's future viability. But you already knew that. So what are you gonna do about it? Tell me what you think by clicking the feedback link in the show notes or leave a comment on YouTube for this episode. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.