The Future of Housing with the Co-Founders of Higharc

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Li, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, start up advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello, disruptors. Welcome back to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today, we're chatting with 2 of the 4 co founders behind Hyarc, Mark Minor and Michael Bergen. Mark started HyArc to make great home design accessible to more people. With a background that includes launching leading 3 d printing companies like Desktop Metal and Carbon 3 d, Mark has a knack repairing design and technology.

A He's held management roles in some of the world's most beloved brands and creative consultancies, always pushing the boundaries in tech and design. Michael, the VP of product at Hyarc, is all about improving the built environment through design automation. His journey began with frustration over slow inaccessible process of custom home design, leading him to explore mass customization in grad school. His work at Autodesk on design automation for automotive and aerospace industries led to the release of Autodesk generative design, showcasing his commitment to advancing design through technology. So a little bit about HyArk. HyArk is changing the game in home building by using technology to streamline and democratize the design process, making custom home design more efficient and accessible. We're excited to dive into their journey, the challenges they've faced, and their vision for the future of more accessible homes. Hi, Mark and Michael.

A Welcome to the show. We're so grateful to have you here on Practice Disrupted.

B Thank you. Hi, Evelyn. It's great to see you.

A So I like to start off with a little bit of an icebreaker or something that either you can't see in your bio. The question for this season is, is there anything coming up personal or professional in the next couple of months that you guys are really excited about?

C I am going well, one thing I'm excited about, I'm going there to the Highland Games. It's, in North Carolina. It's kind of like a recreation of traditional Scottish Highland Games. So that should be fun.

A Is Is this your first time doing the Highland Games?

C Yeah. It is. Yeah. I have 2 kids, and one of them she's 9. She plays the violin, so she'll be fiddling there with other folks. And and my other my other one is a younger boy who's, very physical, and so he will love to run and jump and lift things like rocks and throw them, carve things. I'll be pasting whiskey. This is a good way to use time in the summer.

C Go to the mountains, do some highland games.

A Nice. How about you, Michael?

B Well, I have 3 of my kids' birthdays that are upcoming. We just got through one of them, and they're coming in August October, and we got a couple camping trips that are coming up. I'm excited about.

A How old are your kids?

B Our kids are well, one is 2, one just turned 4, and a 6 and a 7.

C And almost all of them were born under the auspices of Hyac. Yeah.

A Oh, really?

B Yeah.

A I imagine then you guys have a good parental leave program at Hyac?

C We do.

B Oh, yeah.

C Yeah. It's a good one. Yes.

A And, hopefully, Michael, you've taken full benefit of that as well.

B I have had the opportunity to take a few meaningful, you know, breaks, which, I mean, it is amazing to be able to do it. And it's quite rare. I think we, yeah, we have a generous sleep policy and a lot of lot of babies at HyArk in the last few years.

A So speaking of Hyreark, kind of let's jump into it. So I have an audience that is forward thinking, but I don't think, you know, Hyreark's a little bit on the periphery relative to the AEC industry. Who wants to jump in and kind of give us the quick overview of what HyreC is about?

C Yeah. I'll, talk about it briefly. So HyreC is built for home building. And so in that regard, you're right that it's on the periphery of AEC. Because for the most part, AUC isn't deeply involved with the way homes are built, especially in the United States. So HyArk is bringing kind of advances you see in generative design, as well as let's say just better, more modern web tools, especially for computer aided design to an industry that really desperately needs it. You probably know that we've got pretty big supply shortage in the US for houses and that coupled with kind of the interest rate environment, leads to a continuing set of challenges around affordability. And so, we're really targeted at helping the builders who build most houses in the US, you know, improve the processes and the quality of the homes they build and bring the pricing down.

C Unfortunately, AEC as a field really doesn't play the kind of role it once did in in that effort. Folks in in our industry are often surprised to learn that more than 90% of houses are designed in AutoCAD still. And so they're leaving a lot of opportunity, on the table. It's one of the reasons why productivity has actually gone down for the industry over time.

A That's a great intro and thank you for framing it specifically for for the audience. So you Mark, you gleaned a little bit into why you were interested in Hyre Arc and the need for home building and driving costs down. But what was the true impetus behind starting Hyre Arc?

C Well, it started when I was working in a 3 d printing company. I had been in a couple of different 3 d printing companies and had been in and around the world of generative design and design technology, design automation. And I started to build my own house. Well, I tried to buy some land and figure out what I could build. That's really how it happened. And it was just extraordinarily frustrating for me as a home buyer, and I've actually got some degree of design capability and knowledge. So of all people, I should have been capable of really nailing it. And I was so frustrated with what I saw in advanced manufacturing in terms of the application of software and design tools.

C And what I saw in homebuilding, which was the total lack of it that, I started the company to do that. Myself and Michael are are 2 of 4 cofounders actually. So, Michael, do you wanna give your your your background and your reasons for the business?

B Yeah. Yeah. So I started my career in architecture. So I worked, in an architecture firm as an intern, developing single family homes, in my first work while I was in undergraduate school. And then I got really focused on technology and started performing BIM implementations. So I was very early Reddit user, back in 2003, 2004, and started to take firms through that transition. And as I was watching the process of designing and building homes, there was so much that was left to be desired. You know, as someone who is familiar with how code is written and how software systems work, and then comparing that to how building projects are developed and how building projects work.

B It's just there's so much that's thrown away after every project. So I worked on one large house for about 2 years, and, developed a set of convictions and insights that we could preserve knowledge throughout this process and reuse it across many different projects. And, yeah, that took me through to graduate school where I focused on automation of single family homes and just developed prototype tools to enable buyers to express what their goals were for a home, and then generate a home on the other side. That work took me to Autodesk where I changed industries for a while, focused on manufacturing and automotive and aerospace, and developed a really great tool called, Autodesk generative design, which is now part of the fusion platform. And this is one of the first proper gold record design tools, that was commercialized and released into the industry. Then I went into a role exploring generative AI. And at that time, it was more about generative adversarial networks and understanding how we could synthesize new plans from preexisting data in the context of Revit. And, as I was going through that project and and working with NVIDIA, got a call from Mark.

B It's like, hey. You know, I read some things that you published in the distant past, and it seems really, similar to an angle that I have in, building a business. And, you know, we headed off pretty much immediately. Yes. You know, the rest is history, I would say.

A People in the AEC industry often forget that Autodesk actually works with other industries. So it was interesting to for you to hear about that transition as you had talked about working at Autodesk. So, Mark, it seems, are you the impetus of pulling together the founding team with the 4 others? So, you So I think a lot of people would have a question about how do I even go out and find my founding team, especially if I have a technical idea and I'm a nontechnical person.

C Yeah. Well, know your own strengths is one of the most important piece of advice I can give and then build like, go and find people who really are complimentary to you and to what you need to build in your business. So I was very purposeful in looking for cofounders who really fit the not only the needs of the business. So for example, I was really targeting, let's say, like, someone who had deep knowledge of procedural content generation of video gaming because I wanted to take I wanted to adapt some of that those approaches over to home building. And so one of our co founders come up video gaming. Obviously, design automation is where Michael kind of the the profile is focused on. And with with Peter who's our other co founder and CTO, it's really more web based CAD on the engineering side. And so kind of understand what you are good at and find people who are really complementary to it and that's like base level advice, right? There's obviously a lot more to it But then understand, like, really have a vision for how the team can complement each other.

C So each time, and not only not only with cofounders, by the way, in general with hiring, every person you hire, you should now rethink, like, half your other hires based on that hire. Do you know what I mean? Like, a company is an organism, and it needs to adapt and react based on the conditions it finds itself in. And so that's, like, I think some of the some of the reason why we've been able to build such a dynamic team is we brought on not only as cofounders, but as as over time as a team. We've we've brought on folks who complement each other as well as who represent distinct and very separate disciplines. You know, we've got a diverse array of disciplines in the business. And we have a kind of framework for how they'll work together. It's always perfect. You know, like, when you hire people from one field into a totally different field and even role, like home builders into a software company, architects into a software company, finding the their fit and what's good for them, what's good for the business, where they're talented.

C Over time, you kind of you gotta be flexible. But I think it really pays off bringing in folks who have that kind of rich diversity of experience and background.

A I really appreciate that perspective. I've been trying to talk to people about, and I know you just said fit, but from a different standpoint, but trying to talk to people about how we don't want to hire for culture fit, right? You want to hire for values, shared values, and that with every person you bring in, like you said, as an organism, things evolve and change. Michael, I have a question for you talking about a little bit about going from Autodesk, which is a very large company. And I feel like architects kind of inherently like the sense of security into what is now like a into a startup role and a and a cofounder. Talk me through a little bit about your thinking about going from Autodesk to startup and any hesitation or excitement you had through that process.

B Yeah. It was, very serendipitous with my connection with Mark at the time when we did connect because I had been considering and fairly obsessed with this idea of, continuing on the thread of my research in graduate school and turning it into a business. Like, really, I had this conviction that there's an opportunity for generative design in the world of production building that is very unique. And, one of the reasons for that is that, production building is a discipline to produce a building that's like no other. Production builders, they don't just build one home. They have many different variations, within them. And one of the homes that we often demo has about 70,000,000 variations. And the way that they're represented today in practice with AutoCAD is through 100 or 1000 of independent drawings that are all, like, collaged together to form, like, what the field uses to build someone's home.

B So there's this really amazing intersection of generative design technology and the needs for production builders that provided this conviction. In terms of risk, certainly, I had a young child, so just a few months old, and I just moved into a new home as well that needed a lot of work. And it was it was difficult, you know, to make that jump. And if I didn't have a cofounder like Mark with his experience in scaling not 1, but 2 startups to, you know, a 1,000,000,000 plus dollar valuations over the course of his recent career, it would have been very difficult, you know, for me to make that jump. So it was really about having a team, having a partnership, and having the support from our investors that made it possible for for me to do that.

A Thank you for that. I feel like architects tend to pour all of their innovation into the design of their their building and their design of their products, that when it comes to designing their own career paths, they're obviously hesitant about making big risks on their own. Mark, I wanted to go a little bit deeper into how you landed. So you have an interesting background. I mean, you have a bachelor, a BA, right, in producing television and music from NYU. So what was that progression like to being a startup founder of not I mean, HireArc is, as Michael mentioned, you know, your 3rd company. So what's that been like? And what's been your favorite industry so far to land in?

C I'm building by a long shot. Yeah. Yeah. I figured out that my core skill set, I love creativity as a whole. And I think creativity has transcends any particular discipline, you know? And so it turns out one of the things that I bring somewhat uniquely is sounds ridiculous, but it's like taste is has been something that's benefited me across industries. It sounds a little bit silly, but good intuition goes a very long way. And it's learning the tools, how to apply that intuition in a given function or discipline is just a question of time and practice. You know? But being able to have an eye for quality and synthesis capability, I think, is kind of my own strong suit.

C And that's what I think allowed for me to move from entertainment to web software to, you know, in an industrial and the design of physical products and manufacturing to home building. Obviously, I'm not a practitioner in any of those areas, you know, but I am a a very excited amateur, you know, is how I would put it. And I love to and one thing I appreciate as a CEO and founder and former kind of creative ring leader, let's call it, is the sheer passion, capability and craft of the folks who practice in a given discipline, whether it's graphic design, software engineering, industrial design, architecture, the great craftspeople can't help but obsess over the craft. And that's for me what gets me very excited and what I like to cultivate. And that's really what we're continuing to try to do at High Arc is to enable people who practice their craft to go as far as they can possibly go. Right? Without having to do things like jump into management or, you know, jump to another company, that kind of thing. It can create chaos is what it can do. And that's one of the challenges I've always faced is sort of a sense of chaos and aimlessness or wandering on a team, but I think that's an important part of of creativity.

A So if anyone goes to to LinkedIn, that you do have a call out and shout out to a student that you had at Harvard GSD. So I think there's a lot of people that would say, like, I got into Harvard GSD. I'm gonna see this through. So I guess given you seem to live a well lived life through experience and development, so what was your thought on applying to Harvard GSD, going through that whole process, and then saying, you know what? I need to take this opportunity and I need to reprioritize things.

C If I could go to school full time today, like, I'm setting aside what I love about Hire. One one day I'm going to go back to school, and it's for the same reasons that I gave about sort of craft. I love it's just it's been my lot in life to not be able to practice a craft, but to cultivate it. And I understand, like, I've I'm just good at it. And so that's what I do. But I love practicing a craft, like, whether it it could be a many different things. I loved I joined the GSD out of a desire to just make things on my own, actually. And personally, I really care about place.

C That's why I left a 3 d printing company that we had just gotten on to the rocket ship. Do you know what I mean? It was awesome. And I oversaw such cool groups there as well. It wasn't like a non exciting job. But I really wanted to just be a little hermit and, you know, learn from incredible people and build things and really focus more on understanding what goes into creating a sense of place, especially in communities. Like, I think community is one of the strongest elements of society. And it's been broken down partially as a function of our lack of attention to place and placemaking. And that's what got me really interested in design automation.

C It's what got me really interested in the GSD. And in and what I found there was that there's so much to learn and do, especially by cross registering at MIT. I really enjoyed those classes. But as a man with a family and a career, I took a job when I joined as a startup. And very quickly, it was it was apparent that, like, I'm just gonna keep doing my startups. So I dropped out. I put it on my resume because I think it's hilarious. Early on when I was raising money, someone told me, like, just sleep with I'm a Harvard dropout.

C That'll do well for you. Which is not quite like I was like a 30 something Harvard Harvard dropout. It's a little different than most people. But one day, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna I'm I'm gonna go like, there's one course in particular that everyone loves that I took, and I loved it. Though I had didn't have much time and to to to work on it, and that's how to make almost anything. And I could take that course over and over again for, like, 4 years. It's so great.

A Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for allowing me to sidetrack that a little bit. So I wanna go into, you know, both of you. I think just meeting you, getting your energy, getting your sense of community, and and my goal family. You know, hierarchy, when you think about affordable homes and solving a housing shortage, my first inclination is not to go to the builders as an architect. I think, you know, there's like a we don't see them we see them as those people stamping out those cookie cutter homes doing things that are, you know, maybe like, honestly have gotten better over time. I lived in a home development, but like, but but not the first place that I would turn to for a solution.

A What is the evolution for you guys? And and a part of me wants to say, like, Mark, you said, hierarchy is a platform that can drive automation and drive costs down. And I'm like, well, but why isn't the builder just picking up that profit? Are they are they in line with that mission with you to to bring the cost down and put more people in homes?

B A first point I'll make is that, the higher technology is designed specifically, and our mission as a company is to build better homes and communities. And when we refer to, the communities that exist today in the United States that are cookie cutter, one of the reasons for that is that the technology is doesn't support a great diversity in the homes that are built across the United States. So some of our largest customers, they build tens of thousands of homes per year. And when I reflect on, my career working in architecture, you know, for one home, it would be common to spend a year or more in design. And when you think about the economy of scale, how do you, address this problem of I I want to provide a custom experience, a custom home for every home buyer and for every home that's built inside of a community along with the problem of I need to deliver 50 houses today. Like, people need to move in as an organization. There's this really exciting intersection and potential where by providing better technology to home builders, we are seeing more diversity in the homes that they're able to build and in the experience that home buyers have both in the customization phase design, and then ultimately when they move into their home, it fits their needs better.

A That's great. And I I wanna dig into that a little bit because it's easy for I guess it's it's easy as on the computational side and the software side to well, it's not an easy task, I'll admit that, to create these multiple iterations that kind of allow for customization. How do you balance that against the actual physical implementation of building these physical customizations? Because it's, you know, it's easier to teach a laborer how to do one type of wall and tell them to do it 50 times than it is say like, here here's many different types of customizations that we've added in. You you need to do all of these customizations, you know, through old build building through the same building technique and and deliver it still on time.

B Yeah. So, I think getting at your question, well, for 1, Hyarch is not a company that builds homes. Right? So we're a software company, and we handle everything upstream. And to address your question of how do we get knowledge into the hands of people who are in the field and constructing these buildings? The approach that we've taken is that our generative design system is fed with a giant set of settings for buildings. And we're only able to do this by, building a team of architects who are focused on design automation, who have a very rich understanding of the tectonics of buildings and how they go together. And we've enabled through this system the ability to specify the assemblies of how buildings go together in a very general way. So you can update, for instance, the equivalent of tens of thousands of Revit files with a very simple set of automations that could take, you know, an hour, you know, or a couple hours. And by doing that, it allows the standardization of process that ultimately expediates and removes friction in the process of building physical homes as well.

C It's hard to imagine the amount of room for improvement that there is in home building when you come from AEC. A lot of folks are surprised when they've learned that in many states, the documents set, the drawings that get approved, that get permitted can be less than 10 pages, often 5 or 6 pages. And in the field, they might not even look at them. And so even a small shift in the right direction at scale makes a big difference. And obviously there are multiple dimensions that we are hopeful to improve in the long run. Only one of those is the kind of building systems and practices and building science that's being applied to the building. There's also just like the typography of the buildings themselves and perhaps, anchoring the designs of homes more to where they are being built, for example. That would be really nice, right? If you could go to a different state.

A Contextualize. Right?

C Yeah. Exactly. So and right now, it's just very hard. It's very, very hard for builders to do that scale. And doing things at scale is really important because in every other industry, what that has accomplished is higher quality, lower cost, faster speed to market and transition, all of that. So if we can apply some of those economic realities to this problem, we can potentially unlock doing really smart things at scale. Homes are never going to be commercial real estate, where each building can be treated a bit like a snowflake. It has to be done at scale.

A I completely agree. But I know a lot of architects see platforms like Hyreark, and they say like, oh, Hyreark is trying to take back the role of the architect. And, you know, I preface this by what you said at the top of the show, Mark, about how few architects actually are involved in homebuilding design. So I guess, what is your response either of you to that pushback from from the industry in in a place where I think if we all sat down at the table, we could actually have really meaningful conversation.

B Yeah. So going back to when I started thinking about applying generative design to the home building space, It was in the midst of, you know, what's known now as the great recession, and there was an incredible issue with unemployment with architects. So I I started at a firm in Virginia that had about a 128 people when I started. And 2 years later, there was about 18 people. And I I I was left, you know, because I was driving new technology transformation. But it was not lost on me that so many architects were out there with skills, and they didn't have a way to deploy their knowledge. And then you look at home building, and again, we're pointing to this issue of cookie cutter housing, and there's a a lack of architectural input and knowledge in this process. And there's, High Arc in its, you know, fullest manifestation is a way for architects at scale to engage with this industry in a very meaningful way and also enable the scale that home builders need to operate to satisfy our supply problem.

B And it got to affordability a little bit earlier. And ultimately, like, our our home builder customers, they are businesses, and many of them are public companies. And, you know, they they need to manage their bottom line, they need to produce profit. And what really is going to make it so that houses are more affordable is addressing the supply problem. And HireArc as a business also is very pointed at this soft cycle supply problem, making it faster to build homes, so that we have more homes for people to move into. So, get a roundabout way of getting to your question, but there's an ecosystem here. And if we could take that knowledge and have systems that enable professionals to, engage with this process, this industry, at greater scale, we all stand to benefit.

A So, obviously, we talked to Abe, who started off by, like, designing this fully customizable home in your system and has now moved on to product management and changed and evolved. Where's the opportunity, and how does HireArc engage in architectural feedback more frequently? So obviously, you can hire wonderful talent in house. Is there a greater opportunity for more of the profession to engage with what you're you're doing and and be a part of it?

C Can I share a little anecdote? Mhmm. Okay. I was looking to buy some land and build a house, like lots and lots of people in America. And it was going to be difficult enough for me to scrape up the cash to buy the land and build something, right? I did not ever consider that I would hire a full time architect to lead the process. I didn't have the cash for it. I did hire an architect to help me make decisions at the beginning and work with me understanding come at a conceptual level what we were doing, like a lot of other people. But, at the end of the day, I was left kind of in the in the center of a network of experts, but I'm supposed to be the one making all the decisions about should I buy this land? What could I build on it? You know, once I buy it, how do I get started? Typically, buyers do not engage architects. And this is for custom homes.

C It's that's about 20% of the market. There's a 1,000,000 homes built every year in the US. Right? And so if custom homes rarely, you know, has a full fully engaged architect, production homes never do. And so I started HireArc with this idea that architects who can extend their practice through technology would be greatly beneficial to people like me. Right? And so, like, the economics of the practice doesn't make sense for for the house. It's too small. Do you know what I mean? So if you can give some capability to scale good decisions, then you give architects the same kind of capability that, you know, other professions that have been able to offer more packaged offerings at different tiers. Right? And I think there's really something there in the future for architects that are interested in playing a larger role in housing design.

C Right? So that they don't necessarily have to choose doing, you know, onesie twosie projects for the 0.5 percent or doing like a master plan for a large production builder that they have no control over in the long run. Right? There's an in between, which is a kind of semi custom style approach. And I think there's a really neat opportunity there that hire over time will enable because of our ability to take kind of direction, right, from an architect for them to encapsulate their decisions in a way that buyers can engage with in a one to many fashion. Right? Does that make sense?

A Makes sense. It looks like Michael wants to add something. Of course.

B What I wanted to add is that thanks for asking that question, Evelyn, because this is exactly the context where we can speak to the architectural community and hire where we at, where we are as a business today, and where we're going. And in terms of that evolution is going to be, in the direction of engaging more with the architectural community. And if what we're talking about in terms of automating and having an impact at scale and building better homes and communities is something that you're interested in and passionate about, and you feel that there's an approach where you can design a home that can adapt to millions of different variations, and can respond in real time to the site conditions and solar conditions and to all the buyer needs, then get in touch with us, because we are going to continue developing our system that exists. And there's ways to engage today and more and more ways to engage in the future.

A That's exciting. And I kinda wanna circle back into that at the end, I think, to to kind of wrap it all in. One of the interesting things about HyArk as a software technology platform and its use of is really talking about the customer experience and the client side, which I don't think actually as architects, we talk enough about. We talk about being good listeners, but we don't really talk about how we more thoroughly use technology to engage clients and customers. So what is it like for you all to consider building out that experience for the industry? Talk to me about the customer experience, and then talk to me about maybe anything architects might be able to learn from that customer experience that you're you develop for builders.

C First thing I'll say is that, for buyers, design is not the same thing as it is for architects. For buyers, design is shopping. That's the mentality we bring to it. We want to see a range of options I mean, we want to change our minds. We want to explore how they compare and we don't wanna pay for shopping. And it's one of the core problems with the buyer experience of architecture in housing, I would say, Right? It's hard to even get started because who pays for shopping? You know? And why am I supposed to like, how how do I know what I want? Here's a bunch of example plans, make sense of it. Right? I can't even make sense of it. So our goal with Hirec is to really help with that problem, to make it very, very easy for buyers to explore in a way that makes sense given the stage they're at.

C Right? You don't wanna provide too much level of detail before the buyer really bought into a given approach to the to the house or or land for that matter. And so by representing homes automatically in 3 d with a huge range of variation, that's possible. Right? Buyers can kind of take more control of the process of exploration. You know, what we would think of as, like, conceptual work. And that kind of sense of control builds confidence and conviction with the person they're buying from. Right? Whereas if we treat them like someone who walks off the street, who needs to be sold to, which often does happen in home building, they are standoffish. They don't trust us. It's very hard to build trust from that position.

C So one of the core tenets of having a buyer experience is to give buyers control so that we can build trust early. And it's not very different from the way that the web has changed many other industries. Right? There's a central theme of kind of providing transparency to a market and control to the buyer. And that's the kind of thing we're trying to do for for the customer side. Okay. So so I wanted to address that part. I know you had some other parts to your question.

A I mean, the the second very question, and you began at the beginning, I think, with with talking about how people don't want to pay for shopping. But, like, what can architects learn from the experience that you're providing that they can maybe even take back into their own practices and deliver a better client experience from?

B Yeah. So, one of the reasons that let's consider a buyer who is weighing going with a custom home versus going with a production home, you know, maybe a highly customized production home. And what are the reasons that they would go with the production home? It's and product, you know, is the root word of production, you know, in production home building. And, what production home builders do is they turn that experience as well as they can with the tools that they have into a product selection or shopping experience, as Mark has described. And what's key to that is this real time feedback, this real time interaction loop, where as a buyer, I can make some choices, and then I see the trade offs. In a production building context, this can also mean that you see the price essentially in real time. And if you've gone through a custom architecture process, I mean, in the ones that I have been involved in, it can be a couple weeks of a feedback loop between design iterations. And you may or may not get high quality for realistic renderings, although there's more technology that's, you know, making this available to to more and more people and more projects.

B But that ability to see in real time what your trade offs are and then evolve and iterate through the design process, it's it's very compelling, actually. And the the best, home builders who offer this experience, right, they can have a custom like experience for the home buyer. And then with tools like Hyatt, they can make it, you know, even more compelling or feel even more intimate as far as the the buyer integration. So to circle back onto your question, how can architects in their practice take advantage of these methods? Well, you know, for 1, it's very difficult to program many design options or variations into 3 d modeling tools as they exist today. That's one of the reasons we built HyArk from the ground up versus going out and using one of the other tools or frameworks that we're very familiar with, is that we support that optionality from the ground up. But it's not to say it's impossible. You know, one can, go through this process of programming a home and exposing controls for users or or a building for that matter in in one of many other contexts, and get that same feedback loop, that same iteration, and and that ideal buyer experience.

A I appreciate that perspective. I wanted to zoom out a little bit. So HireArc just received series b funding at the beginning of this year in February. So congratulations. I think there's a lot of people interested in, like, what is series a? What is series b? You know, I I come from the architecture industry. What does series b mean for where Hyarch is relative to the stage of growth in in our company? And if I'm reading if I'm an architect reading, like, oh, Hyarch just got series b. I guess, you know, for for somebody who's not in the VC world, what should I be paying attention to? What does that mean for the growth of Hyrek?

C Well, I think capital raising is loosely, loosely connected to company outcomes. You know, it's a kind of outcome and it's useful to propel a business forward, but it's not in and of itself the most important indicator. What it should say is that we are hiring for critical roles and that we are looking to aggressively grow the business. The stage itself, series B can mean different things for different businesses, but typically means that you are in a kind of go to market stage where you're looking to start to scale up. You're not necessarily in your initial product market fit stage. Right? So if if you're looking if you're in AEC and you're thinking about jumping into startup land, it's really valuable to have a sense for what stage you're going to be a best, like, is going to be a best fit for you. Early stay earlier stage, series c, pre seed, or a is really a bit of a wilderness land for a lot of businesses. And that's either very exciting for you or it's a bit scary.

C You know, series B and on means that the business largely understands its market, has a product, it has buyers, it's got revenue, and it's in a kind of heartening, it's in a bit of like a heartening stage.

A So one of the reasons why I was kind of leading into that question was, you know, the architecture billings index has been on the decline for 14 months now. The last time this happened, we were approaching the the great recession. What has that meant to Hyarch in terms of its growth for for this year and where you hope to be by the end of this year?

C Housing sets sits a little outside of of of what you're referencing. So it doesn't really reflect the macro in terms of housing. In fact, it's a bit inverted. Right? So as CRE as a whole has really struggled due to the sort of lasting effects of COVID, the, and sort of the remote work reality that we're living in. The inverse is true for housing, where demand has only continued to outpace supply. And so I think right now the industry is pretty healthy. We are still on pace to grow 2 or 3 times year over year, which is really great for our business. For the industry as a whole, that's also the case.

C Home builders, one of their home builders biggest challenges really is finding land, right? Because financing realities has really made it more challenging, especially for smaller builders to go out and aggressively pursue land acquisition. And that's really the lifeblood of growth if you're a home builder. So so overall, things are really good for housing right now, and they probably will be for the next few years, I think. And it's one of the reasons why you see in, like, real estate investment, in the real estate investing world, a trend towards diversification, right, where housing is now where a lot of folks are putting putting their capital.

A The funny thing is you say that, like, it would be everyday knowledge to architects. I don't think architects actually follow the investing, the realities of, like, where and changing of, like, where capital is being invested in in the different markets, frankly. So so thank you for bringing that to our audience. So what is next for hierarchy? I mean, you talked about this opportunity where architects you wanna circle back to the part where architects can maybe one day begin to use your platform. How far like, is that a is that a far future thing? Is that a near future thing? And and what's going to happen in between in the meantime?

C I'll provide a quick answer and then Michael can provide a little bit more detail. We wanna hear from you now, if what we expressed as a vision for architects sort of scaling their practice vis a vis predesigned homes is interesting to you. We are actively exploring this and we've got some very interesting work underway that we'd be happy to share. I expect us to be more aggressively in the market within the next few years with the results of that.

B Yeah. So, talk about just the the vision for a moment and, you know, consider how to make the process of getting a custom home more accessible to more people. Ultimately, that's that's what the ultimate goal is. There's a lot of latent demand out there, let's say. So I grew up in a family that, like, didn't really know what architects did, you know, for the most part. It my dad was a builder, and there were architects on the commercial projects. But when it came to projects along the house, like, we wouldn't have thought to engage with an architect. And I think broadly, there's a just across the entire culture, there's a need to express what the value of an architect brings to a project, so that we increase the demand.

B And then you also need distribution. And when you think about architecture firms and how they operate today, it's mostly very local firms in the context of residential that might only operate within one particular jurisdiction. So all these issues, you know, culminate to make it so that there's a lot more demand for custom high quality homes than are being built out there in the world. So how do we solve that? If we have a productized workflow that enables you to select some land and get a home that's customized to that piece of land, meets its curb requirements to a great extent, and perhaps even, meets a prescriptive set of engineering requirements, then we can make it more efficient for a buyer to meet the product ultimately, which is the home, and then have more conversions across the architectural discipline. So that's broadly a goal of how we would bring more architects into this process, and we built the technology to support it. And figuring out behaviorally, like, what are the right patterns, how to bring a buyer into that process, and what an architecture like experience looks like at scale, that's still an unsolved problem. You know, we have some really great hunches about how that would, evolve from an existing model of customizing production home, but certainly, it's there's a huge amount of space between the experience that is delivered in a very custom home today and that, which is delivered in a showroom for a production home.

A Right. So just for the people that wanna get out to you, Mark and Michael, you both said, you know, you wanna engage more architects today. How do they do that? Do they just go to your website? Who should they get in touch with? How can more architects who are interested in what HireArc is doing be a part of helping you grow?

B Yeah. I mean, we're we're out there, on the Internet. You can look us up on LinkedIn. You know, that's probably the most straightforward way. We're also on the Slack channel, so you can get in touch with us there as well. And I've made some great connections with folks over the years through that channel because it's a great service for the industry. And, yeah, certainly, our website has a contact us form. That's also a good way to get in touch with us.

A You know, if Hyarch fulfills its mission, what does that look like for you guys?

C I'll give you kind of the quick answer and then a bit of a longer answer. I love this topic. So first of all, 90% or more of all houses are designed using AutoCAD, which is 41 years old and went from its first introduction. So first of all, every single house that's designed and built should go through Hyre. That's success. And so that's kind of like the macro penetration and impact story we're very excited about. We're going for the entirety of the market, which is the way the market works, right? It's just it's just a new way to design and build houses that's just better for everybody involved. And the impact that should have, what we're so excited about is that the houses that are built and the communities that they that are designed with them are designed into the places that they are built as opposed to overriding the land and placing indiscriminately and this is like the worst version of it, but placing indiscriminately a collection of buildings that maximize square footage at the expense of livability, comfort, community connections.

C I think if we do our job really well, home builders will be more profitable, their employees will stick around longer because they're happier, They won't trade out subcontractors as rapidly because there's less mistakes. And the communities they build will be more resilient in the long run, not just resilient in terms of the technical definition, but resilient in terms of the sort of lifestyle reality, the community reality that they play into. I think that's really my hope. And and so that, by the way, includes renovation, homes that are in need of a of a full reno as well as new construction. So that's really what we're going for.

A That's amazing. Michael, did you want anything to add to that?

B Yeah. Sure. So there's an ideal configuration for a community that intertwines all the needs that you have, you know, for commercial space and grocery stores and restaurants and the place where you live and the place where you work. And I'm very fortunate to live in a place where I I walked to work this morning. I was about 15 minutes, I passed my kids school where I have to drop them off, it's not this summer, and then I can stop the grocery store on the way home and then walk back home. And also, along the way, I see many different topologies of buildings. I see multifamily buildings. I see single family buildings.

B And I live in a single family home, which is kind of like my my ideal home that I love working on. So there's something about this topology when we get a diversity of uses and a diversity of styles and appearances and layouts and lots within a community that creates something very valuable and, something that's important for people to have great communities where they live. And if we and our technology continues on the track that we're on and we continue to see that increase in diversity that's available, we're excited for what that means for home buyers everywhere. And hopefully, you know, some of the folks who are listening today will have an opportunity to engage with higher technology

C and maybe build their own.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practice of architecture dotcom/podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practice of architecture.com/community. Our social media handle is practice of arch. That's practice of a r c h, we'd love to hear from you. So feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.