Architecture, And: A New Language for Material Decision-Making

C Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Every architect has felt the friction, digging through endless product catalogs, wrestling with pragmatic specifications, and trying to balance performance, sustainability, cost, and aesthetics. It's a process that hasn't evolved nearly as fast as the rest of our workflows. Today's guest, Vardan Mehta, knows this challenge firsthand. His career began solving complex envelope solutions for US Embassies and pushing material innovation on projects at MIT and Yale. But instead of accepting the inefficiencies of material selection, he set out to fix them. Vardan is a coauthor of ACELab, an AI powered material hub designed to cut through the noise and deliver precise performance driven product choices.

A Since teaming up with former Revit CEO Dave Lamont, AceLab has rapidly gained traction, now serving over 13,000 firms and capturing 35% market adoption in just eighteen months. His impact on the industry recently earned him a spot on Forbes thirty under 30 in manufacturing and industry for 2025. In this episode, we'll explore his journey from architect to entrepreneur, the gaps he saw in material decision making, and how ACE Lab is revolutionizing the way architects specify building products. We'll also dive into the role of AI, sustainability, and the evolving relationship between architects and manufacturers. So if you've ever wished for a smarter, more intuitive way to select materials, this conversation is for you. Let's get started. Hello, Ryan. Welcome to Practice Disrupted.

A We both get together often to talk about the future of practice, and I'm an advisor to your company. I'm finally grateful to have you on the podcast so we can talk a little bit about your career path as a founder in tech as a nontechnical architect.

B Yeah. Yeah. That sounds great. I'm super, super excited to be here. Always enjoy talking to you as, you know, two architects that went into tech, but still love the profession and practice. So really excited to be here and share more of my story.

A Thank you so much. And, again, I'm super excited to have you here. But first of all, I wanted to send my congrats because towards the end of 2024, you were listed on Forbes thirty under 30. Congrats for that honor.

B Thank you. It was unexpected. Not a recognition that I would have probably appreciated back in architecture school. But now, like, in the tech world, it is somewhat important. I still feel a part of it is completely vain. So I I appreciate that for the company, if not entirely just myself.

A But you're architecturally trained at your heart, and, you know, you have a bachelor of architecture, a b arc from Pratt. So let's go back to your roots. What made you want to pursue a b arc in the first place?

B Yeah. I don't have a very good excuse. I I mean, I saw my dad all his, like, practice as an architect, but somehow I was still like, oh, yeah. That's the thing to do in life, to become an architect. So, anyway, I I'm actually a second gen architect. Grew up in India, and my dad's an architect, still practicing, and my uncle's an engineer. So this was, like, our family business. And from a very early age, when they were actually starting out, like, when they were, like, my age, I was starting to see this stuff.

B I would go on the job sites with them. I would, like, hang out at their office after school and just gain, like, a lot of appreciation for this profession. I think one thing that was, like, really exciting for me is in India, the definition of the architect is still very heavily, you know, being involved with the physical world or being involved with the contractors and so on. It doesn't necessarily, you know, the deliverables, so to speak. And so I gained, this, like, really big appreciation for, like, what it takes to, like, build a building and, like, what it takes. Everything from, like, really early design all the way to actually being built and being occupied. And so, eventually, I decided I want to become an architect as well. I came to Pratt Institute, which was wild in itself.

B I I was a 17 year old Indian kid not having been in The US previously, and I landed right in the middle of Brooklyn at a liberal arts school for my undergrad in architecture. Yeah. So that's how at least I got started. Do you want me to talk a little bit more about just like my experience at Pratt?

A Well, yeah. I mean, anything I think at Pratt that may have influenced where you headed after Pratt that took you away from traditional practice, but also you were at Weisman, Freddie, which is a well known architecture firm too. So it's not like you didn't dip your toe in traditional practice before you got this idea to start your own company. What was that transition?

B So while at Pratt, I was spending a lot of time doing students' ideas types of competition. So that that, I think, like, sparked something in me where I wanted to I wanted to do projects which were even outside of academia. And I wanted to, like, explore more ideas and, like, try out more things on my own. Eventually, in my fourth year, I won a competition which landed me an internship with a top 10 firm in the city being vice on Friday. And that was, I think, a big change in my thinking about architecture. I think until then, I hadn't really seen a project go from, like, zero to hundred. And at Vice President Freddie, I was entering a project, like, right at the seed stage. And it was just an idea, and it was a napkin sketch.

B And I was very lucky that as an intern, they had way too many of the, like, the design architects at the firm, and so they had show me on the technical side.

A You felt that you were lucky? I I would feel less interns would feel that they're unlucky in that situation.

B Right. But I think I think, candidly, I think I was starting to get a little disillusioned having entered, like, the real practice world of renderings and models. Right? I mean, I think, like, those are thinking tools, and those are, like, important for any architect. But I think something you don't necessarily appreciate enough in in architecture school is the technical end of the practice and how that's, like, still very meaningfully important for the architect to understand, you know, regardless of if you, like, if you want to grow to a really important place at a big architecture firm or if you want to start your own practice. It's, like, it's just a part of being an architect which you can't ignore, at least for not too long. And so I entered the firm. They threw me over to the the technical side very quickly, and it just, like, it made me realize how little, if anything, I understood in that world. So I remember, like, sometimes I would be asked to, like, draw a detail, and I wouldn't know where to start even though we take some, like, pro practice classes in school and whatnot.

B It was just, like, very real. And so I'd like like, I would often have to seek mentorship from architects in the firm. Sometimes it would be to research building products. And, again, don't really know where to start. Like, not the parts of, for most, the architectural education in The US. And so I think at Viceman Freddie, seeing a project from, like, zero to hundred, it just, like, made me sort of identify the gaps, which I felt were, like, really important to being an architect. I and I think it helped me, like, expand my understanding of, like, what an architect does beyond what I learned in school. I feel like the way I was understanding that, again, as a 20 or 21 year old, was, like, I started seeing the technical side of the practice of which I knew very little about as the bridge between, you know, the vision, which you, of course, learn in architecture school and you really appreciate.

B And that's, I think, like, most of our all of us want to and enjoy being architects. And then the reality, which could be, you know, the realities of the project, realities of dealing with so many stakeholders, realities of, like, what makes sense for a project based on the cost, the schedule, the code, sustainability, all of these factors which are really hard to capture in a set of drawings and specs. And so that's why I think, like, I started to appreciate the stuff that does not go into, you know, the deliverables of an architect, which are usually all the conversations, all the back and forth that happens in the background, most of which ends up being on the tech.

A But there's an interesting duality that you and I can begin to draw from there because I think a lot of architects have problems, you know, and and we lean on even the GCs this much to understand when we're putting pen to paper, when we're figuring out what what the materiality of everything looks like, that I don't know how many projects that we did that like, every single time, as soon as we got a GC on it, it's like this is this is over budget. So for the architect's ability to at least wrap their head around a better understanding of of what that looks like, so often we say supply chain management or supply chain's driving driving the costs, and we feel like we are so far removed from that conversation. It's hard for us to more accurately bring that conversation to the ones we're having directly with clients.

B I mean, totally. I I think in my experience, I felt that this understanding, appreciating, enjoying the technical side of practice was actually a really important tool in the architect's toolset. And that if we if we don't understand that, then a lot of times then we're defaulting to the GC or the consultants. So I feel like as architects, we we get paid to know something about everything, and that's really hard in itself. But I do feel like there are, like, some aspects of a project where you have to become an expert. And you might not be an expert on day one, but, like, you just have to be very open to and excited to learn new things, like, all the time. And for me, like, I think, like, that's what, you know, the technical side of the practice represented. Like, I think a very good example I remember from the internship time at Weismann Freddie was, I think at some point, there was a GC who a lot, like, later in the project, they looked at, like, what was specified, I think, like, for, like, tiles or something.

B And it was chosen with a lot of care and, like, a lot of conversations with the owners, with the contractors in the room as well. And then, eventually, they were too late to place the order. And by the time, it was not available easily from the manufacturers who were specified. And so the GC came back to us as the architect and recommended their default, which, of course, was nowhere nearly as beautiful or sustainable. And so for the architect, like, we were in this, like, really tough spot in that situation. Like, our only options were to go out and do a lot of research, manufacture the products that we knew or didn't know, to find a superior alternative or to default to what the GC recommended, which would be by almost by brute force entering the project. And so I feel like that's the type of stuff which I learned to appreciate, and I realized that, like, for us, like, as architects, like, if you want to retain the control and the outcome of the project, it is incredibly important to be, like, super strong on the technical side.

A And when I think about how many times a project manager in my early years of an architect just asked me to, like, copy paste a detail, right, and and how I didn't even think twice about that or the number and the specification that the drawing was was pointing out. And and the fact that unless the Armstrong tile person got out in there and said, hey. They're very specifically, hey. We updated our lion this year, And for cheaper, you could be getting a higher acoustical rating, you might want to switch, think about switching to this, we copy and pasted that into every single school classroom that that we designed in I don't know how many schools.

B So you see this problem,

A and and the way and the reason is and it's funny that I call you a nontechnical architect even though you're getting excited about these technical things. I'm talking about nontechnical from a a founder's perspective. Right? So you are a founder of, in a way, a software as a service, very simplified software as a service product in AceLab and before you tell people what that is. But the reason why I'm calling you a nontechnical person is because you're not the one that went out and learned how to code this software and put it together. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what ACELab is, and then we'll talk about how you went around pulling together a team that could actually build this thing that you were envisioning.

B Yeah. Yeah. Happy to. So as I was wrapping up my time at Bison Freddy, like, one thing that I really grew to adore was knowledge about materials. At the same time, I felt like it was incredibly hard as an architect to know hundreds of thousands of skews as you mentioned, you know, with the tile example. And that's just, like, one of the decisions that you're gonna make at four of those schools. And now there's, like, 200, three hundred more. And as architects, like, you have to either weigh in.

B If you don't weigh in, then, you know, you you you feel that risk of it being a product that might have, like, a negative effect on the project. So really started to appreciate that. Around the same time, I I was about to start my grad school at the GSD. And I was, like, thinking a lot about what I care deeply about, what I wanted my grad school experience to be like. And if I could, like, change anything about the practice from my understanding of both, like, my aspirations and, like, the things I enjoyed as an architect and my understanding at that point of the architecture industry at large. I felt like materials were, for me, at least, like, they made they truly made the difference between a good building and a great building. And so I was very fortunate to be at a firm where every material was chosen very thoughtfully. It was detailed with an incredible amount of attention, and it was something which was not just based on the touch and feel, but then also its impact on the owner, the occupants of the space, and whatnot.

B And I think, like, that amount of discipline and rigor, it just made me think, like, we were very fortunate, probably, like, one of the few firms in the country that could that could afford to do that, that had the clients that, like, really, really cared about that stuff. But I feel like that's not necessarily indicative of the larger industry. And so at the same time, I was, like, obsessed with with the podcast. You probably know this one, from Guy Raz, how I built this. Mhmm. And so, like, all these stories of founders from, like, all the big companies that we know all the products we use on a daily basis, mostly tech, but then outside of tech as well. I started to, like, you know, like as I was thinking about, like, what I want the grad school experience to be like, I started to realize that a lot of founders like, a lot of the tech founders didn't necessarily know how to code. They just understood a problem really well, and they had a thesis around what, you know, like, a solution could be.

B So it wasn't necessarily the most, like, immediately required skill you had to know. But what you did definitely have to have an intuition about was what's the pinpoint, what challenges exist in an industry, for whom, what the solution looks like, and why does the solution make sense to be solved by you as a part. And so I lived this, like, this this life as an architect, and I'd experienced a lot with materials. And that led me to ASLAP, right there that started my grad school. ASLAP, it's a materials management platform. We're a team of architects. We started this as a fun project between the architecture schools at Harvard and MIT. And the goal was to build one single source of truth that wasn't just filled with information on top of information or materials, but could provide an answer to an architect when they needed the most and on their terms.

B We we felt as a team of architects that making a decision for materials is not just important for the firm in terms of, you know, their reputation, the projects, what they do in the built work, but it affects so many people. And it's like the thing that, like, you know, which really makes the building come to reality. And so we started this as a thought exercise first and and foremost. Like, we didn't know, like, where AS Lab would be right now, but we were starting to do incubators, accelerators. We were, like like, trying to understand more, like, what it takes to build a tech company. And then eventually, everything started to fall into place, and and now we're a tech company. So did you learn, I guess,

A through the incubators and the accelerators how to find that technical expertise?

B Yeah. But before that, actually, the technical expertise is, you know, I think I think we realize it's like two parts. One is the design, and second is execution. So with the design, I mean, you know, all the UX, all The US stuff, what is the functionality, the feature set, and so on. And then it's actually all the development work after that. So, like, what we started doing is, like, we just, like, started looking at examples of websites that or platforms we were using and we loved. And we were also looking at tools that we'd use that architects and hate it. And it was just, like, trying to take both the experiences using InDesign, Illustrator, the tools we already knew as architects and were already using.

B We just started using this for a different application. And that was enough to get the vision in place. Like, the first, like, prototype of ASlabs ever was really built on InDesign. It was, like, layouts just, like, the same way we organize a slide deck for clients. We just did that for, like, a different application.

A Like, you click on this button. This is what their next window looks like. This is what the pull down menus look like. It's just, like, really UX UX design of how we solve this bigger problem we see.

B And, like, you know, we hacked our way into it. So, like, we would, like, act like we were actually making a click on a button. It's like if you were, like, meeting with an investor or doing a competition pitch. And the idea was, like, we, like, we understand that most of the people that, like, we're going to be evaluated against, they may come from a technical background. And I think, initially, it was it led to a lot of, like, self doubt for us as a team of architects. Like, how, like, how the hell are we gonna do this? Like, this makes no sense. We don't actually know, like, okay. We can make some screens for designs in InDesign, but then somebody at some point is gonna have to build all of this.

B Like, how would we go about all of that? What about data? Like, we've never dealt with data as architects outside of the the projects that we were working on.

A And the way we view data, I would say, is very different, right, than tech.

B Oh, yeah.

A Because there's so much more to the data that we create than I think we often realize as architects.

B I mean, totally. I think for us, like, data at an average architecture firm, it can be the post the sticky notes on our desktop monitor. It it can be it can be those email threads. It can be be the folders that nobody at the firm likes to keep to up to date. And and so, like, we were dealing with data of a different magnitude here. And I think, like, we have to, like, learn new skills, but then at the same time, I think as we started to just get moving, whether it was, like, building the first, like, pitch tech or InDesign prototype, it helped us to build the confidence that there's not just one definition of a technical founder. We're just we are technical just like in a different way. Meaning, like, we're technical in understanding the pinpoints of our industry and knowing what to do about it.

B And that in itself is very meaningful and important as well to build a company that we eventually built.

A So my next question to you then is so you were obviously going through incubators and accelerators. How did you decide then whether or not you were able to bootstrap this, whether you wanted to take the venture cap route? Because I feel like that's also kind of a crossroads that founders find themselves in in terms of how do they wanna bring their product to market and and what they wanna do there.

B Yeah. I think we were very fortunate that we started to receive a lot of inbound interest from investors. I think primarily, it wasn't due to the merit of ASLIVE as a company. I think it was the space. I think most investors, when they look at these reports from McKinsey or BCG, they see that the construction industry is least innovative. Nobody I don't think in the investor world, most folks don't truly understand why. But anybody who's from the industry and has been on a project gets it. But it's not just about the technology being adopted or not, but it's also about the people and, you know, the realities of the project.

B And so I I do think, like, for us, we, like, we started to gain interest there, but then some of the VCs had a very different idea for, you know, what we should do with ASLAP. And that idea was drop out of grad school after the first semester when we won, like, two or three of the competitions between Harvard and MIT. They asked us to drop out. They would write us, like, a million dollar check for a c drop, and they just asked us to, like, to build this full time. And for us, it was, like, the most baffling thing just because we were at architecture school. And we are in I mean, if you, you know, like, if you've been to GSD, literally a hall with, like, a thousand architects under one roof. And so when we started to understand, like, what this game is, we realized that we're gonna have to do so much market research. Like, this, the prototype that we've built in InDesign, just like a project, is gonna go through so many iterations and options, and we're gonna have to keep, like, fine tuning that.

B And it's a lot harder to do if you're not in a place where a thousand architects are are available. They're at the studio desk, and they're happy to chat about anything for fifteen minutes. So that actually was, like, really important for us, and then eventually, we found investors. Well, you know, we totally get it. Makes a lot of sense. You should stay in school. Don't drop out. I truly feel if I dropped out, my parents being Asian parents would have shut down a slap in me.

B They'd be like, this is not a good idea. You need to go back to being an architect and stay there. So, anyway, that helped us, like, to gain, like, a little bit of the funding that was required to actually execute and to build an MVP or, like, a minimum viable product version of the platform that we then eventually got in the hands of a handful of architecture firms, manufacturers on the other side, and then started to see, like, how they were, like, playing around with it.

A Yes. I see it as an opportunity to me, but I'm surprised, like, a lot of the investors didn't look at that and say, like, yes. You have an opportunity to talk to all these architects, but they're also, like, architects in training do because they're not in practice. So it would like, I would have loved to have been a part of those conversations.

B But, like, I mean, if you if you imagine, and it's it's been really interesting, like, now when you look at the, like, the demographics of our users, three out of four of them are 45. And I think, again, like, it it was important for us that this idea that came for us, it wasn't due to just, like, using the tools that architects have used for the past three decades to do to do materials management, but it came due to the fact that we were a bunch of architects in their twenties who had been using tech already in their personal life. And so we had a frame of reference for what, like, a smooth user experience looks like. And we were, like, lacking that in the architecture practice. So if you imagine, like, the kids that we went to school with, like, a lot of them now, they work in practice. And if, like, if not right now, in the very near future, they're gonna be in the decision making seats at firms, at architecture design firms on what happens in a project, what are the materials that get chosen, what is the tech we're using in our stack. And so I I do think, like, that was important for us, like, not necessarily have those experienced architects to get, you know, the feedback from, although we did that as well, but also architects who are in training, who have a vision for themselves and for the industry, and what it means to be an architect as they graduate us.

A No. I mean, I I totally see it now, but I I don't know. Maybe maybe that's the older architect in me, but you're talking to unlicensed architects that aren't even in practice about a future product for architects to use. So through this process, Dave Lamont is now highly invested in kind of what AceLab is doing. He's the former CEO of Revit. How did that relationship happen?

B Yeah. So as we graduated, we raised the seed round from a team of incredible investors, and, eventually, we got introduced to Dave. Initially, he was supposed to be an adviser. You know, like, he may have been an angel investor. And then as he started to, like, learn more about our story, I think he saw a lot of similarities to what drew him to to Revit in the first place. Let's think about it. We, as an industry, were primarily addicted to AutoCAD, and three d wasn't even on the horizon for for most firms. And we were still struggling with all the design decision making and three d, two d, documentation, and so on.

B Revit was a startup, and it was, like, trying to change, like, lead this industry wide transformation from, like, a legacy tech tool being AutoCAD into the three d world. And I think Dave saw an opportunity to do something very similar with this. A lot of the firms still the way we operate, the way we do our research for materials, do our decision making, documentation, it's still happening very manually. It's very scattered, and it's very inefficient. And so if as an architecture firm, you're thinking about growing the practice not necessarily just through headcount, but just being able to do more projects with the same headcount, you have to adopt new technology. So, like, a lot of the firms that actually adopted Revit in the in the early days are also ASAB users. That's how he got started, and then now at this point, yes, he's the executive chairman of the of the company. He joined us about two years ago and since then has, like, really done abundance for us in helping us to shape our own markets.

B Right?

A I I mean, so the interesting thing to me is that you also kind of found yourself in this place in MIT and Harvard. I think if you had found your way to graduate school program in the Midwest or coming out of Florida, maybe and I'm I'm not trying to personify programs, but just because you just moved from Florida, do you think ACE Lab would have gotten into where it was, or is it also because of what was going on within those programs and the opportunities that you had and the access that you had to these incubators and these accelerators that moved it forward?

B You know, it's it's it's hard to say for a couple reasons. First, I'm a strong believer that luck in any shape or form is always involved in the founding of a company and whether it lives to see some milestones in its journey or not. That luck may be association with an institution. It can be, you know, it can be any number of factors. It's luck. Right? You can't really, like, plan for that stuff. But then second, like, the reason why it's hard for me to say that is I know founders in the tech industry that didn't go to Harvard or MIT, but still have built incredibly successful tech startups. And I think there is something about, for some odd, insane reason, being okay with living as a full time student even though it's grad school and using all of your spare time instead of, you know, going to parties and meeting new people in a dark room by yourself, working on a pitch deck or in design prototype.

B I don't think that's for everyone. But I feel like the people that feel really strongly about a problem, about an idea, and have a conviction that they they want to at least, like, try stuff out. You know, the fortune favors the bold. And so do I feel like I I I do think, like, there's some element of just being bold enough to, like, to start something and not giving up that eventually just, like, makes it work. Yeah. But I don't know if that's helpful to answer the questions. That's really hard to say. But I, you know, I I don't want a discount at the same time.

B The value of these these brands. Although, you know, there have been a lot of failures that came from these brands as well. So I think, like, regardless of if you're an investor or a user or a customer, I think everybody generally tricks these brands with a grain of salt, be it Harvard, MIT, Forbes, all of the above. So they're only useful to to to some extent. And then at some point, you have to be real. Like, you have to actually have something that's valuable to make it.

A Right. No. And I and I wasn't saying that it was necessarily the namesake that you guys graduated out of. I was just saying when you think about incubators and accelerators or MIT CityLab, like, there's certain more institutions that position themselves as innovators and spaces anyways.

B That is absolutely true. And I and I do feel like more architectural firms can easily do that. I mean, I do feel like the architectural education is so weird. Like, now at this point, we've got folks that came with, you know, that have an MBA background or they went to school for CS and whatnot. And exams are so so different from, like, what as an architecture student is your day to day or, like like, how you get evaluated. Right? And I do feel like like, at our core, we learn how to solve a problem, and I do think, like, these accelerators so at at MIT, there's an accelerator called the DesignX, and that's a program that is housed under the school of architecture. And it's mainly architectural students or, you know, from urban design planning that are starting to spin off startups using that as a platform. And I, you know, to your point, it it is a very influential thing to have access to as a student.

B And I think you talk about the doing this in

A a dark room by yourself and not going to parties. I think, you know, to acknowledge that, like, I was definitely one of those students that fell to the rigor of what it means to be an architecture student and felt like I had very little extracurricular time as it were, let alone coming up with my own startup on top of it. So I think to that extent, it does absolutely take a certain individual to build what you built at the time that you did build it.

B Yeah. Yeah. And I do feel like as architects, again, we can train to be that rigorous in school anyway. Like, I'm sure you and I both have some wild architecture studio stories where we saw somebody on, you know, way way too much caffeine or just, like, really, really struggling with an idea to make sure, like, they, you know, they find their way out of it. But I do feel like that rigor and, like, not giving up on something. Like, a project you start is, like, so ingrained into architects from, like, the really early days.

A So seeing how we evolve, having somebody like Dave as chairman, where do you see as the greatest opportunity if you look at tech and how even AceLab is leveraging tech for architects going forward? That might not be top of mind right now in the discourse? Because I feel like you and I also are looking out for the things that people don't often have their eyes on.

B Yeah. I mean, maybe, like, in a more abstract way, I feel like there are a lot of tech startups in the AC industry right now which are working to supercharge, you know, the architect's workflow, helping architects to create optionality regardless of it being from the firm operation standpoint, from design standpoint, just being able to cycle through design thinking a lot more effectively, a lot faster. And I think there's a breed of the startups where they were already doing that. And then with AI, everything just got super accelerated. Meaning, you know, I do feel like one thing that I first gathered as you got started with this lab was, like, how much faster the tech industry is through traditional practice. Although a year or two in, I started to feel like it was, like, still, like, fairly slow. It still required a lot of headcount to be able to build out the products we want, iterate on the designs, and so on. Like, there's a feedback loop involved with everything.

B But then in the past six months, I mean, with AI, I I think, like, it's happening for I feel everybody around the world in in different ways. But that that feedback loop is just a lot shorter regardless of if you're working on optimizing an email response, if you're working on finding options for the materials to use as alternatives on Islam, if you're looking through, you know, the design massing options that you might build, a lot of the manual work, which is low value and which takes away from the architect's ability to effectively curate a project, I feel like will eventually go away. And I think, like, that's really exciting. And I think for people, like, in the next generation of architects, like, they're super excited about Just because, like, they're experiencing almost, like, the magnitude of an and, you know, I don't I don't mean to evangelize AI to an insane degree, but I I truly feel like we are we are in a cycle which maybe has only happened, like, twice in the past. First, with the with the founding of the computers, and secondly, Internet. I do think AI will have an impact, which is same orders of magnitude on the world.

A I don't disagree. But one thing I do wanna talk about, because you mentioned that earlier on in our conversation, the the care with which, you know, Weismannfredi and the resources Weismannfredi had to to make careful selection of materials and how platforms like ACELab if if you draw the corollary to ACELab and what AI enables people to do is a a greater conversation around democratization of of design and accessibility and even allowing small firms to do what large firms once could do. So I think that is a discourse also takes a different type of small firm leader to really engage in those tools in a in a way that allows them to do that.

B I think that's totally fair, and you and I know a few of the small firms' leaders that are really truly leveraging technology as a way to fuel their practice, as a way to grow exponentially, and be able to do more with the same headcount at the front. Right? And and I think to your point, I do see, like, AI has a role to play in that too. I think in two regards, one, the most useful AI actually trains on the right data. And I think, again, like, that's why any architect that may have tried a search for, you know, regarding sustainability or code or anything related to a project, often the outcome is suboptimal or it's, like, lukewarm. Like, you don't really trust it. It sounds somewhat right, but it's mostly wrong. And I feel like the reason for that, it's not really trained on the right data. So if you think about how could we utilize AI where it actually improves, becomes smarter with every architect using it.

B And so it doesn't really matter if you're an architect from a big firm, from a small firm. It's benefiting every single architect that's really tapping into that network. I think the second one is more like productivity. So if architects could really automate these manual administrative low value things out of the workflow that you can't really build a client for, but still end up sucking so much of your time, which takes away how much you can do to to research stuff, to find new innovative ways of doing something regardless of if it's, like, a detail, choosing a product, doing the massing. I feel like that'd be, like, a very enriching experience for the average architecture firm. So so we don't have to, like, recycle those specs all the time, but can actually, like, take that time and invest that into seeing, like, what's new in the market. What might be something, a trend that we really ought to learn about?

A I'm sure there's a lot of younger architects, maybe even some in grad school or in in undergrad that's hearing you and thinking, like, I I have enough of an idea to potentially get going. What's your word advice for new entrepreneurs in this space who are potentially interested in following a similar path?

B I think it's mostly a mental game. If you look at most of the AEC tech startups right now, you know, that come from architect founders, none of us had any business going into tech, taking the leap of faith, starting with an idea. But I think once we did that, like, we found it very rewarding. And all it took was, like, the first, like, small step. I feel like there's a there's a saying. I actually heard this from my mentor. There's only one way to eat an elephant. It's a jarring phrase, but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

B Like, if you're going to break a problem, you well, you need to have the vision, but you don't you don't necessarily need to have every single step of it totally figured out. It's impossible to do that. And so, you know, if if you have the vision and if you know how to go from, like, zero to one, that's most of the game. And that's also, like, most that's the step that most people, I don't think, want to take. It's scary. It's really scary. Why would you, as an architecture school at GSD or MIT, like, not shoot for a job at, like, a job architecture firm and take this, like, risk of not being able to, like, you know, have a decent salary for yourself as a founder because that's the reality. Like, there's an ugly side of tech too, which is just the grind is a lot more it's a lot harder.

B There's a lot of stress. There's a lot of, like, pressure. But then at some point, you realize, you know, like, when you're doing something of your own and I don't think it's just tech. It could be something like launching a firm, like, right from school. But at some point, I feel like as a founder of anything, as an entrepreneur even, you realize that, like, the pressure you you're you're experiencing is actually a privilege, and you start to make the most of it.