Build the Future You Want: A Builder's Path with German Aparicio

A The built environment is changing fast. If you want to be one of the people leading that change rather than responding to it. Join me this summer for Innovation in the Built Environment, a professional intensive from the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Learn more@beradicallybetter.com that's B E R A D I C A L L Y B E T T E R. Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast exploring how architects can build better businesses, embrace emerging technology, and create more sustainable, fulfilling practices. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, architect, angel investor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're running a firm, starting your career, or reimagining what's possible, this podcast challenges you to think differently about the future of architecture. Hello, disruptors.

A Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. My guest today decided he wanted to be an architect in the fifth grade. He held onto that goal through Cal Poly Pomona, through mit, through more than a decade in consulting and software, and finally got licensed in California this year. He says he had to just to prove to himself that he could. That through line, deciding what you want and going to build it runs through everything Herman Aparicio does. He started his career at AirUp, ran into all the ways our industry duplicates work and protects information, and went looking for a better way. He found one piece of it at Gary Technologies, which Trimble later acquired for both its software, now Trimble Connect and and its consulting arm. He found another piece in 2018 when he co founded Zero to 60, an equity free accelerator inside Trimble that has worked with companies like Testfit, Monograph and Scaffplan to bring startups into the AECO stack.

A Today, Haruman leads early innovation and partner development at Trimble Ventures, teaches at Cal Poly Pomona, and is asking what an AI native design practice could actually look like at the core. He calls himself a builder. We talk about what he's building next and what architects need to do if we want to lead the next wave of technology rather than be led by it. Herman, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. Practice Disrupted.

B Thank you for having me. I'm super excited for this conversation.

A We've been talking on and off and I know you brought me. You and Lucas brought me on to the 0 to 60 accelerator. But before we get into what that is, why don't you give people a little bit about your background because you're actually. You're trained as an architect.

B Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So just mentioning at the beginning of this call, right. That I Grew up in Southern California, first generation born American parents from Central America, from El Salvador. And so I'm not going to go over my, my entire upbringing, but, you know, grew up in Southern California. And so I decided to stay around and go to architecture school. So somewhere along the way I decided I want to become an architect. I think it was in the fifth grade I was looking at, I have a daughter now who's about that age when I decided I want to be an architect. And I realized, wow, that's how long I've been wanting to be an architect.

B And this year I can finally call myself a licensed architect in the state of California, which I'm super proud about, and, and get more detail. But to answer your question, yeah, I grew up in Southern California and when I decided I wanted to go to architecture school, chose to go to Cal Poly Pomona, because that was, you know, the school that one accepted me and was local and couldn't afford, but luckily they had one of the best programs, I think in the country, is an impacted program. And so it was a great experience.

A So you went to Cal Poly, but then you also went and got your master's degree in design and computation. What happened in between those two degrees, if anything, or what made you decide to go get that second degree?

B Yeah, I think at Cal Poly, some of the instructors, actually some of the faculty that came in in my fourth and fifth years were from mit and so they played a big influence in my education. And that was kind of always back of mind. But post Cal Poly had the opportunity to go work full time for Arup engineering firm here in Los Angeles. And it was then that I realized how broken our industry was, working with all the different disciplines, all the rework that was happening. And I decided I wanted to go back to grad school to get a more formal or technical education. And so given that I knew about the SMARTS program at mit, I thought that was a great program and wanted to be a part of that. Really liked what the faculty there was doing and what they were focused on and saw myself going back to grad school. So actually I only applied to mit.

B I didn't apply to any other school. I figured if I wasn't going to mit, I wasn't going back to grad school and was happy to stay in practice and work at arup. But luckily I was accepted into the program and spent two years there. Incredible years working with the faculty and the students. I think a lot of the magic that happens there, yes, with the student population that goes there, get to learn from each other. And it was an incredible experience.

A And then you went from there to Gary Technologies. At a time where I think everybody is like, what is Frank Gehry doing and what is Gary Technologies? So want to tell us about that step and how forward thinking it was at the time within the industry.

B Yeah, Gary Technologies was always a interesting organization, one that I always looked at, looked up to and was following. And so happened that one of the faculty members at mit, Dennis Sheldon, was also the CTO at Gary Technologies. And so Dennis was my thesis advisor at mit. And after graduating at MIT and I found myself in the Bay Area teaching, he invited me to come help him lead a Frank Gehry studio at ucla. So between MIT and joining Geary Technologies, I spent some time in the Bay Area working at three different universities. CCA in San Francisco at UC Berkeley, and also doing some research at Autodesk. So I spent a few months there at One market before moving back to Los Angeles, working at ucla, co teaching with Dennis Sheldon. And then soon after joining Gary Technologies full time.

A What inspired you to teach in addition to working full time?

B Yeah, I always loved having like one foot in academia. You know, I always loved, like the experimentation and thinking that goes into. Right. Writing and research. So MIT played a big influence of that. So did Cal Poly. Right. A lot of the ethos there, you know, is about experimentation, innovation, like discovery, critical thinking.

B And so I always, while I was at mit, I also, to help pay for my education, was a ta. So I was always in studios working with other architects and teaching skill sets. And so my. One of my professors there, Sheila Kennedy, took me under her arm and she's like her and Larry Sasse. I owe them a big deal. They said, universities need people like you. You would be a great professor. You should consider teaching post grad school.

B And so when I found myself in the Bay Area, I got the opportunity to teach at CCA and UC Berkeley, in large part from introductions from Sheila Kennedy. Really enjoyed it. Working with students, continue to experiment, do research, also give back. So today, fast forward, I currently teach at Cal Poly Pomona. But a lot of that is less about experimentation and research in an academic sense, but more about giving back to my alma mater and the school I went to, working with students that come from similar background as mine.

A You went through an acquisition, and I feel like very few people in the industry has been through an acquisition. And the other thing is, it was a different type of acquisition. I think people who have been through an M and A or mergers and acquisition have Obviously, or most often go from one architecture firm to a larger conglomerate. Gary Technologies as a piece of. Gary's firm was acquired by Trimble, which develops hardware, I've learned, as well as software. So can you talk to us a little bit about, like, what did that move mean or indicate to you about where Gary Technologies was headed within the architecture realm?

B Yeah, that was a surprise to me, actually. Technically one of the last hires at Gary Technologies before being acquired by Trimble. So when I, at the time I was teaching at ECLA and working part time at aecom, Dennis Sheldon invited me to join Gary Technologies. And so I thought I was leaving kind of big organization and coming to work at a small boutique firm to work on some, you know, create incredible projects. And so I was a bit surprised when I learned that we were being acquired by Trimble. But it was a pleasant surprise because, yeah, Trimble had a kind of long history of acquiring software companies, Sketchup being one of them. I thought the cultures were very much aligned. And so I owe a lot to Frank, Gary and Dennis and others at Gary Technologies for having the foresight to sell to incredible organization and give me the opportunity to excel my career.

B So I really had an incredible time, you know, before the role that I'm currently in, kind of working in the consulting world and you know, to, to Trimble's credit, like kind of let us just run, you know, business as usual. So Trimble acquired Gary Technologies for the software and the back then called G Team. It's now Trimble Connect, which is a platform for sharing building information models across a project. Project. It's now our platform solution. But also acquired Gary Technologies for the consulting arm. And so I was part of that consulting team, you know, that helped deliver projects for customers or clients like Frank Gary and others. And so I got the opportunity through Trimble Consulting, right, to travel around the world and work on some really amazing projects, which is really, I think, helpful in understanding the industry, kind of the pain points that our Sashida customers were facing, the realities, right, of how broken the industry was, where we needed to focus, to help drive change and as a motivator for some of the work that came afterwards.

A Well, why don't you talk a little bit about that work and zero to 60 and how kind of this group has grown within Trimble.

B Yeah, so 060 was that idea that came out of the Gary Technologies consulting Group. Right. You mentioned Lucas, I think on the call earlier. He was a director at GT at the time. And so we were as part of Trimble Consulting, working with some of our strategic customers to implement both trimble and non trimble tech on building an infrastructure project. So I had the opportunity to travel around the world and work on some incredible projects. Spent some time in Europe, spent some time in New Zealand, sometime in Mexico, here locally in Los Angeles, working with organizations like wdi, Fernando Romero and Norman Foster on the Mexico City project and others. But it was on these projects where we would get hired to assist with the project delivery and federate all these models coming from various point solutions and help the flow of data and accelerate the delivery of these large complex buildings that were billions of dollars investment.

B It was through those engagements, seeing the pain points for hand, that I realized there's gotta be a better way because at the end of these projects we would just throw these technologies away and then the next engagement it was like the same thing. Maybe some of the underlying tech had evolved, changed, but we were still kind of focusing on similar challenges. I said there's got to be a better way. Why don't we work with startups on this? And so in 2018, Lucas and I co founded this 060 Accelerator program, thinking based on my experience at MIT and in the Bay Area, why don't we have something like that here in Los Angeles? So we thought maybe we would get something up and running in LA and work with a few startups locally, but soon realized there was a demand kind of globally and started working with startups around the world. And so it started with 2, 3 companies at a time kind of as a side project where we tried to learn what we could offer small startups as a large organization, what type of resources and learned that they're all very different. Some need some help with just access to customers, making introductions. And so we did some of that, you know, we had closed and open door demo days. Others needed help with their go to market strategy.

B They're looking for channel access and so we assisted with some of that. Others were looking for access to technologies, resources, you know, mentorship. Chumbo is a company of companies, I like to say. I mentioned acquisitions. Scary Technologies is one acquisition, SketchUp, another acquisition, a number of other companies. So a lot of founders, right, hanging around Trimble that have so much to offer and wealth of knowledge that you know, sometimes it's just mentorship that these companies needed. And so three years ago in 2023, joined the Ventures team to kind of focus on this full time and instead of just working with two, three companies at a time, decided to collaborate with Sketchup, which is one of our business units. To use SketchUp as a platform.

B So I invited 10 companies from around the world to come build on top of SketchUp as a platform. So that included the desktop tool, the web tool, the mobile tool, the SDKs, APIs, et cetera. And invited these 10 startups to our headquarters in Westminster, Colorado to come meet with our design, engineering and leadership teams to come conceptualize what integration to SketchUp would look like. And so we connected them with some of our mentors, subject matter experts for this two day event or they got to learn a little bit about the Trimble culture, kind of present to our leadership team what they're building and spend the second day kind of whiteboarding what an integration would look like following some kind of design thinking models. And from that event we then sent everybody back home to meet over a 12 week period with our subject matter experts over office hours to actually develop these integrations. And then we have a big showcase at our annual conference in November called Trimble Dimensions that brings out about 5 to 7,000 of our customers to Las Vegas where they get to showcase what they've built. So based on the success of that first year's model, we scaled that up the following year to include all our AECO products, leading with Trimble Connect as our platform. So kind of full circle going From Gary Technologies SG team to TrimbleConnect now through the accelerator program integrating startups into this technology, but also includes SketchUp, Tecla project site and some of our other solutions as part of that effort.

B And this year scaling and expanding on that program not just to include software, but also hardware. Because as you mentioned earlier, the Trimble origins are in hardware actually from Charlie Trimble leaving HP and taking some of that technology and developing total stations, for example for civil engineers and site surveyors. And so we at Trimble have a number of hardware and now mainly software, but combined allow us to differentiate ourselves from some of our competitors through these kind of field to office workflows.

A For those who do know anything about accelerators, I'm thinking even like Y Combinator is taking an equity share into these companies with the investment. The model for 0 to 60 is a little bit different, I believe. Do you want to talk about the type of support you're offering these startups? And I don't think you've actually named some of the companies that have been through 0 to 60, so just talk about that as well.

B Yeah, so it's currently an equity free program, so we actually don't take any equity in the companies. I don't know that that's always going to be the case. Maybe it'll change in the future. But the whole reason behind that motivation came from consulting and first trying to understand what it was that we can help with. So back then we were working with companies like Testfit, Join Monograph, Tonic DM for example, to try to learn what we could offer as a large organization. We did that for a few years before doing it at scale and now work through the first cohort. Had a company called Scaffplan, for example, that came out of Australia that built an integration into SketchUp, focus on scaffolding design. So you would just outline a building and generate a scaffolding and they had an integration prior with tecla, but they wanted to reach a bigger customer base and so they work with SketchUp to develop this integration.

B But you're asking a question about accelerators and the models, right? I guess coming from my time at MIT in the Bay Area looking at accelerators like Y Combinator and like I mentioned before, I was thinking why don't we have that in Los Angeles? But more interestingly, why don't we have that for our industry? In 2018 there was no kind of industry specific accelerator programs. Now I think there's a a handful of them and some of them do take equity to your points. But the goal for 060 was always to kind of grow the ecosystem, drive change in the industry. So that's the way that it's still positioned today. Right. The motivation behind it is to build partnership.

A This episode is brought to you by the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. I am teaching their professional intensive course, Innovation in the Built Environment and it is designed for practitioners who are ready to think differently about how the built environment gets made. Whether you're an architect, planner, developer or somewhere in between, this course gives you the frameworks, the language and the cross sector perspective to lead change from wherever you sit. Five weeks of virtual sessions plus an in person intensive in Detroit. Find out more and register@beradicallybetter.com that's B E R A D I C- A L L Y B E T T E R dot com. You mentioned very early on when you were working with ARUP, immediately after undergrad, the broken systems that you are kind of pulling together. And it seems to me that there's a little bit of a thread of that of identifying those systems and trying to f whether it's through teaching or whether it's through zero to 60. So now, having seen so many different startups come through.

A And working as an integrator while you were a consultant, what is fund alignmentally kind of misunderstood about this industry and how we work together and collaborate? And what do you think we could be doing better moving forward? That's a really big question, actually.

B Yeah, it's loaded. There's layers to it. I'll try to tackle it. I think if I had a pinpoint, like one of the biggest challenges and making that come true is just people. I think that's probably the biggest challenge and removing obstacles and a lot of the friction that exists in the industry is because we have legal agreements just the way that we do business. Because I don't think it's technological. I think that's a lot of that's kind of been solved. But we put things in place that kind of prohibit moving data from one format to another format.

B Right. From one tool to the other, or we prohibit from sharing of information. So I mentioned some of the frustration. Having worked at arup, you know, out of, right out of undergrad, I thought I was going to work at one of the most innovative companies in the industry. And they were, but they still did things very traditionally. And it was not because it wasn't technically feasible, but. Right. Because of the, I mentioned the, like, legal agreements in place, the business models where you had to do all this rework.

B So you had to get a design model from an architect and kind of like rebuild it from scratch. Right. For your engineering work. And you couldn't trust it for background. You had to intake cad models or PDFs or whatever it was. And now I think a lot of that has been reduced, but some of those things are still in place and hopefully they'll evolve in the near future. But if I answer your question. Yeah.

B The biggest challenge I think is just people and some of that is going away because I think we see the opportunity ahead of us, but also the younger generations now finding themselves in leadership positions in many of these organizations and realizing, no, we can do things a different way. I'm excited about that future a little bit.

A You mentioned your change of teaching in terms of staying close to this research and pushing the boundaries. And now as your teaching has evolved, it's also been really about giving back to the community. And what type of courses are you currently teaching and why have you landed on those types of courses?

B Yeah, a lot of the courses I teach are around advanced digital design. Right. And it is because the digital side of things just keeps evolving. So we're able to use kind of the same framework and Insert a new technology to rethink about, you know, project delivery, for example. So in a lot of these courses, students are looking for practical skill sets. So they're learning about building information modeling. But we don't teach it from like a point and click software perspective. We teach it from like a project delivery and how digital technologies can aid right, in different activities that are involved in delivering a project.

B So going from design through construction to operations and maintenance, which is, is becoming more important these days as owners invest a lot of dollars into these expensive assets, right? They want kind of the digital twin version of those assets to be able to operate and maintain their buildings. The other type of course I also teach are focused on entrepreneurship. So taught those courses before at, in the Bay Area and at Cal Poly. That's always an interesting one because we're teaching architects, right? This is all in the architecture school, how to think about becoming entrepreneurs and using the skill sets they learned in architecture school, maybe to start their own companies, kind of focus on the pain point in the industry and develop a solution around that. And so, yeah, I think it's part of the culture at Cal Poly where, why that type of course works. And it's always like multi disciplinary, very similar to a school like MIT that takes somebody from architecture school, somebody from the computer science school, and somebody from the Sloan School of Business, right, and enter into a competition, a pitch competition to pitch their startup idea. And Cal Poly kind of has similar culture there. And so I'm able to teach some of those courses, thankfully to a lot of, to the leadership people like George Proctor and now Bob Alexander, who are chairs there.

B But it goes back to, even when I was in undergrad, people like Judith Shine, right, who were, who were like, you know, true leaders back then.

A I feel that the courses that you're teaching, whether it is digital technology or whether even it's entrepreneurship, is very forward thinking for the industry and for practice itself. I mean, that's where I'm trying to push practice, right. As somebody who's been on the practitioner side of things for nearly 30 years now. So how do you prepare your students for taking the education that you're giving them for the realities of the field that they're headed into and how to manage all of the relationship culture, things that you mentioned before that might frustrate them, having come in and learned all these innovative solutions?

B That's a great question. Trying to think of the, how they translate. You know, what I'm, what I'm teaching is skill building. I'm also teaching ways of Thinking, I'm teaching ways of problem solving. So I think the Cal Poly way is learned by doing so. It's always a lot more of like systems thinking, first principles, you need to develop a framework. So a lot of the students who spend a lot of time in studios, it's less about like designing, but designing a framework to arriving at a specific design solution. And so that's essentially what I'm teaching in these courses.

B There's digital capabilities that we have today and how to use them to build these frameworks for maybe design thinking and solving problems. So whether it's a design problem and have to arrive at a building solution or it's product design or it's like in my case ecosystem design, I think at the core it's more about building a framework, a system to help you arrive at specific solutions.

A Do you ever find that your students come back to you frustrated by what they get in the real world when you like, have coffee with them after they graduated?

B Yeah, I think that's just a symptom of our industry. And if you try to follow, I guess, a traditional path and things move slower than they like. But you know, I always encourage my students to take ownership of their careers and think big and, you know, to envision the future they want to see and go build it. Right. Because a lot of that friction comes from, I think there's many people that wait to be told what to do next. I've never really been that person. I learned early on in my career that nobody's going to come and save me and, and tell me what to do next, you know, and kind of design my career. And so I encourage all my students to do the same, is imagine the future you want to see and then, and then go build it.

A I have a question for you because I don't even have the answer to this for my own career. We just talked today and we talked about you being a teacher. Your official title, I feel is Project Manager of Early Innovation and Partner Development at Trimble Ventures, which in itself holds a lot of different responsibilities and roles. And you're the part time soccer coach or the soccer coach to your kids as well. If you're just meeting somebody for the first time, how do you identify and how do you tell them what you do?

B Yeah, I love that question. It took me a while, I think, to arrive at what I'm gonna answer. And it's at the core it's just I'm a builder, right? So all this time just reflecting back on my career, I've been building along the way, right? Yeah, along. Along that way. It was hard to define because it has evolved. It has evolved from, you know, trying to be an architect and not being able to call myself an architect because I haven't gone through the licensing process to working on project delivery and working on developing technologies to help with project deliveries and helping other architects deliver their designs to, you know, working on accelerator programs, building essentially programs and ecosystems. Right. To develop partnerships and build solutions, to assist eventually, ultimately right to.

B For project delivery. So when I now think of myself in the role I play and all the different roles I've played in the past, essentially just at the core, been like building roles. I've always wanted to be a builder, still continue to be. Want to be a builder at heart. And it's. Whether it's. I'm building buildings, ecosystems, accelerator programs, writing software, it's all. It's all just building.

B And. And that's the way I think about it. And that's what I tell my kids when they ask what. What dad does. Last year was the first time I actually got to show them with something physical. Right. Because I'm often on calls or, you know, sitting behind the computer. And last year I was able to take them to Disney World and show them a project that I worked on.

B And it kind of clicked, you know, and was able to show them some of the models that went into building that project and, and kind of do the translation. And so it was nice to share that with them.

A My children literally just had a debate this weekend over whether or not I actually do architecture as an architect. There is one building that I took from start to finish down in Orange county, but they have not gotten to see that. And it's something that I haven't touched since like 2000. I don't know, 2005, 2006 was the last time I actually worked on any type of set of drawings.

B So there's still time.

A There's still time. I actually. Well, I mean, even if I were to. I know which architects I would hire to do my house. So let's put it that way. It's not me. Do you think you missed anything by. By taking this path that you wove for yourself? Do you ever miss practice?

B No, I'm actually excited to re. Explore what that. What that looks like. So I mentioned that I'm recently licensed in the state of California. It's always been a goal of mine. I didn't think before getting licensed that I would ever find a need for a license. So there was never, ever a rush to go get licensed. But now that I am licensed, I'm excited to explore.

B Right. With some of the technologies that emerging. I'm excited to explore, for example, what like a native design practice looks like. The promise a lot of this technology is that you can do more with less.

A Is that your side hustle now?

B Yeah, potentially. I mean, one of my goals is to explore what that looks like and have maybe a small practice and be able to kind of prove out this thesis that I have. Excited to explore that in different avenues, whether it be through my own practice or through continued engagements in academia. Exploring that through students. A lot of the work that I

A do at Trimble, what was the impetus? I mean, I guess there is an argument where you could do that partnering with somebody else who is a licensed architect. So, you know, some people would be like, what? Why at this point in your career? Well, first of all, congratulations, because I feel like that's a milestone that needs to be acknowledged no matter what. I pursued my license for a very different reason. But why was it something that you felt that you had to pursue towards the end?

B I think maybe just to prove it to myself that I could and arrive to the point where you can just do things in this life. You can just say you want to do something and you can go do them. And so I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation recording, you know, that I wanted to be an architect when I was 10 years old, and I set that goal out for myself and I wasn't going to. I'm the type of person that wasn't going to rest until I achieved that. Whether I use my license or not is a different question. But I'm the kind of person that when I have something in mind, I just have to go and get it done.

A So you've kind of mentioned that you're optimistic about the future and technology and even the exploration of what it means to be an AI for company or the ability to do more with less. Right. Which then also comes back to technology. What keeps you optimistic? When I feel like so many architects right now are pessimistic or tend to be having a defensive stance with where we are right now.

B Yeah, I think I don't know where it comes. Maybe it's just my personality. Like, I'm always classful kind of guy, optimistic about the future, but just also, you know, having spent some time with this technology and building, I'm super excited of how that's going to reimagine the world, because I think, you know, going back to my experience, going from Cal Poly to working at organizations like arup, aecom, Autodesk, teaching at universities, you know, working, consulting, seeing a lot of the challenges firsthand. A lot of the solutions have been kind of incremental, I think steps, right? Going from like hand drawing to CAD drawing to building information modeling to scripting technologies to now we have this technology where you can just use natural language to arrive at a design. And to me that's, that's a big step change and I think that's where the opportunity lies. And I think it's super exciting because I spent all that time, you know, kind of trying to refine my craft, learn all these skills to be able to arrive at various solutions that now I can just do in a, in a much shorter amount of time. Right? Somebody. I'm kind of jealous of my students who are coming out of undergraduate school because they have all this technology at their hands where they can just derive design.

B And so I'm excited about that future because I've seen it firsthand. Working at a software company, I get access to technologies that are in development. Also working with a lot of these startups, a lot of this innovation that, that they're building and how they're leveraging technology and rethinking about not just technology, but also rethinking about rethinking business models. So when I say AI native, I'm not just thinking about a technology for project delivery, but thinking about how we move from, I guess currently a lot of SaaS products to as we move towards usage or tokenization or outputs, like how that redefines business models and how we go from a service industry where we base our value based on time, to be more output driven. Right? And if we can go from a architectural program, which is maybe a written document instead of specs, to actual design in a short amount of time, like how does that redefine what we do right as builders? So I don't know, maybe I'm just naive or biased, but I'm optimistic about that future.

A I think this profession and industry could use a lot more optimism. In general. I think you have an interesting viewpoint or vantage within the industry. Being on the trimble venture side of things, seeing what students are really interested coming into school, but also then understanding from a software company, what does GTM look like to really deliver, deliver to architecture firms who are doing the work on the ground. Is there any conversation in all of those threads or any anything that we're not talking about that we should be talking about within the industry right now?

B Nothing that comes to mind. But I think something maybe that I take away from your podcast and your writing actually is this idea of architects shaping the future industry versus technology companies. So I think a lot of the technology is being led by software companies, AI companies today, right? I think you've seen in the, in a lot of the news like anthropics studies, research studies, and kind of the next wave, right? Going from a lot of their chat bots and agents and industries they've been focusing on is starting to bleed into the architecture industry. And so I think one, I guess answer your question, one thing we're not talking about is how we're going to lead that future, right? As, as architects, now that I'm a licensed architect, I can, I can say that, like, how are we going to lead that future and, and leverage this technology and not be, not be led? And so I think this is a great opportunity for us to do that and maybe redefine our business models, like I said, how we deliver our services and return, I think, back to a master builder, because that's what this type of technology lends itself to, to get to that future, right? It's not going to be one software vendor, it's not going to be one startup. It's not going to be, you know, one design professional. I think it's going to be a whole ecosystem of participants. And so that's kind of where I'm looking to take the 060 program is in developing that kind of ecosystem of startups, of industry professionals, of leaders, a software company like Trimble and its resources to help steer and innovate the industry in that direction.

A This summer, join me for Innovation in the Built Environment, a professional intensive from the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Built for practitioners who are ready to move from thinking about transformation to actually leading it. Learn more@beradicallybetter.com that's B E R A D I C A L L Y B E t e r.com. 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 practiceofarchitecture.com podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers and other disruptors in our community@practiceofarchitecture.com community. Our social media handle is practiceofarch.

A That's practice of Arch. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say Hello. Tune in next time week for a new conversation on change in the profession.