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KP Unpacked
KP Unpacked explores the biggest ideas in AEC, AI, and innovation, unpacking the trends, technology, discussions, and strategies shaping the built environment and beyond.
KP Unpacked
Why Curiosity Beats Connections in Startups
If meritocracy starts at a web form, do you still need warm intros or just relentless curiosity?
Track3D founder/CEO NK Chaitanya joins KP for a field-level riff on founder-led sales, learning on job sites, and why doing the unscalable early creates durable moats later. We unpack how a cold application turned into a partnership, why “works on day one” beats roadmap theater, and how automating the boring parts brings joy back to building. NK also breaks down Track3D’s $10M Series A, the tech vs distribution dance, and what it really takes to earn a customer’s time.
Highlights
- One front door: meritocracy via a website form (and why it works)
- Founder in steel-toes: two years on sites to earn insight (and trust)
- Tech moat vs distribution moat: when to swing between them
- Design partners > pilots: time commitment beats small checks
- “It has to work now”: MVPs that are job-ready, not demo-ready
- Why this industry hates being sold to and how to sell by serving
- Doing the unscalable early to make scale possible later
- Founder-led sales past $1M (and why the founder stays in the room)
- Automate the drudgery, protect the joy: AI that frees real work
- Immigrant advantage: beginner’s mind as a superpower
Learn more about KPR Co Mastermind Groups here!
Upcoming KPR Co events
- Owners’ Training Series: practical moves for owners and owner’s reps
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Check out one of our Catalyst conversation starters, AEC Needs More High-Agency Thinkers
Hope to see you there!
All right. Welcome to KP Unpacked. That's my best radio voice. Getting better at this game. Um, today, though, we have a special guest to unpack, so to speak. Um, NK Chaitanya is the founder CEO of Track 3D. Um, one of my favorite portfolio companies. For all my portfolio companies that are listening, he's one of my favorites. You have to decide whether you're the other favorite or not. Because much like children, we do have favorites, we just don't admit it in public. So, how's it going, NK?
SPEAKER_02:Going good, KP. Thanks for having me. I was always looking up. One of the success metrics was you know, coming on this podcast. I really think that you know we are getting on the right path.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know if you know it's the number one podcast in AEC.
SPEAKER_02:I do, I 100% do. That's why this was the bar.
SPEAKER_01:It didn't used to be. We just started saying it, and then manifest destiny. We became the number one podcast in AEC.
SPEAKER_02:No, I recently saw your banter with bricks and bites as well, right?
SPEAKER_01:You having it up that was those guys, they do it for a living, and I still have more YouTube subscribers. I was like, This is what you guys do for a living. I just do this for like because I don't have any hobbies, like, this is my hobby.
SPEAKER_02:I think it's all the employees of your portco companies give me exactly the best way to get your next round of funding.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. That could be true, but you know, we'll see. Actually, a lot of my LPs listen to the podcast, absolutely, but they don't say anything online because they're just funny that way. I see them in person and they talk about how much they enjoy the podcast. It's like it'd be nice for you to like, I don't know, promote it for me a little bit, but you know, they just they want to keep. I'm like I'm like a great babysitter, nobody wants to tell their friends about them because they're afraid.
SPEAKER_02:No, I'm guilty of that as well, right? I follow your podcast completely, but I have never commented or you know, reposted it with my thoughts because you have great views, KP, actually. I agree with them most of the time, right? It's not like you know, I don't agree with them as well. I need more controversy. Is that what you're saying?
SPEAKER_01:A lot of people will say no to that. You want to talk about H1B uh visa sites?
unknown:No.
SPEAKER_00:No, okay, I'm doing time by that stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Well, cool for everyone. Uh, hopefully you already know me. Uh otherwise, I'm not sure how you found this podcast. Um, but uh NK, why don't you talk a little bit about like what you're doing? You're back, just you know, just give everybody set the stage.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, GP. Thank you. Uh so hey everyone, I go by NK, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Track3D. We are three co-founders. Started this about four years back. But even before this, right, right from my early days of starting my career, which is like almost 20 years back now, I've been uh very fascinated by the world of physical AI. That is 3D vision, AI, robotics, and IoT, all of this combining together. And I have only worked in startups, either it was my own startup or our startup getting acquired by some company and me going and continuing that division. So it's always been physical AI because you know I could never understand a blueprint, for example. Looking at a blueprint, getting the physics of the space was so, so I mean, I just couldn't make that happen. So it was all about 3D vision for me. How do we take images and start perceiving it in 3D? Applied it to different domains. Started out in the medical domain, furniture augmented reality. There was home automation, industrial automation, to our last startup, which actually introduced into the world of construction, that was smart cities. So we were creating digital replicas of entire cities so that you can get things like your road space condition, your green space index, your violations, code violations. And also cities do a lot of construction, right? So construction monitoring was a natural part of it. So that's where all the three of us got together, three co-founders, started working on that, right about when COVID happened, right? Obviously, CETI's budgets got repurposed, but that took us back to the drawing board, saying that you know construction is a very, very interesting problem to apply and solve these technologies to real-world problems. So, you know, we started back in 2022, and uh the idea was how do we automate construction monitoring? Now, with that in place, right, we were back in India back then, and this is a funny story I should actually share. Not many people will actually believe this. But what happened was, you know, we knew US was going to be our topmost market because you know, the lack of labor, the amount of construction that is happening over here, we 100% knew that US was our topmost priority. But then we were folks sitting back in India, but we had a core prototype built, but again, we haven't even properly spoken to construction companies in the US yet. But we know we had a very interesting take on how we could solve this problem. So I tried to reach out to KP. Uh first it was LinkedIn, other ways of contacting you. Unfortunately, you put everything behind a wall card, and KP couldn't directly add you on LinkedIn as well. So, out of just taking a chance, what we did was went to shadow.vc, the website, and directly applied on a form. They had a form where you could apply it with absolutely no expectation in mind. And this was one of the first uh investor conversations that we were ever having. So applied it online, put a form, and I see within five days, I get a response. Like we were genuinely shocked. I think so. It will not even be surprised to even see that response. And then four weeks, four calls later, we get our first term sheet. And this story totally baffles me, right? Yeah, you always say you need warm intros to reach out to VCs, you need connections, you need introductions, but nothing, basically. You you have always supported this KP saying meritocracy is super important, and seeing it actually live in action, right? It's it's still even today, it's something very, very different.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you know, it's fine. We've talked about it several times because it, I mean, I think, you know, no founder, you know, if you said, oh, go hit all the VC's websites and fill out forms, and and and I would say, like, we're probably I'm probably very different, and that I do believe in a lot of the selection bias that happens in startup world is really kind of this affinity bias, like, oh, I know this person, you know that person, uh, which doesn't get you fresh ideas, it gets you a lot of recycled ideas. Um so I've always um believed that you know, if you have one front door and it's your website, and everybody has to walk through that front door equally, um, it's at least one step towards meritocracy that you know, and in fact, it's it's people get frustrated. I have other VCs will hit me up and say, I want to introduce you to a founder, and I send them the link to the website. I'm like, send them here.
SPEAKER_02:I've seen that myself too. You know, some of my friends who are starting up, they say, you know, hey, make me an introduction to KP, and I'm like, you know, apply on his website. Make sure I'm a live example. He will look into it, he will respond. But you know, people don't exactly understand, but no fault of theirs, KP. You should think that's how the industry has worked.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So uh you've had some recent news since our humble beginnings.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So again, uh super honored and you know uh super happy that you know we were able to close our CDC. Just announced it a few weeks back. We uh our first on back was in September of 2022, where we had raised 2.3 and then followed it with some strategic investment, totally 4.3 million. And now we have taken to the next leg of our journey where we have raised our CDC of 10 million dollars KP. And again, thank you for again re-participating and reaffirming your faith on what we are building.
SPEAKER_01:No, I think what you guys are building is is it's important, right? There's uh, and I think it's becoming more and more important. You know, I get um, you know, I do about 25 calls a week with founders, right? Everybody comes to the website, and I, you know, we split it up a little bit, but I generally still get a lot. Um, and it's getting harder and harder to get excited about software deals. And I find myself trying to talk founders out of taking on venture capital because they don't um, you know, they don't think about scale, they don't think about, you know, I can be super helpful, obviously, but if they don't if they don't have a company that can scale, that can benefit from my help and benefit from the capital, then they're just not not gonna get anywhere. So I think it's been fantastic to see um the growth you guys have had. And it's funny, I've had other portfolio companies uh in the cohort that haven't raised their series A and they wanted to know what you guys did that was special. And I was like, there's twofold, you know, we we talk VCs talk in very binary words, like you need to have a tech moat, have a market moat, right? And so founders think very binary, like, oh, I need to have a tech moat, or they think I need to have a marketing mode.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, distribution mode.
SPEAKER_01:I think you guys have done a great job of bouncing back and forth around that, right? Initially having a tech moat, then building some marketing moat, getting some key accounts, right? Um, and then you know, going back and building your tech up again, right? So going back and forth because it's not one or the other, right? It's how do you iterate through that? And uh, I tell people a lot of times, you know, the first year you came from India, you were on job sites. Correct. When you were in job trailers spending time and had an actual you had an authentic intellectual curiosity around how things like I never told you, like, hey, you need to go hang out at job sites. Like, no, I need to go spend time at job sites.
SPEAKER_02:100% KP, you know, and that was so such a humbling experience as well, because you know, uh, I have known only software engineers all throughout my life, right? That I have very clear perspective on what these people think like. But and and all software engineers, by the way, think they work really, really hard, right? Sitting in an AC cabin for six hours and they think they work really, really hard. Again, no offense. But going on job side side opens up a whole new perspective. You know what working hard is all about, actually. Then you understand, you know, hey, we we can pass a very lame statement saying that construction is technology laggard, they don't adopt technology much. But you go and see in the field, right? Then you get that perspective on you know how easy the technology is supposed to be, how simple it has to be to be adopted, you know, uh, because these guys are genuinely, genuinely busy, not busy having a coffee meeting or a wine lunch somewhere, right? Playing football, exactly playing football in your you know, very hi-fi offices. Yeah, these are like genuinely hardworking people, and that perspective I would never have gotten at KP unless I visited sites. Yeah, so again, thank you for being an enabler during that part because you know, even getting access to these construction companies or sites is not easy, right? But uh getting that early access, and then obviously you have to go and just grind it there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, 100%. No, I look, I think you know, a lot of times um, you know, my job is to connect, right? To be the connector. But I also am very cognizant of uh who I put in front of my LPs and my network, that they can actually provide you know real value. And um, you know, and and so in many ways you made it easy because I would get phone calls, you know, from folks saying, like, oh, NK's such a great guy, he's so smart, he was so helpful, he asked good questions. Uh, and I think that that makes me look good, right? So as long as you're making me look good, that's that's all that matters, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yep, I think perfect partnership keeping in that sense.
SPEAKER_01:So let's talk a little bit about um, because I think it's an interesting topic, which is how we think about sales in this industry. And I wouldn't say you going to job sites was necessarily um a sales endeavor, it was more, it was it was truly a research endeavor that turned into sales, right? And I had this real like debate going on with lots of friends, it's like sales dead, right? Is sales really a skill that everyone from software to customer success to market, is it really just a skill that we should all have? Because this industry doesn't get excited about talking to just pure salespeople, right? They kind of get turned off by it, even if the salesperson's very knowledgeable and and all those things, right? Um, first thing they ask is like, well, what construction companies did you work at? You know, it's it's very much that. How do you think you know that effort you put in it was like a solid year, year and a half, right?
SPEAKER_02:That is kind of two years, actually.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, almost two years. And then by the way, in terms of founder sacrifice, a lot of those times was without your family being here, away from your family. That is all which is not insignificant, right? In terms of um being committed to try to understand these things. Um, I mean, how do you think it would have worked like if you weren't like passionate about the product and all that? Like if it was a salesperson, not to be derogatory, I have lots of salespeople on my life. I always joke around when people say, Hey KP, you're really good at sales. I'm like, that's funny, I've never had a quota, I've never had a sales position. Um, but you know, there's a great book from uh Daniel Pink called To Sell as Human. I love that book because it's basically saying, like, stop viewing sales as this negative attribute. It's just part of being a human. Like we learn at a very young age. You know, my three-year-old yesterday, I told him he could have one cookie and he ate one cookie, and he's like, he's like, Well, that was breakfast, that was lunch. So we start if the motives are there and the incentives are there, and it's very engaging if you learn how to sell, right?
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. I think that's a primary life skill, right? And to be very fair, right? I was also I had that false ego myself, KP, to be very honest, right? I've been a technologist all throughout. All my previous roles were that of a CTO. So I haven't sold ever in my life. So leave alone selling to the US or selling to the construction industry in the US. I have never sold a dollar of anything in my entire life before this. So for me, it was about being the genuinely curious and understanding what people want, right? Because our perspective was very clear. And just before we go a little bit deeper into this topic, right? You wouldn't know the story, but I think it it will make an interesting tidbit is when we were getting started, like this is in 2022, there were companies our competitors had raised like hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, some of the early VCs that we pitched to KP actually told, why are you doing this? Don't do this. This market is saturated. In fact, be in India, and maybe some of your these companies can actually buy you out. Probably that's your best bet. So that makes it a venture unfundable company, like you were talking about originally, right? So and we also genuinely thought that's the case. Like, you know, construction technology is you know saturated, uh, reality capture or reality intelligence, even is become a standard of every job site. But these visits, right, going job side to job side, traveling, this opened up my mind actually. What we thought as an assumption that, you know, hey, it's ubiquitous, everyone is using intelligence on the job side, to what was actually happening. There was a huge, huge gap. And you had seen it firsthand as well, incubating some of those companies early on. And I asked you specifically like why did you even invest KP, having seen other companies and their life cycle? So we understood that the technology was neither simple enough, not fast enough, not accurate enough, or not cost effective enough to become like a standard accessible uh tool for every job site, irrespective of its size, shape, or geography. So that was a huge opportunity we saw. If we were to do that, if we were to build that, we were very, very honest, right? We knew there's only one way we can do that. It's only with deep, deep, deep customer understanding, putting ourselves in their shoes, traveling job side to job site. And simple is always complex. The more simple the product is to the end user, all the heavy engineering has to come in the back end. Like Google has that one search part, or Chat GPT has that one chat window, right? But all the heavy engineering, the indexing, the searching, the algorithms all are happening in the back end. So to get to that level, right, itself has been the journey. And you know, it I would say getting that perspective would have been impossible. Yeah. Because our early customers also told, right, uh, we don't ever like to be sold to. And this I was interviewing them, and they they told it very, very openly. We want to buy, we have an intent because there's a problem we want to solve, but we hate being sold to. We want someone who can answer our questions, think and align on the thought process. And you know, we need to have that confidence that you know these guys have a vision and they're capable of executing to that vision. And that was an eye-opener for me. Then, you know, I think we almost never sold KP. You would know that actually, basically, right? It was more about understanding and then saying, hey, this is the right fit. And some of the times we told, you know, we we are not the right fit for what you're trying to do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. No, I think all I think there's a couple things to kind of unpack there. One, sometimes in this industry being first to market, there isn't really a first mover advantage. Actually, Nick and I talked on a couple episodes ago was um we talk about technical debt a lot as as tech as software companies and uh tech companies. We don't talk a lot about marketing debt, which is the fact that you try lots of things to break through the market. Some work, some don't work. Um and I think a lot of the people that got here first, they had massive marketing debt to educate the market, right? And so when you came uh in and said, Hey, we're doing this, I'm like, good, because I looked at all your competitors and I just couldn't get there, right? I couldn't get there from a uh how much money they were raising in the valuations, didn't make a lot of sense to me. And that even though they had raised a lot of money, they still really didn't have product market fit. They were working really, really hard to not only get new customers but expand in their existing customers, and then slowly there just wasn't as much differentiation. So I think there is something to um, you know, I always tell people, you know, Facebook wasn't the first. There was MySpace before that, Google was far from the first. There was Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, and so many of them, right? Got it. Um, and so there is the benefit of sitting back and learning and taking a critical eye towards what's going on and really kind of trying to find that vein of gold, and and that your customers are are kind of along for that ride, and they're they really tell you a lot about what's working and what's not working. Um, and I think the other thing for me that stood out was this like your technology worked, right? And I had a call with a group today, and I was just like telling them like, look, this idea of MVP might work for a consumer app, but these are real people building real projects. They they're not looking for another feature, they need something that works and something that works well, and they don't want to hear from day one, oh, it's on the product roadmap, right? They don't want to hear that on day one, maybe day 30, 60, 90. Um, I think then they're thinking about it. I think the other thing you guys did very well is you weren't selling the technology first, you were selling being on the project team first, right? Which is super important for our industry because nobody really cares about buying software. That's not what they're like. I have a here's the jobs to be done. Can you help me? Right? Can you help me? Can you do some of those jobs for me? Which I think your approach has been that way.
SPEAKER_02:Very true, KP, actually. And you know, again, that perspective came from the field. In fact, our first partner, customer that we worked with, right? I say getting a good design partner is one of the very, very important facets, especially in your zero-to-one journey. Because, yeah, as a startup, what we start with, right? We know a piece of technology, but more importantly, we have a set of hypotheses that we want to validate. Now, this validation is impossible without an actual design partner who has these problems. And Answer was exactly that for us, right? Going on one job side to the other, just learning from that. And so you need people with high vision and that agency as well, right? That you know, uh, you need to interact. This is a problem, these guys are capable. Let's work, partner up, and let's solve it in a grand scale. So that that again was super cool. Yes, please.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and I think so, so I think where a lot of people might miss some of these ideas of finding a good design partner, etc. Um, I know for a fact a lot of your design partners early did not spend a dime with you. Correct. You did not charge them a dime. Um yet they were like overly committed to helping you. And I think a lot of founders believe, like, oh, I got a proof of concept, they paid me a little bit of money. And what I tell people is, and this is it's very counterintuitive sometimes, for large companies, money is easy, it's a commodity. I agree. I don't believe time is much harder, right? Them actually committing time, you know. You know, I work with a a lot with Schneider Electric, and that's the biggest thing I've learned for them, you know, working with them for the last almost 20 years, is they can send money. I mean, they're a big company, sending money to do something, that's the easy part. Getting someone's time is really, really hard. And I think what you did well, which is a good example, is whenever I talked to your design partners, they never mentioned track 3D. They said, I love working with NK. NK is fantastic, and you know, like I'm learning from him, he's learning like it was very personal that you were like part of their team.
SPEAKER_02:And while that is like zero scalable in any yeah, it was people should almost like don't do this as absolutely not scalable, right?
SPEAKER_01:But also, it's the unscalable things that I think have longer term impact. And I do think that at the end of the day, they they believed in you and what you were trying to do, and you believed in them, that they believe that they were on the same mission, right? Exactly.
SPEAKER_02:And it was a risky thing to do as well, KP. If you look in hindsight and see, like, you know, we were very purposeful, we didn't go after a lot of customers or partners. We said very, very narrow, let's see five and let's make them extremely, extremely successful. In fact, out of that five, also, if you see, there would have been a weighted average between two or three of them, that we spent disproportionate amount of time because, as for them, even for us, our time and bandwidth was the number one uh resource constraint that we had. We couldn't, even if we wanted to, we couldn't hire like 10 people and put them across saying your product, your customer success, your sales, keep doing this. We could not have done that, and I think it worked to our advantage really, really well. Yeah, we could spend a disproportionate amount of time with them, and we almost had to earn their time, yeah, which is what you were talking about, right? We could earn their time, they could believe in us, trust in us.
SPEAKER_01:No, and I think if people knew the math on where you got to in terms of revenue and the number of salespeople that you had, they'd be shocked, right? And I talk about this all the time about founder-led sales, the first million in recurring revenue, the founder needs to do themselves because you have to figure it out, right? You have to figure it out. And when I see other companies, you know, other startups really trying to scale up sales before like way too early. Um, when the founder hasn't figured it out on their own, it's it's like really telling. I tell people all the time, like, you know, sales is a verb, and not all salespeople get that. They think sales is a title.
SPEAKER_02:Correct. Actually, you're so right. And you know, again, I could get all this firsthand wisdom with you because of our weekly calls and all this, but it's a it's a very important point to double click on KP, actually, right? Because founder, in fact, I I now believe that you know, founder has to be an integral part of the sales process until the 10 to 20 million as well. Because the more you are, the more perspectives you learn, the more relationships you can develop. Because what we understand about our company, no one else has that perspective actually. We know the people, we know the technology, we know the processes. So we can relate to and talk to others, other companies or other design partners in a much more uh I mean, yeah, no one else could actually match to that extent. So I think we should we should use take advantage of this thing, right? Uh it is something to be taken advantage of.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I and I do think there's um something that you probably thought was a disadvantage, but I think it ended up being an advantage. One, you're not from here, two, you're not from construction. So when you were asking questions, like you actually were trying to, you know, there's a lot of founders that start from the industry, and I worked X number of years at Turner in this place and that place, and they act like they're doing customer discovery. But the reality is they think they already know the answer, they think they already know. Like I worked at XYZ for 15 years and I saw this, and and so when they go out and do customer discovery and engage, it's kind of half-hearted.
SPEAKER_02:Leading questions, yeah. People ask leading questions and all that. Yeah, I think you didn't like you didn't know, right?
SPEAKER_01:You're actually asking, right?
SPEAKER_02:I had no clue. I had never been to a construction site in the US, so every question I asked was coming from genuine curiosity, and the fact that I knew nothing about it, I was open. So, best part about the industry was I thought people will be impatient because they don't have time, right? We need to respect that. Yeah, but it was not the case, KB. You know, I was so pleasantly surprised. You asked questions saying I know nothing about this, but I can apply technology to solve the problem, but I I don't even know what the problem is.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. I think it ended up, it's it's ended up being, you know, now you know a lot more, but at the beginning, it I think it became a uh a real advantage. And you know, I always tell people, you know, I was in this business for a long time, and yeah, you know, as a civil engineer, and then left for a little bit and went into telecom, and then in Ended up coming back into the industry. Actually, I got back to the industry by buying a civil engineering firm years ago. Ended up doing some things to it and selling it and making a couple of bucks. But um but the you know, people asked me the difference. I was like, this industry literally has the best people, the best humans on this planet are in this industry. Um and you know, when I went into telecom, there's some real shady people, it's just like making a lot of money, but very shady. But um, I do think when you have a genuine interest, this industry does like to teach. And like so let's shift a little bit from that. And um we're talking a little bit about one of my posts a couple weeks ago about the joy of construction. And you know, my view is some of the technology, et cetera, is is to get away the thing, get get rid of the things that don't bring us joy, right? Um, so that we can focus on the things that do create joy to us. Um, and it's a tough business, right? So there's lots of reasons to be upset, to be mad, to be stressed. Uh, I think we have one of the highest rates of suicide as an industry. How do you how do you think? You know, I was I was telling someone uh we published this like 400-page report on all the construction tech software, right? And I thought about it afterwards. We should have like a joy quotient. How do you think track 3D provides joy to the industry?
SPEAKER_02:No, I I read that post, uh KP. As usual, very thought provoking. But what I thought, in fact, even while starting track 3D, right, our core assumption was this there are certain things that humans are good at, there are certain things designed for machines. So you should actually optimize and automate as many tasks as possible. Let humans do what they excel at. For example, collecting data from the job site or recording your daily progress, quantifying how many people are there, how much work has been done. This is a very menial task, it's repetitive, it's boring, and no one is gonna do a good job of it because of those reasons, right? You you ask people to report manually, they will do it even if you put 10 people on the job only to report your job site. People would do it, but either it will be incomplete, inaccurate, inconsistent, or simply inaccessible. So stakeholders of the project never get the right information, right insights at the right time, not because people mean bad. You are telling that these are some of the best well-intentioned people, just because you know it's very inefficient to do it. So I think you know, when people excel at making logical decisions, having deep relationships, and you know, solving issues just by sitting across the table. Now, if you're just talking about collecting data, hey, this data is not right because you collected it, I collected it, it becomes such a you it takes exactly the joy away out of you know building the right things. So I we believe that you know, especially we are at that age and time where AI has evolved so rapidly. So sensors, both hardware, robotics, cameras have become so so good that you know it's on us to make it simple enough, easy enough to automate automate these things. And I gave you one example from track 3D's perspective, but there's so many other things that you know uh jobs specifically well designed or things that machines can excel. Whereas humans don't like it, they don't find it fun. No one loves creating a 200-page report, right? KP people love to give talk about insights, have those collaborations, and I think uh that was in fact track 3D score hypothesis that got the first validation. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, I think it's I think it's really interesting, you know, because I I do think um, you know, I always say, like at a very young age, as kids, we get enamored around building things, right? Whether it's Legos, whether it's cardboard boxes, whatever it is, right? Whatever we can find, we start stacking them, right? That is and and we have so much fun doing it as children. And then uh we we might even go to school, you know. I I think a lot, a lot of young people um they go into architecture. I'll talk to these kids in high school that want to go into architecture, and you know what they think architecture is is very different than what it actually is. And I think you know, if we can continue to like, you know, bring joy to people in this work, I think instead of them going home and telling people, oh, it's so hard, it's this, and it's you know, I was in a deposition, like all the things that make it negative, that if we can somehow like combat that with providing people tools and experiences that bring joy back to it, much like when we were three years old playing with Legos.
SPEAKER_02:I'll do one more analogy on that, KP. You know, this was when I was in college, again, Indian college basically. We were being taught C, I think so. It was, and I I used to love coding, sitting in front of the computer, doing getting it to do something, architect something was super fun. But then uh our head of department, a CSE, used to ask us to write all the code down, whatever you have written on the system or whatever you want to do, write it down on a pen and paper. And that used to suck the joy out of me, like anything. I was like, I I had to fight with them actually. I was like, you know, programming is meant to be done on a computer. You're writing computer's language so the computer understands it. You're asking it to do a task, you're defeating its purpose by just reporting it on a piece of paper, actually. So I think the same analogy applies over there, right? Building a Lego, super fun. Now ask someone to actually document the process of a Lego basically, which piece went where, when did it come up, or doing all of that? No one would enjoy that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. No, it's funny, like in coding, too. You know, our um a lot of my previous companies, it was always like, well, this guy's really good at writing code, but he's terrible at documenting. This other person, their code is okay, but they're very good at documenting. And it's it was always like, which which software engineer would you rather have? Right? And and generally the right answer is both, but you know, being able to document your work and and all this, it's it's not the fun part of the job. You know, I deal with a lot of engineering firms, and it's like, yeah, you know, I missed that class in college when we filled out our timesheets. Exactly. And it's really like this like that is the worst thing in the world. Like, why do I like no one wants to do that? And it just sucks all the joy out of the work is doing timesheets.
SPEAKER_02:So exactly. And you would have seen this, right, KP. Everyone who works on a job site takes tremendous pride in it. In fact, I would not kid you, but you know, I was driving around with my parents and my kids. Any job site that you know, we or track 3D has been a part of, I'm like super proud to say, you know, hey, we are working on this job site. This is the job site I personally went to. These are the things you want to associate yourself with. No one would ever say this is a project where I wrote the report to or monitored the progress of on a day-to-day basis or check schedule adherence, right? These are things, I mean, again, you don't simply enjoy it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's one of the things I really try to coach like CEOs of these firms and leadership in these firms. Um let everyone take attribution to the project, no matter how big, how small. One, it doesn't cost you anything. And for people to feel like even if all you did was drop off the porta potties at that project, you had a role. So you get to call it your project, right? That's my project. Oh, I worked on that stadium. Like, let people do it, it doesn't cost anything. But sometimes these senior leaders like make junior people feel bad about that, right? Because, well, you're not you're not the engineer of record, you're not the principal artist. This is my project, right? It's like leave it alone. Let's let everybody take credit, let everybody be part of it.
SPEAKER_02:100%. And I see and to tie back to the original thought process of learning from site, right, KP, and you know this, but I think it's a good conversation. Now, what I'm asking all the team members from our side also at Track3D to do is either like you might be a product manager, product lead coming from India. I say, guys, you can't be a product lead until you are on site. So they're doing exactly the same thing I was doing a couple of years back, and I'm continuing doing now. Also, all our customer success people, or even a sales team that we are building right now. I said your number one metric should be visit sites actually. Visit sites, correlate with them, have conversations, learn. Now let's have that compounding effect. Let's make this process more scalable with more people doing it.
SPEAKER_01:So we're gonna wrap up here in a second. So, what do you think the chances are your kids go into the construction business in some form? Actually, they love it.
SPEAKER_02:Very surprisingly, you know, because my daughter, when she was five years old, I was making a pitch actually. So she was my pitch test. Now she knows more about it probably than I do. But but she loves construction and my son loves construction, they love tech. I think so. With what is possible, I think so. Next generation, I'm very positive will like it more. Like, you know, we make bring bring the joy back, as you said, right? KP, bring the joy back in actually constructing things. I I'm very positive on the next generation, uh, especially with these advancements and what is happening. Uh, people will love coming back to the job site more than ever.
SPEAKER_01:All right, well, awesome. It was good catching up with you. Um, congrats on the series A. It's always fun. It's always fun to see our founders graduate to the series A. Um, unfortunately, it means you get less time with me because now you have other people that run all your time.
SPEAKER_02:No, I I moved to the Bay Area because of you, KP. You need to remember that.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. All right, man. It was good talking to you. Great talking to you. Thanks for having me, KP.