234: 'Here's to the Crazy Ones, AEC Edition', with Håvard Vasshaug
A conversation with Håvard Vasshaug about liberating building data from Revit, real‑time data flows, reducing outdated six‑week information, and turning risk into revenue for AEC firms.
Håvard Vasshaug joins the podcast to talk about what happens to building data after the architect hits save, and why so much of it dies inside the authoring tool. We explore why it makes no sense to force construction, cost, and scheduling data into Revit, how live model changes can flow straight to contractors and owners without a BIM license, and why six-week-old information is the reason projects run over time and over budget. Håvard also gets into architects' instinct to guard their files, the industry's decades-long habit of shedding risk instead of getting paid to carry it, and why the firms that self-disrupt end up looking light years ahead.
This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, BIM managers, and design technologists who are tired of being the bottleneck stuffing metadata into models on someone else's behalf, and who suspect that structured, liberated data is the real groundwork for everything AI is about to ask of the profession.
Original episode page: https://trxl.co/234
Episode Links:
Connect with the Guest
- Håvard Vasshaug
Håvard's Companies
- AnkerDB — Website · LinkedIn. The product at the center of this conversation: pulls data out of Revit so contractors, owners, and manufacturers can craft and enrich it directly, without a BIM license.
- Reope — Website · LinkedIn. Håvard's first company (formerly Bad Monkeys), where AnkerDB was born. CEO Joachim Viktil was Evan's guest in episode 221.
Software and Tools Discussed
- Autodesk Revit — The BIM authoring tool at the heart of the debate: great for parametric 3D, wrong for stuffing construction and cost data into.
- Autodesk Dynamo — The visual scripting environment Håvard once ran a hundred scripts in. His "you need a key" line comes straight from Dynamo.
- AutoCAD — Still Autodesk's best-selling product, part of why Håvard doesn't expect Revit to vanish.
- Rhino — A tool architects love partly because the file is theirs and locked to them.
- Tekla, Archicad, Civil 3D — Other authoring tools that also can't automate project breakdown out of the box.
- IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) — The open format behind the 3,800-model library one contractor uploaded to Anker.
- Claude — Some Anker configurators now operate the platform by chatting with Claude in the browser.
Classification Standards
- Uniclass, UniFormat, OmniClass, COBie — You don't need everyone on the same standard, you just need a standard. With structured data, Anker can map one to another.
Events Mentioned
- AEC Tech (CORE studio / Thornton Tomasetti) — Where Evan and Håvard first met in New York City.
- Autodesk University — Where Håvard gave talks on rebar and Revit earlier in his career.
Previous TRXL Episodes Mentioned
- Episode 140 — You Had Me at Anger (Håvard Vasshaug) — Håvard's first time on the show, covering Reope, Anker, and the Bad Monkeys backstory.
- Episode 221 — Architecture's Busyness Trap (Joachim Viktil) — Evan's conversation with Håvard's Reope co-founder and CEO.
About Håvard Vasshaug:
Håvard Vasshaug is a structural engineer by training and the co-founder and CEO of AnkerDB, a Norwegian software company rebuilding how construction data moves through the AEC value chain. He got his start in BIM 21 years ago as a Revit trainer, then spent years as the in-house "scripter" — the bottleneck with a hundred Dynamo scripts, cramming construction metadata into models on behalf of contractors who were standing around his desk. That frustration led him to co-found Reope (formerly Bad Monkeys) and later spin out AnkerDB, which pulls data out of Revit and lets contractors, owners, and manufacturers craft it directly, without a BIM authoring license. A self-described serial entrepreneur eight years into startup life, he now works mostly with public owners and infrastructure projects, though his real subject is the one he's chased for two decades: making building data genuinely valuable to the people downstream.
Comments ()