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KP Unpacked
Join serial entrepreneur KP Reddy for conversations and discussions around innovation, technology trends, and AI for startup founders, innovation catalysts & investors focused on the built environment (and beyond!)
KP Unpacked
BIM is Dead
What if AI could offer more benefits without the cumbersome reliance on 3D models? KP revisits his 2011 textbook on BIM, reflecting on its promise and the reality a decade later. He shares his vision for a future where AI enhances value creation for building owners and developers, possibly without the traditional 3D visualization that BIM champions. This episode is a thought-provoking exploration of the lessons learned and the potential for AI to reshape how we approach building design and construction.
Our conversation broadens to discuss the fundamental need for a paradigm shift within the AEC industry. Pushing against the grain of "that's how we've always done it," we urge industry professionals to rethink their roles as catalysts for innovation.
To read the original post on LinkedIn and connect with KP, go here:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kpreddy_notimesheets-norfis-activity-7273330637095284736-IBi1/
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Speaker 2:All right, welcome back to KP Unpacked. This is my opportunity to ask KP Ready, the CEO and founder of both Shadow Ventures and KP Ready Company, what he was thinking. Hey, KP, what were you thinking when you posted that on LinkedIn? If you're not following KP Ready on LinkedIn, you should be. It's pretty easy to find him. It's KP Ready, R-E-D-D-Y. Find him on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:He posts once or twice a day sometimes more thought-provoking, pot-stirring, but really deep insights on the AEC industry, on what's going on in terms of innovation, development in the built environment. My name is Jeff Eccles, I'm a senior advisor at KP Ready Company and, as you can tell, I'm joined again today by KP Ready.
Speaker 3:Hi, kp hey, jeff, how's it going? It's going really well?
Speaker 2:I'm looking out your window it's going really well. I'm looking out your window Is this gray and gloomy? I'm looking out my window it's like a dark and stormy night here. It's mid-December. We were just talking about it. It should be snowing here in Indianapolis, where I am, but here we are.
Speaker 2:So I guess we ought to just talk about BIM books. You posted recently on LinkedIn and, as we're recording this, it was three days ago. So, for those of you that are playing along at home, it was about friday, the 13th of december, when you posted this, and you're talking about the book that you wrote several years ago. Now. Actually, what's, what's the math? 13 years ago, yeah, wow, time's flying, isn't it? So I'm going to read the post, as we usually do, the format that we usually follow, if this is your first time here at KP Unpacked, I'm going to read the post. I'm going to ask KP what he was thinking, what was the inspiration, what was the impetus behind this post, and then we're going to unpack it. We're going to talk about it here. Maybe we'll even talk about some of the comments, because this one generated a lot of responses here. So it went something like this I published my textbook on BIM for owners and developers in 2011.
Speaker 2:My belief was that BIM would ultimately benefit the owners and developers of buildings. In my mind, it was a game changer. It was not. In fact, I'm unsure that BIM has been positive for those that matter the most. It may have in fact created an overhead to their projects, with the only benefit being 3D visualization. I was wrong. I now believe that AI will benefit the owners and developers and BIM is dead. Ai doesn't need 3D. That's for humans and really only an output.
Speaker 2:Right now, this is my opinion based on my experiences. I have a series of hypotheses that I am testing with owners. This has already started and beginning in January. I intend to focus on a series of interviews with owners. I will compile this research and possibly publish it in some form, maybe an update or maybe chapter two. So far, the feedback has been confirming some of my hypotheses and shaping some new ones.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to summarize some of my hypotheses using the hashtags no timesheets, hashtag no timesheets and hashtag NORFIs. Exactly, we've talked about the NORFIs concept a little bit not in Unpacked, actually, maybe we should do that, but, um, I think it is fascinating. I think that's a fascinating uh aspect of designing and building, which we absolutely have to address as we move forward in the industry. But, um, reading this post is interesting for a lot of reasons, on a lot of levels. Of course, hey, you wrote this book 13 years ago. Hey, bim, you know that was those were the relatively early days of BIM.
Speaker 2:We're in the relatively mature days of BIM and I agree with you 100%. This has been. This is something I talk about with my students as I teach. This is something that I question people in the industry and you know part of my take on it is why in the world have we been using BIM all this time only to print things out on 24 by 36 inch or 30 by 42 sheets of paper? What makes sense of any of this? For me, having worked in firms for 20 some odd years, myself, and you in your career as well uh, in your career as well. But I know I I've got an inkling of where this post came from. But why don't you give us the backstory? Why? Why plant this flag now?
Speaker 2:and where are you going with it?
Speaker 3:yeah, back when I wrote the book you know um it came from, I did like I think it was like a hundred dim boot camps for owners around the country, around the world, and the conclusion was that, you know, even back then, everyone was using the world digital twins, right? Digital twins mostly invented, I think, by GE, and they used it for really engine maintenance, for airplanes.
Speaker 3:Right that's where it came from. So there's already this inkling of, you know, digital twin and in my book I outline hey, here's how designers are using BIM, here's how contractors are using BIM and, by the way, nothing has changed. And here's all the features of BIM and, by the way, nothing has changed. And here's all the features of BIM. But ultimately there's this owner that should benefit from all of it. Now, with that said, early days we recognized that the owner is actually two different owners. There's the OpEx owner and the CapEx owner. The CapEx owner cares about the building getting done on time, on budget, et cetera, et cetera. The OpEx owner cares about the building getting done on time, on budget, et cetera, et cetera. The Apex owner cares about what the overall building maintenance costs are and be able to do predictive maintenance and analytics and all those things, and I cover all those things in my book. And, of course, none of it has happened, and I think the reason none of it's happened is on the design side. Bim has actually become a drafting tool. Yes, it's a fancy drafting tool for, honestly, for designers that maybe don't have spatial ability in 3D, like they can't see their own building, and so BIM allows them to design a building that they can visualize, right, they're also able to share those visualizations with the owner to say, hey, is this what you wanted? Is this what you meant? Do you like this? Blah, blah, blah. Still, you know, huge benefit, but maybe not for the effort. You could do that in SketchUp. I mean, now you can talk to things like one of my portcodes, icon3d, portco's Icon 3D. You can like, talk to their AI engine and it'll create a 3D rendering of whatever you've envisioned, right, you don't even need to draw it anymore. And so I think ultimately, people have taken this tool and kind of bastardized it for their own use and not for the owner's benefit.
Speaker 3:You know, my vision when I wrote the book was we're going to have all this data from the designers. The contractors were to pick up that data, enrich that data right to the point that it's enriched, that the design team would review it when they were done and when the building was complete, and enrich it with as-builts and warranty information and all the things that could go into this building, and that was going to be the ultimate deliverable with the building right? That was my vision. Well, it turns out, architects aren't using BIM, right? They're using it as a drafting tool. They don't care about the data. In fact, they're maybe even inputting less data into the BIM model. Because of their fear of liabilities, contractors are now taking 2D drawings and recreating a BIM from scratch and adding their information to it. So we're doubling up on the work effort and at the end of that, the owner still gets crap. They're still getting a box of closeout documents and warranty manuals Okay, maybe someone's scanning them in and giving them a PDF on a CD, which is absurd. But the data is not only being lost along the way, there's not even an enrichment of the data along the way, and so it's very frustrating as I circle back to these owners, and here we are, this many years later, and nothing's changed. And in fact, many of them say they're getting less data. It's not even getting the same data. They're getting less data than they did before BIM. So it's super fascinating, frustrating and kind of pisses me off a little bit.
Speaker 3:You know that we've done this to owners and developers. I think sometimes we forget that the owners and developers are ultimately who we serve. Now one hypothesis I have about why owners and developers have not benefited is I blame the software industry? Right? Autodesk is not in the business of selling licenses to owners and developers. Their customers are the designers and somewhat the contractors, right, these companies, they're core markets because if you think about an owner, maybe they build five buildings, whereas an architecture firm will design five buildings a month or more. Right, so it's a better market for the software, even though the benefits should roll to the owners and developers. So I think that's kind of one of the core problems. And then I think it's an industry that does not really we want to do the bare minimum with the minimum amount of liability to really serve, um, the owners, uh, and so we talked about, like you know, rfis right, we bring it up in that and yeah, no rfis right.
Speaker 3:Where do rfis come from? They come omissions, obviously, but then also that gray space between design intent, build intent and then the owner's intent. So it's playing, you know. So there's all these gaps of data and information, and that's where the RFIs come out. The RFIs are just like questions about things that are either not in the drawing or not explained. Well, you know, any amount of RFIs is a communication gap.
Speaker 3:Let's just keep it there. Right, it's a communication gap and in fact, because BIM in many ways you know, bim in many ways really does a lot of work for you and so there's a lot more cut and paste work as a designer, so maybe you're creating even more gaps of information and the feeling is, well, you know, the contractor ultimately is going to do clash detection and da, da, da, da da. So we're actually pushing more burden onto the contractors and so this manifests in the number of RFIs. I mean, part of the work I want to do next year, some of the deep work I want to do, is really go to an owner, say, hey, let's look at your last 50, 100 projects and let's track some boundary conditions about the project size, the project type, whatever it is, and let's see how many RFIs there were and let's see what the correlation of RFIs to change orders are. Sure, one thing, just at a macro level yeah, do we? I mean, I don't believe that there's less RFIs because of all this technology. I think there's more RFIs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So my point of view is. So a little bit of history for those of you that don't know, kp already knows this but a long long time ago, as part of the management team for an architecture firm, when this is right after Autodesk bought Revit, I was in charge of transitioning our firm, basically the digital transformation of the firm, from AutoCAD to Revit, and one of the statements that I made to our team was I looking at this tool and the power of this tool and and what we can actually create and how we can serve our clients, et cetera. And I said you know I forget what year that was, you know 1990, something right. I said AutoCAD won't be around in five years.
Speaker 2:And here we are in 2024, it's almost 2025 and AutoCAD is still going strong. But what I recognize is that you said something earlier. You talked earlier about serving clients, basically, and that's the value proposition that we're missing out of, especially on the AE side, I believe, is that we're not focused on the value proposition of serving clients. We're looking at BIM, you said, as a drafting tool. Fair enough, because what we're looking at and what we were looking at when Revit first came out, you know, first became available from Autodesk we were looking at BIM as a tool to get us to the deliverable of the permit set, not as the tool that would change the way that we served our clients.
Speaker 2:A point A to point B how do we get there quicker? How do we get there more efficiently? Hey, now I've got this model. Rather than doing an array of windows on an elevation, I've got this model that when I drop the window family in there, it gives me the specifications data, it gives me the cuts in the sections, it gives me all the things. We were, in a very short-sighted way, looking at it as a drafting tool, looking at the deliverable being how do I get this to the building department, not how does this serve the the? Uh? How does this serve my client?
Speaker 3:no 100 and part of it is, you know, incentive misalignment right yes, and we've gone through all these cycles of ipd and design, build and God knows what. All the kumbaya of all the kumbayas of. Well, we're all going to collaborate right. We're going to have shared risk and shared benefit.
Speaker 3:Like all of this nonsense has existed right and, at the end of the day, if you ask an owner great, all this technology, are you getting a better building? No, Are you getting data that tells you predictively how much budget you should have in your operating budget? I mean, I really think as a design and build team turns over a building, they should have to put in a 20-year maintenance plan and operating budget. That should be a deliverable. That should be a deliverable and they should be held accountable to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, well, that should be a deliverable and they should be held accountable to it. Yeah Right, when, when we were in Miami for the executive briefing as we're recording this, it was about a month ago or so we heard that from stage, from the owner side, the. The owner that was on stage in a panel discussion said you know what? We built 50 facilities this year and it was too many. But my problem is right. I know how much it's going to cost to hire the architect, the engineer, the construction manager. I know how much the materials are going to cost. I know how much it's going to cost to design and construct this thing. Why can't you tell me, why can't you give me some idea of how much it's going to cost and you explained this earlier how much this is going to cost to operate this facility, because that's the bigger number. That's actually more important to me than what it's going to cost, has more impact on my business than what it's going to cost to construct this thing.
Speaker 3:Right, and so it's almost like a performance warranty right Around the performance of the building. And but guess what, when I talk to the building product manufacturers that are part of this process, they've never been asked. They don't get asked like, hey, tell us. And so I think there's this missing link and the owners believe they're getting even less value of what they're paying. And the foundational aspect of technology is cheaper, better, faster right, that's supposed to be the goal and none of those things are happening. I mean, I think even an owner says, hey, I don't mind that we're paying more, but if I'm getting a better building, if I'm getting better data, then you know happy to pay more, right? I mean, actually we had one of these owners say they offer their design from a bonus for delivering early, and they were told it doesn't work that way. It takes what it takes to get our design done yeah I was like you should never hire that firm again.
Speaker 2:So, as we're talking about this and we're recording this, at some point in the future, there are architects or engineers or contractors that are listening to us talking right now, right now, and I know I can predict right now that there are architects, engineers, contractors listen to this and they're saying, yeah, but yeah, but yeah, but right. There's a lot of that going on as we're kicking this around. So let's talk about how, how this becomes reality and how what we're talking about uh is applied, because it's a new paradigm. It's going to require some sort of new paradigm. So what does that look like in 2025, 26, beyond, whatever? What needs to happen in terms of relationships, in terms of the contracts, in terms of the way that everybody works together? I mean, you mentioned integrated project delivery, ipd.
Speaker 3:What new form of working needs to happen in order for all of this to start to make sense. So, good question. I'm going back to basics, I'm doing customer discovery. I'm going to ignore how we do things. I'm going to to basics. I'm doing customer discovery. I'm going to ignore how we do things.
Speaker 3:I'm going to go spend time with. My goal is 100 owners. Next year maybe even more. I'm hiring someone full time to help me with this, so we're going to go talk to as many owners as possible. I am the master of customer discovery self-proclaimed, and I'm going to do customer discovery on this market From that. I'm going to do something about it, and either the AC industry is going to do it with me or I will do it without them. It's very simple. So I've got a few things going for me.
Speaker 3:I've done this before. I've built start. I know what it takes to build a startup. I have the relationships, by the way, I have capital and I don't have an existing legacy of like we used to do it this way. If you say we used to do it this way, like you're fired right, you're voted off the island immediately. You're voted off the island immediately. So what I'm really doing is saying we keep tipping away at features and this and that, and AI to do renderings and AI to do this, whereas ultimately, if we're not using AI to serve the owners and the developers, then all the rest of it is just a waste of time. It's just a waste of time. It's just a waste of time. So this is my mission. You can either join me, if you want to, and those that know me, I'm a fierce competitor. Losing is never an option for me.
Speaker 2:So either come be part of it and join the gang and be part of it, or I'm probably going to run you over, join the gang and be part of it or, you know, probably gonna run you over. Yeah, yeah, well, and part of what I hear coming out of that is, uh, well, well, first of all, it is good that you are the uh customer discovery uh guru, because that's what we base our incubator on, our startup incubator on. It's what all of our startup founders are running through and have run through is intense customer discovery. But what you're talking about and this will play out in the customer discovery certainly and it's sort of a no-brainer if you understand the market that you're actually in hey folks, if you're in AEC, you're in professional services. You're here to serve clients.
Speaker 2:Value creation what value are architects, engineers, contractors, etc. Creating for owners? And I'm excited to see where this goes. I'm excited to see what comes out of that customer discovery process, because it's going to be hundred percent value creation. How are we creating value in the development, the design, the development, the operation, the use of of the built environment?
Speaker 3:I mean that's that's what it comes down to, a hundred percent. Look, I'm we. Let me see, I'm a. I was about to say I'm of an age. I mean, we are of an age. That's because you're old. Our priorities start to change, right. Our priorities start to change right. And I think about near field stuff that we're building together like we're doing fantastic, it's not good enough, right? It's not good enough. And I think there's a couple of reasons, like this whole customer discovery effort with owners.
Speaker 3:The reason why industry can't do it is they're a hammer looking for a nail and that's all they know, like they don't know how to go to a customer and say like hey, tell me about your last 10 architects and why, why, you would ever hire them again. How did it go? Tell me about your engineering firm, and if you're an architecture firm, would you ever ask the question does it make sense for all the sub consultants to report into the architecture firm that has very little business acumen? Does that make sense? An architecture firm will ask that none of the time.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:Right. So the benefit I have is I don't care, I'm seeking for truth and authentic demand and all those things that the existing industry cannot ask for. They cannot ask those questions. They're tough questions, and then you also have to be a bit of a finance weenie, right. So I'm going to talk to them about their use of capital and their capital efficiency and their return on capital and expectations to either shareholders or whatnot, and how do they think about all these things. So it's going to be a fun effort, you know, with these owners and I think you know what I tell people is. You know, if you want to be part of it and learn along the way, join some of our programs. I'm definitely. I'm not looking to our mastermind group for answers. I'm really there to deliver questions.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Right and say like, hey, here's what I'm hearing to inform them of, like here's what owners are saying I mean I'm dealing with on the government side. I mean it's not saying I mean I'm dealing with, you know, on the government side. I mean it's not just buildings, right, I'm dealing with mayors. I've got conversations with mayors happening right now to say, hey, like what are we doing with roads and bridges and everything? This is insane, right, this is absolutely insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. One advantage you have and one of the things that's driving a lot of the yeah. One advantage you have, and one of the things that's driving a lot of the yeah buts that are going on right now, as people are listening, is that if you're in the industry, first of all this is the way we've always done it you get voted off the island. Kp already said that. Right, you get voted off the island if you say this is the way we've always done it. In my opinion, that's the most dangerous phrase that we have going in our society, right?
Speaker 2:now dangerous phrase that we have going in our society right now. But or and what the architects, the engineers, the construction managers, etc. The contractors are saying as you're talking about this, one of the advantages that you have is they're referring back to their contract documents, they're referring to their you know policies and things like that and you're.
Speaker 3:You have the advantage of being able to operate outside of that right now to reimagine these sorts of relationships no, and it's super frustrating, right, you look at like if you talk to a contractor or an architect and you say like, hey, what do you guys work on? They're like, oh, we design k312. That's not what you're doing. Go, we design k-12. That's not what you're doing. We're designing the educational environment for future generations. That is what you're doing. Who cares about the building? Who cares about the bricks and the curtain wall? That is not what you're doing. And that is in absolute alignment with the owner. That's an absolute alignment with the people that fund these schools, which is society. And you know, you and I probably grew up in very similar elementary schools. They were, you know, might've been a prison at one time. It felt like in a big cinder block buildings.
Speaker 2:Well, it was a prison while I was there.
Speaker 3:But my friend Anand Sanwal, who's the founder of cb insights, posted a post describing um this whole thing and at the end of it he's like did these sound like the rules for students or prisoners?
Speaker 2:it's like probably both right, yeah, it's the same so it's the same.
Speaker 3:So I think that's where it's got to shift. Right, that's the shift that has to happen is, if you, you know and I've posted about this a lot this year about mission alignment If you're going to work with me, better have mission alignment. I'm very focused on it. If you're talking to an owner and you ask them what their mission is, your job is to support them on that mission and help them exceed their abilities. Right, that's your. You're supposed to be, um, that catalyst that gets things going, because they can't know everything about everything, right, but it's your job to do it yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I mean, if you're uncomfortable, if you're listening to this and you're uncomfortable with what kp's saying, first of all, you're thinking you can retire. You're thinking small, right, you're? You're uncomfortable if you're listening to this and you're uncomfortable with what kp's saying, first of all, you're thinking you're retired. You're thinking small, right, you're? You're thinking small. And if you feel like, no matter where you are in the a, the e, the c, whichever letters you fall under, if you think, oh, we're being commoditized, it's because of this. You're not thinking about that mission alignment. You're not thinking about the value creation, you're thinking small. You're going back and saying, okay, bim is a tool to create the deliverable of the permit set, rather than value for for our clients, for the people that we, we serve.
Speaker 3:So um, and we're both very passionate about this. Yeah, and, by the way, the reason I'm focused on this with zero political bias most people know which direction I lean it's not whatever the narrative. Right now, I'm getting calls from mayors and governors and their people. Right, hey, one of our biggest line items is infrastructure and buildings, and building maintenance and infrastructure maintenance. The narrative right now is we got to do better, we got to do more with less. The feds aren't going to send us money if we can't demonstrate that we can be capital efficient in our deployment. That's roads, that's bridges, that's everything. There's a narrative now in DC and, like I said, I don't care who you voted for, it is where we're at Right and that narrative is now trickling down because if you're in a small city, you're saying, yeah, like it turns out, there's a lot of government waste. What are we doing about that? Right, it's very popular right now, targeting the government, and so I think that's going to be across the board.
Speaker 3:Shareholders are fed up with all this stuff. You know, I was talking to someone you know in the pharmacy business. Right, these pharmacies are shutting down thousands of locations. That is a massive, massive write-off. No one's asking A why did we build them in the first place? Right, right, oops. Two, nobody's coming up with a plan to say what do we do with these assets. It's literally a balance sheet write-off for these companies. But why are they not accountable, I asked this guy. I was like you should be accountable to repurposing the infrastructure that you built. You don't get to just like leave it and turn and rent it out, abandon it and rent it off to Spencer's gifts, who runs the Halloween stores and the Christmas stores, or like no fireworks.
Speaker 3:That's fireworks. No, sorry, you built it here. You own it. You are now responsible for the longevity of that, or that should be part of the thing, right? So even as a society, right? If someone wants to build a new grocery store in our backyard and they already have an old grocery store, part of the permit should be what are you doing with that?
Speaker 3:You don't get to just leave it empty. You don't get to just leave it empty. You don't get to make it a um, you know where all the kids hang out and you know there's crime and all the other stuff that comes up with abandoned buildings. Force them to turn it into. Make it. Make them turn into a community center, make it turn like there has to be. You know, we, we do this like cradle to grave thing. And if you read about this stuff, there's this whole idea of cradle to cradle, right, and as an industry, we should be leading these conversations. We know better, right, and I think the owners need help. I think things have just changed and, by the way, things are so expensive.
Speaker 2:It's so expensive to build a building these days and yet we're so quick to knock down a building right we're so quick to knock down a building, and half the time it's because the owners didn't know what it was going to cost to operate it yeah coming full circle I mean I yeah 100.
Speaker 3:I mean I think it interesting. I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East and in Japan and places like this and people ask like odd questions for us Americans what's your 100-year plan? I don't mean dead, they're like no, but you should still have a 100-year plan, year plan, I'm like I'm dead. No, we don't do business with people that don't have a 50 year plan. We don't do business with people that have a hundred year plan.
Speaker 3:So, as we think about all this stuff, I think the pressure for owners of all types to deliver better and be better contributors to society Of course we have ESG and all these other things right, we know there's pressure there and my point is the pressure, who cares? It's the best thing to do. It's not about the pressure of society and regulatory and all that. We should have bridges that are maintained. We should have schools that have a path forward. We should have schools that are designed to deliver the best experience for students to live their best lives right, full stop. Yeah, I think everyone. I mean I mean hit me on the comments if you disagree with that okay, I'm not holding my breath on that one but you know.
Speaker 2:I think when, when we talk about innovation for the built environment, we talk about and I said this earlier at least part of it. We talk about how buildings are envisioned, how they're imagined, how they're designed, how they're developed, how they're constructed, how they're operated, how people live in them, how people work in them. It's all connected. It doesn't stop with the ink on the paper, right. It doesn't stop with oh well, we, we met the deadline. We pulled the permit. We had zero, zero rfis, or a thousand rfis or whatever it was. It's also who's going to inhabit this? How's it going to be operated? Who's going to live here? How are they going's? Also, who's going to inhabit this? How's it going to be operated? Who's going to live here? How are they going to live? Who's going to work here? What's that going to be like? We've got to start thinking on the in those terms, and one of the things I'm wondering now is when are you kicking off your election campaign and what's the office?
Speaker 3:Nope, lots of skeletons in this closet. Thank God it was before social media. But you know, what's interesting about all this is, as I talk to capital allocators the people that fund these developments they are getting super interested in all of this this. They just don't know. They don't know. And I was talking to some capital allocators in the Middle East that fund real estate people and I was like you know, only about 70% of your money actually makes it into the asset and they're like what do you mean? I'm like there's all these brokers. There's inefficiency. They didn't even know what an RFI was and I explained it to them. They're like what do you mean? I'm like there's all these brokers, there's inefficiency. They didn't even know what an RFI was and I explained it to them. They're like no, that can't be true. They were in denial that. It's like even a thing happening. I'm like go ask your people. And so part of that has been. I've been. We'll talk about this on.
Speaker 3:A different episode is how we think about assessing these projects, how we think about assessing the people. How do we think about assessing the firms and how do they align with what the owners and the capital allocators that back the owners right. Keep in mind who owns buildings. Well, there's taxpayers, right, we own buildings and roads and things. Buildings Well, there's taxpayers, right, we own buildings and roads and things. But also it's insurance companies, it's private equity firms, and what I love about talking to private equity firms the minute you mentioned to them, hey, here's what's messed up and here's how we can monitor and measure that they get very excited. They get very excited. So I love that, right, I love that I'm talking to a bunch of hospital owners and funders of hospitals and they're signing up right, like this is uh, they're signing up for the mission. You know, they're like no KP, how can we help?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, this has been a little bit of a wild ride, because we started this conversation talking about KP's post on LinkedIn where he's talking about the book that he wrote in 2011, actually, about BIM for owners and developers. I'll go back to that post here in a minute. Maybe you got to this episode from LinkedIn. Maybe you got to this episode from LinkedIn. We understand there's this two-way flow, right? You may be listening to this now and then going back to LinkedIn. So if you're not following KP, it's just KP ready R-E-D-D-Y on LinkedIn, you'll find all these posts that we talked about on KP Unpacked. So maybe you're listening to that. Now you're going to go back to this post and right now, as we're recording this, there's something like 26 comments on the post. Um, lots of engagement around this one. Or maybe you started on LinkedIn. You said, hey, I want to know more. And you came over to this, this podcast or this video episode, to hear us, uh, talk about and give more insights about the post.
Speaker 2:But this is my opportunity to ask KP hey, what was the inspiration for this post? So let me touch on the post again here real quickly and we'll wrap this up because we've gone off on some great tangents here, but it's time to kind of bring it back to the original idea. So it goes like this I published my textbook on BIM for owners and developers in 2011. My belief was that BIM would ultimately benefit the owners and developers of buildings. We talked about it earlier. It hasn't.
Speaker 2:Kp goes on to say in my mind it was a game changer. It was not, in fact. I'm unsure that BIM has been positive for those that matter the most. It may have, in fact, created an overhead to their projects, with the only benefit being that of 3D visualization. It goes on and on. We've unpacked a lot of that here in this conversation. We've talked about value propositions. We've talked about mission alignment. We've talked about the future of BIM and AI, understanding what it costs to operate and understanding the mission of the built environment. Kp. Any closing thoughts around all this? It's been a great conversation today.
Speaker 3:No, I mean, look, I think I'm fairly transparent about what's important to me. I had the benefit of, you know, 100 plus investors behind me that are from the built environment and, as I've socialized this with these CEOs, none of them have disagreed. They're all in agreement that my thinking and my conclusions are 100%, not partially 100%, spot on. In fact, one of them said hey, what are you actually doing? Like it's clearly you're like Netflix and we're about to get blockbuster. How do we get involved? And my response was like I don't. I don't know that I want you involved. I'm not sure. Like you got to earn a seat at the table. If you want to be involved, money doesn't get you everywhere right.
Speaker 3:It's about philosophy and contribution. Yeah, yeah, and if you're a CEO that's like, hey, I'm willing to disrupt my own business and come play with KP and allocate some capital and time and all that and 100% aligned with the mission, then you know let's chat. But other than that, like I'm not here to convince you I think we had this conversation before about you know you don't have to convince people. You know rebel forces and star Wars. They weren't going around convincing people. You were there in. You know you're either in or you're out, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there's. There's nobody that's leading a revolution that has to convince all the people that are going to follow them. Yeah, um, this is a purposefully cringy statement for the architects and engineers out there, but those ceos that you're talking about are the ones that understand that the value they're creating is not the, the ink that shows up on the blueprints right, that's not that's not the value that they're creating.
Speaker 2:it's something very, very different. All right, thank you for listening to us unpack kp's linkedin post again as we're recording this or as it was posted on linkedin. You must have posted this about Friday, the 13th December 2024. So go back and check out that post. Follow KP on LinkedIn. He posts a couple times a day, sometimes more, and all of his posts have deep insights into the AEC industry, the built environment. Sometimes they're thought-provoking, sometimes they stir the pot. They're also they're always well-informed and it's always my pleasure to be joined by KP here to ask him hey, what were you thinking when you posted that on LinkedIn? My name is Jeff Eccles. As always, I'm joined by KP Ready, the CEO and founder of Shadow Ventures and KP Ready Co. We'll be back again next week with another episode of KP Unpacked. Thanks, kp.
Speaker 3:All right, thanks, jeff.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to another episode of KP Unpacked. You can connect with KP Ready today at kpreadyco. That's kpreadyco readyco, that's k-p-r-e-d-d-yco, and additionally follow him on linkedin at wwwlinkedincom. Slash I n slash. Kp ready you next time.