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Guest Intro - Itzik Malka (4M Analytics) · Wired to Build

0:00
Hey, what's going on everyone? Welcome to Wire to build, a
0:03
data-driven technology focus podcast digging into how
0:06
building owners and operators use technology to manage the
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full life cycle of their projects.
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I'm Nick Caravella, your showrunner and curator, and I'm
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excited that you're joining us today to talk about the people
0:16
that tried to change in our industry.
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You today I'm joined by Christy Hunt.
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How you doing? Hey, Nick, how are you doing?
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Great to be back as. Always.
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Yeah, I know. Can you believe it's August,
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even though it's July here for us?
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Well. Time work, but that never hurt
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anyone. I know, well, we teased it out
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yesterday when we were recording the episode, so everybody knows
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we're we're kind of future forward here.
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But I think the exciting part about the summer is it, you
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know, it's a busy season, but it's also a quiet season.
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Half the roads feels like they're on vacation, other half
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feels like the start of the next mega project.
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Absolutely. There's, you know, you've got
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all the new budget excitement with a new fiscal year and so
0:56
project cycles and, and all that kind of good stuff and the work
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never stops. I think that's the, that's the
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trick, right? There's always work to be done.
1:03
Yeah. And that's, I think the reminder
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is as we're on the highways, heading down to the beach or
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into the mountains or wherever you happen to be.
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Yeah, infrastructure doesn't really get a chance to take a
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summer break, which is kind of what makes today's episode
1:15
perfect. We're going to be going deep,
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literally on the subsurface intelligence to that power is
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our infrastructure. And so today, we're excited to
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dig into the story behind someone who's not just
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rethinking how we build, but how we understand the world beneath
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our projects. That's right.
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Yeah. We're today we're excited to be
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joined by Itzik Malka. He's the Co founder and CEO of
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Four M Analytics, their company that's helping the construction
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world see what's always been invisible, all those underground
1:45
utilities. So say hello, Itzik.
1:48
Thank you, Christy. Thank you, Nick.
1:49
Thanks for having me. Thanks for the opportunity to
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tell you the story for him and myself.
1:54
Happy to be here today. We're happy to have you.
1:57
So it's it's joining us from having started his career in
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civil engineering but quickly saw a systemic problem that was
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too big to ignore. The fact that no one really
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knows what's underground, and that that uncertainty creates
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risks, delays and unnecessary costs across nearly every
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project. He founded 4M Analytics to
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tackle that problem head on, building a global digital map of
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the subsurface. His work is changing how owners,
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contractors and governments think about utility data, not
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just as an afterthought, but as critical infrastructure in
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itself. Under its EX leadership, 4M has
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become a trusted partner of departments of transportation
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and public sector clients around the world, helping them reduce
2:38
utility conflicts, improve safety, and drive accountability
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across massive capital programs. Before we dive in, it's like
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anything I miss in that intro. No, just the fact that we are
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active only in the US and working on every state, 14
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states already been pre mapped but about to be 22, but every
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state is available on demand. So yes the US is the our main
3:03
focus. So that's that's the only.
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Sorry, I misspoke that in one day world domination, but for
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now, US, yeah. Hopefully it's going to be
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global, but I want to put the the things on, you know?
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Oh, totally. No, I appreciate that extra
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little bit of clarity. So let's, let's just jump into
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it. It's like, you know, I think
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during our pre call, it was really interesting to learn
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your, your history and, and what got you fascinated into this,
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this space of infrastructure and it really started back to your
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role in the military. Can you can you share a little
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bit more about that? Yeah, definitely.
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I trained in a special forces to deal with detection and
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clearance of land mines. Ended up taking the military
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expertise and applying it to civil engineering domain, trying
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to help recover post conflict regions from it's called
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humanitarian demining, humanitarian demining.
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And, and, and I tried to do it as a, you know, doing good back
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to humanity and ended up Co founding foreign defense, which
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is today the biggest company in that space in Israel.
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And part of my innovative spirit, I was always trying to
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find better ways to mitigate the risk with less people, with
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less, you know, sending people to the field and more like prime
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movers, you know, automated autonomous excavators, wheel
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loaders, et cetera. And I realize that I'm spending
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time on, you know, solutions not like the the the problem.
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The problem is you don't know where the door was explosive was
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buried and when. And that was the point when I
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kind of realize that there is something there.
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Yeah, and that's something, it's fascinating.
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I'm thinking back to an episode we had with Hannah Mish a couple
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months ago, and she actually talked about finding a super
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nuke on our site here in the States.
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And so it's interesting, you know, you hear about all the
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different burial sites or creatures that may be living
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underground or even a bomb that may be underground that we just
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didn't know about. And I think one of the
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interesting parts of that problem is that we didn't always
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have the method to tracking this information.
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There was a guy at a shovel. He threw something in the
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ground, and then he walked away, and no one really mapped it.
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And so, you know, where was that moment where you realize, you
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know, something was really critically missing from the way
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we manage underground infrastructure?
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And how was it similar to your work in the military, The Israel
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military? Yeah.
5:29
Good. Question back to my story.
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I once I build like my idea was to build a data multi data
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source engine that utilizes legacy sources but mostly
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imagery and try to do superposition with imagery and
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blueprints in order to predict precisely the location of buried
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hazards. And once I did, I got the
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compelling success correlation between the system prediction to
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the actual my location uncovered.
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I said that was a moment to me. I said I'm going to raise money
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to actually build it and I said to my Co founder, you know, I'm
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about to go and build a tech company.
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Said what do we have to do with the tech company?
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We have a bunch of construction guys who knows how to operate a
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really complex environment of reloaders, excavators, crashers,
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fire movers, etcetera. What do we have to do with code
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and software? I said I don't know but we're
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going to figure this out, but I'm going to do it.
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I was trying to get funded. Spoke with every investor but I
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couldn't find any anyone who is willing to give me a dime and
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the reason is because I'm asking money for something that could
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explode and take the entire portfolio with it.
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I went back to the audit room, did what every person do when he
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doesn't know and ask Google what can I do with technology that
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could see is beneath the ground and I found G Mansbach.
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G Mansbach is the godfather of subsurface utility engineering.
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That's the common practice of how you depicting what goes,
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what ones beneath the ground before any construction begins.
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And I was transcripting everything he said.
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And I realized that there is like a really complex process
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of, you know, trying to find like reaching out to the 811
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call before you dig, get the names of owners and then using
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those names to reach out to the owners, get their records, if
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they're willing to share the records with you.
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And then after you have the records to do some kind of a
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manual amungamation of many records manually.
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And then you need to send people to the field with geophysical
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tools like ground penetration radars, magnetic sensors, and
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they're going to find the X&Y. And after that you're going to
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send trucks like vacuum excavation trucks to delegate,
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excavate and find the Z, the depth.
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And then a pre qualified engineer will come and say, I
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think your route, new implementation of the water main
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or you know, telco line, fiber line needs to go here.
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And I was amazed why they do all of that and sending so many
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people to the field many times. And nobody centralized the
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database like Google Maps that could, you know, be available,
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readily available on the click of a button anytime somebody
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wants to see what's below. Like you could see the road, but
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now see the below ground, the physical world below the road.
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And that was our moment to me. I realized I'm going to become,
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I'm going to build the Google Maps for the subsurface.
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That was the. Yeah.
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I love that. Sorry to interrupt, but I love
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that analogy. It's something we actually
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talked about on an earlier episode as well, of the the
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consumer tools and how consumers are using tools and things on
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their phones and those become inspiration.
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Like I do this everyday at home, why can't I have the same thing
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at work? But we we're stuck in this world
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of we've always done it this way.
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And so this is just how it works.
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So how did you take that concept and build it into a company?
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And maybe tell us about that first real world use case, maybe
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your first project you worked on?
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Yeah. Good question going back to my
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journey to the try to get funded for the explosives issue idea.
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Sorry I was getting every possible no you could imagine,
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but the kindest ones gave me kind of explanation of why not
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and I realized there is like a thesis around investments and I
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found somebody told me you should go and read the five T's.
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So what it is said, it's like 5 T's means it teases behind.
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It's like investability thesis it it speaks about like the size
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of the problem you want to address.
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That's the total vessel market, the the first key.
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And then you're talking about, OK, you know, the technology.
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Why do you think you could solve it?
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And then you talk about why you the team and then you're talking
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about why now the timing. And then you're talking about
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show me the traction of somebody who's using it or willing to use
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it. And then show me like how I'm
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going to get 10X on my, you know, investment.
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And, and, and for me, like seeing everything was really
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complaining. I realized that I'm, if I, if I,
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if I need to build a story, it needs to be meeting the
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investment thesis. So I said it's going to be
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Google Maps and it's going to enable us continuity and
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security of critical services that we consume on a daily
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basis. Could be waterfall drinking,
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could be heating, it could be power, it could be Internet that
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we consummate, the broadband that we consume on a daily
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basis. It could be mobility.
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We drive into the office every day and it was resonating with
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my audience. I got funded.
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It was not immediately, but I got 45,000,000 for the idea on a
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basically on a presentation. It wasn't really a presentation,
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but it was like beginning of something, but that was it.
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I got 45,000,000. I used that money to go and find
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the most talented, devoted team I could ever find because I know
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it's very complex because I said it's going to be a software
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play. I'm not going to send anybody to
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the field. And, and, and that was the
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beginning. That was the beginning of the
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story, so. That's that's incredible.
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I really like the five TS too, of just understanding the
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approach and your vision's so clear.
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Like I think anybody who's listening to this episode can
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close your eyes and see what Google Maps of infrastructure
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looks like without having to ask any questions or any clarifying.
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Like it is clear. And that to me, like any
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successful company, that vision being that clear is I'm sure
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helpful to like bringing your team along and helping them
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understand the mission that you're working toward.
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And so I, you know, yeah, I think he talked about it a
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little bit. And what strives you personally
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of the kind of improving people's understanding of
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subsurface conditions and where that started with demining now
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going into the infrastructure and utilities type space, which
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is is really cool. And it's, it's funny when you
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were talking about the story of just how convoluted that process
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is of just having to bring all these different teams out.
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Because it reminds me of a project I was working on where
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we had the drawings of what was underneath the, the slab.
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And I had to got into the argument with the owner.
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And they're like, well, the one line diagrams show everything
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going up and then show everything going over.
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And so I understand what the line anagram said, but I'm
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guarantee you when the subcontractor came out there,
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they ran a diagonal line because it was less material, much
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shorter run than all these other things.
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And so we got into this big argument about poking a hole
12:44
into the slab to figure out where this stuff was and the
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drawings are wrong because, well, that's not what the one
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line diagrams are supposed to do.
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And so there's this aspect of where we have documentation of
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these, the red herrings that tell you the wrong information
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of location and that we now need to go and find all of this
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stuff. So, you know, in your early
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days, I guess, was there anything, you know, as you're
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building the team and as you're starting to build a technology,
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things that you found that were really interesting or surprising
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perhaps, Yeah. What I found interesting is like
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the fact that the people thinks that you know owner's knows
13:23
where facilities are located and the matter of fact that you
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mentioned the records, most of the records that you could get,
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it's going to be like PDF. So it's going to be maybe a GIS
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servers like engines that the people are using, but the data
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that you going to find there, it's not it's not updated.
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And with imagery, you might have some imagery to go backwards,
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but no one is able to take everything together.
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A manga meant into a foundry that displays what's going to be
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the, you know, the substance of what's below and people are not
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willing to share their data because three reasons.
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And and that's something interesting.
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Some of them will tell you it's a matter of privacy security.
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Some of them will talk about competition.
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They don't really know and they don't really want that their
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competitors would know where the net their network is located.
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And lastly, the most common one like the the the fact that 80 I
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think 8090% of the times they don't know where the facilities
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are buried and I think they are too embarrassed to admit.
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So that's interesting fact. And what you call in records,
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I'm calling, you know, maybe depiction of something.
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Somebody told me we have a great records.
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I said, yes, you have a great depiction probably of bad
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records because the records is not it's, it's the it's the,
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it's the phases between what could be designed.
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That's the S design to what you are mentioning as the S built.
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And because there is no system that could connect between the
15:00
two states of design and implementation, you get as build
15:07
as wish or was not as the fact itself.
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So I thought I'm going to build something that could connect
15:13
between those two States and and that's how we started the
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journey of building it so. You know, I love the, I love the
15:22
inside of the, the Google Maps. And I know you mentioned that
15:25
we're just looking at the United States right now, but talk to us
15:28
about the bigger picture. You know, it's as much as we
15:33
like to think it's all about us here in the United States.
15:35
It's really not all about us. How?
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How do you see this evolving out to the broader globe?
15:41
Yeah, definitely. I think to me like the focus in
15:45
the US was to figure out because it's a mental model, you need to
15:50
understand where to start when ways build their map.
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It was based upon other maps. We are starting from fraction of
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data sources that are not considered to be a subsurface
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map. There is no subsurface map.
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We are the 1st 1. So it's a really tough mission,
16:09
but because we came from, you know, because we felt like we
16:14
know that construction using, I don't know, 5 to 10 systems and
16:20
the the Liverpools that they're going to produce is going to be
16:24
pretty much the same everywhere in the, you know, in the world.
16:28
But if we want to prove that we have a really good sandbox to
16:34
start with, it's going to be 50 states.
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And if you could figure out the differences between doing Texas
16:39
to doing California to doing, you know, Illinois to doing
16:42
Colorado, I think it's going to be easier for you to go and do
16:45
it in other countries. We do think to go to help UK.
16:50
The UK has a project called Newell.
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It's a national utility and asset register.
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It's basically 4M made by the government and they got to, you
17:04
know, a certain point that they have, they have capabilities,
17:08
but it's not close to what they're aiming for.
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So they're having like discussions with us.
17:14
It's not functional discussions yet, but they, we, we might
17:18
think about working together. But yes, that's the intent.
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It's just not just the US, but just let's do the 50 states
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first. Let's go deep to each state.
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It's not just mapping those states.
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How can you retain the data and keep it up to date?
17:32
That's that's the second aspect of the challenge.
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It's not building a map, it's to keeping it up to date and ready
17:38
to use and. What are the cool things?
17:41
So what does this unlock, right? We all know there's differences,
17:44
you know, in the geography of the different, you know,
17:48
different states here in in the US, let alone other other areas
17:52
around the globe. What types of things does having
17:55
this subsurface map unlock? Yeah.
17:57
So I always saying like the, you know, we are locking the hidden
18:02
value underground, but think about our data as a crystal ball
18:07
for future development. If you want to build and rebuild
18:11
faster, safer, you know, together you need to understand
18:16
what was beneath the ground. Let me give an example here in
18:19
Austin actually, you know beneath our building, 8th Street
18:26
downtown, there is a project, it's going to be utility
18:30
upgrade, probably water main and it's going to be owned by city
18:34
of Austin. The funding partner will be
18:38
Travis County where I live. They going to have like
18:41
oversight agency agency Texas dot and they're going to they're
18:47
going to try to find one vendor out of 20 vendors like
18:53
engineering companies, the Stantec, the Burns and Mack, the
18:56
HNTB and one of them the a com the day Jacobs, one of them will
19:02
be selected to do the design. They're going to hire 10 to 20
19:07
subcontractors for designation, locating soon investigation, you
19:13
know, coordination aspect all kind.
19:16
And for the construction phase, you need to speak with the
19:20
Granites, the Kiwis, the flow. And eventually one of them will
19:24
be selected to do the construction phase.
19:27
And they're going to have to speak with 30 utility owners
19:31
that running beneath the ground, 30 utility owners in that
19:36
junction. And every one of the 5060
19:40
entities I just mentioned and probably potentially hundreds of
19:44
stakeholders will have to have some sort of truth of what 1's
19:48
been beneath the ground. No one has any clue.
19:51
And every one of them has digital systems like the Bentley
19:55
with, you know, products like the Micro Station, I twins open
19:59
Roads, etcetera, the Autodesk with Autodesk Revit, AutoCAD,
20:03
the Esri and Trimbel, etcetera. But everything is siloed.
20:08
They're walking, but they're not coordinated with with each other
20:13
because there is no language and channel to speak with each
20:18
other. I think that's, that's our
20:21
vision, that's our mission to enable everyone to build Better
20:25
Together. And that's where we come to play
20:28
and, and, and, and enabling them to be on time and eventually the
20:32
public get the value of being less disrupted.
20:36
So no accidents, no dysfunctions, no loss of
20:40
revenues, many values that we could unlock by, you know,
20:44
building that nap. I think this is it's really cool
20:49
because it is the infrastructure, especially as it
20:51
starts to obtain it like we're, you know, we talk about like
20:54
Stargate as an infrastructure player, which is a United States
20:57
play of building data center infrastructure to power AI for
21:01
the United States. And this is cross states, which
21:04
means it does have multiple teens and multiple stakeholders
21:08
involved. I think where this might be a
21:11
little bit of an interesting dilemma is I don't I don't think
21:15
anybody is in disagreement about having a single source of truth
21:19
about for information and to reference.
21:21
But then as it ties to the the infrastructure and the backbone
21:26
of nations and what how is it to juggle the like ethics and
21:30
responsibility of making underground information
21:33
universally accessible? Yeah.
21:35
That's a good question. When I started the the company,
21:38
when I realized what we're about to build, I wanted to work with
21:42
the most experts for people that actually did it and be and be
21:46
part of the ecosystem that we have now.
21:48
So I reached out to Jim and Spark, the same guy, and tried
21:53
to convince him to work with me. And it was very tough to
21:57
convince, but eventually he agreed in one condition.
22:01
He said promise to not over promise to customers.
22:06
I said got it 100 percent, 100%. I would never over promise to
22:11
customers. Said no, he just did.
22:13
There is no 100%. He just did.
22:17
Yeah. And then after working with Jim,
22:20
he came as a gatekeeper at the beginning.
22:22
I think after two years, he saw the persistency and consistency
22:28
and like the, everything that we did.
22:31
And he, I think he got convinced that we, we are getting there.
22:35
And, and I started by saying, because you're talking about
22:38
like trust and you're talking about reliability.
22:41
And I started by saying, I'm not going to talk about accuracy.
22:44
I'm going to talk about the value, the outcomes.
22:47
And I'm going to talk about completeness.
22:50
I'm, I'm going to talk about comprehensiveness.
22:52
I'm going to, I'm going to use the, the, the theme good enough.
22:56
And when I said good enough, he came to me said there is no good
22:59
enough. You're talking about lives of
23:01
people. You're talking about like,
23:04
potential accidents and threats. And no, I said, yeah, but how
23:08
can I talk about accuracy without substance?
23:11
There's no ground that I could use to argue about accuracy.
23:15
Look about, you know, look on, on like the industries, I would
23:19
say outside that becoming very isolated because they're always
23:23
arguing about accuracy without the substance.
23:25
And eventually they got partially adopted by the dots,
23:30
by the public sector, by owners and, and, and instead of using
23:33
it because it's efficient and, and, and much more safe, they
23:39
are not using it because we argue about accuracy.
23:41
So that was a really, really good decision that we took to
23:45
start with good enough. And now that the data become
23:47
very, very comprehensive, I would say even accurate, I'm not
23:53
using accuracy yet. And I don't think I'm about to,
23:56
I'm, I'm saying like the data is good enough for digging
23:59
purposes. I'm using for the use case, the
24:01
outcome. And I'm, I'm not arguing with
24:04
people about, you know, how accurate it is and how trusted
24:07
it is. You just need to use it.
24:09
And, and, and our value today is giving you the data.
24:13
I'm not even saying reliable data.
24:15
You get to decide why, because I'm giving you it within an
24:18
environment with image science that you could use to trust and
24:24
verify the data. And and, and I think that's
24:26
that's that's that's how we get into trust by our customers and
24:30
users. I think you really captured like
24:32
one of the biggest like fears or blockers to innovation is the
24:36
even the because the better way isn't perfect.
24:40
We're going to just keep doing it the old fashioned way as
24:43
opposed to maybe improving the way we do things.
24:46
And I, I like the good enough mindset because it is like
24:49
before forum, for example, I guess you just didn't know or
24:54
you were going off of documentation drawings and they
24:56
may not be accurate. And so you just like you needed
24:59
the seven teams to come out and kick dirt around and dig holes
25:03
and do all the different things that they need to do versus
25:06
having some additional information, some additional
25:08
validation to say, you know what, we think there's something
25:12
and therefore we can act and make it better decisions and use
25:16
that information to be better prepared.
25:18
And I feel like this is, you know, in my years of being in
25:21
technology and in construction, and I've, I've noticed this
25:25
trend where because we're afraid to change our processes to adopt
25:31
to a new mindset, we'd rather do things the the old fashioned
25:35
way. And perhaps this is a a good CI
25:38
into the next question of, you know, what's been surprising
25:41
about building a tech forward team in such a legacy heavy
25:45
industry? And have you found early
25:46
adopters or have you found people so you know who really
25:50
seen the light after starting to work with you?
25:52
Yeah. That's, that's a good question
25:54
because construction industry is driven by relationships and it's
26:00
all about people. I know it's all about people
26:01
everywhere, but here it's really unique because I think the
26:07
currency is the trust. But how can you measure trust?
26:11
It's not empirical. And somebody, a customer told
26:14
me, yes, you have ability to measure trust by speed, which
26:19
you could get used to make a decision.
26:22
And I said, oh, speed. So now I'm coming to play
26:26
because I'm giving you data, good enough data.
26:28
But early on when data does not exist, people used to bid on a
26:34
project without knowing the level of complexity they're
26:37
going to have to deal with once they're going to be selected.
26:40
Now I'm giving them data to really assess, to really
26:44
understand the level. Like somebody told me, it's the
26:47
spicy meter. My software is a spicy meter to
26:51
the level of complexity they're going to have to deal with and
26:54
it changes everything to them because at the end of the day,
26:57
it's a it's a project market fit.
27:00
If I'm a construction company and I'm and I'm again getting
27:03
selected to very complex environment, I will be ended up
27:08
risking the company and you know, get into disputes,
27:11
etcetera. And I don't want to get there.
27:14
How I'm not going to get there. I need to get access to the data
27:19
and that's what we did. And and and we drive in like
27:21
conversations early on and also think about construction as like
27:26
a monster that needs to be fed always.
27:29
So you want to keep it, you know, leash and and and you want
27:34
to unleash it only when you're ready to execute.
27:37
If you are not ready to execute any room, you strike something
27:40
and everybody stopped. Everybody is now waiting to
27:44
something to happen. You're losing your bleeding
27:47
money every day. And so we, we are here to help
27:52
prevent those, you know, instances in construction.
27:56
And I think that's the, that's, that's, that's part of it.
27:58
I'm I'm telling we selling currency of trust by the speed
28:02
which we give you to make a decision early on.
28:05
Well, I love that trust, Trust over time that there's a,
28:08
there's a formula that we could probably come up with.
28:10
We could probably make something up there, you know, talking
28:14
about the people, you know, we, we talked about the three legs
28:16
of the stool. People, process, technology,
28:19
They're all important. They all have a rule to pay play
28:21
and they all have to be balanced.
28:23
Can you tell us an example or more, more than one example of
28:27
the type of alignment that we're talking about here across teams
28:32
because of that data and because they have better data from
28:35
forum, Yeah. As I told you before, the the
28:39
system today, the ecosystem today is like submitting in the
28:42
US, you can dig without getting a digging permit.
28:46
So anytime somebody wants to break a ground and it's to call
28:48
811, it's a good system. You have to do it.
28:51
They're going to give you a list of names, but they're going to
28:53
notify the owners that's going to probably potentially
28:58
intersect with that corridor. They're going to send out their
29:01
vendors that that's the locating companies and they're going to
29:06
mark and flag. You probably have seen many
29:08
times the spray markings, the, you know, the marking the, the
29:12
market pedestals and, and, and posts, sorry.
29:15
And eventually you're going to start coordination with owners
29:19
and eventually you're going to have some instances that they're
29:22
going to apply to SU subset to data engineering.
29:25
And every phase like submitting ticket used to take three days
29:29
SLA because 55% of the time doesn't get located on time
29:33
because there is no workforce to send out.
29:35
It become two weeks to four weeks and then coordination one
29:40
month to three months if somebody is willing to share
29:42
data with you. And then few months to six
29:44
months and more to do the investigation with Sue and other
29:48
designation like practices. And eventually at the end of the
29:52
day two months ago, Lexington misery when the system worked as
29:58
intended and a locator missed a section of a gas, a gas pipeline
30:06
that got to a devastating event of an explosion of three houses
30:11
and a tragic death of a seven years old kid.
30:16
Because the system today is slow and not safe enough.
30:21
And we want to become second tier of validation.
30:25
I'm coming from damage prevention in landmine
30:28
clearance, detection and clearance.
30:30
And there is a saying there that the applicable here you have
30:34
when you manage your risk, you have to do every possible effort
30:38
to remain with reasonable and tolerable risk.
30:42
But you're going to remain with a risk.
30:43
And if there is a system made by a company that could provide a
30:48
second tier of validation, you have to go and get it.
30:53
You're obligated to do so for the public safety.
30:56
And I hope to be supplemented to those systems.
31:00
I'm not here to replace anybody. I'm here to support everyone,
31:04
make them much more productive, you know, with more
31:09
coordination, collaboration, simulation, and eventually to
31:13
often build faster together. That's that's, you know, that's
31:16
a thing. That's our mission.
31:18
Yeah. I I.
31:19
Think that's that's for nail on the head and and perfect
31:22
opportunity kind of start to wrap this portion of the the
31:25
episode on is that idea of supplementing the technology.
31:30
And we're in a world today where I think like, you know, a second
31:34
goes by and new tech startup is born.
31:37
But what's really neat is that there's so many different people
31:40
with so many different backgrounds and so much
31:42
different expertise. That is OK for us to have many
31:45
tools and have the right tools and the right people's hands.
31:49
And then really start to talk about the, the ecosystem
31:51
strategy where these tools actually do work together.
31:55
And that's in many cases, you know, where a lot of the
31:57
friction and construction happens is a system A is not
32:00
talking to system B. So now there's a manual entry
32:03
job or someone has to go and talk to 15 different people to
32:08
get all 15 different systems aligned.
32:10
Really working towards a connected and integrated
32:13
information strategy that helps everybody work together better.
32:17
It is, I think philosophically the right approach and such a
32:21
fascinating thing to hear how you know where Esri is like
32:25
looking maybe perhaps above the ground in your in your
32:27
underground, how those two systems could really be working
32:30
together to paint us a full picture of how we should be
32:32
approaching builds. And so we always like to kind of
32:35
close this intro episode with one question is, you know, what
32:40
does Wire to Build mean to you? And what should our audience be
32:44
thinking about as we get toward our next episode, where we're
32:48
going to talk a lot more about Forum and the value your team
32:51
creates? Now I see.
32:52
I thought about it and I think to me like wire to build
32:57
correlates with the ability to, you know, build together because
33:01
eventually construction is fragmented with many
33:06
stakeholders and many entities, many workflows, most of them are
33:12
not digital and and siloed. So I want to be kind of
33:21
something that everybody uses when they want to know what's
33:25
below that going to disrupt their construction and
33:28
eventually get them to losses and disputes.
33:33
So I think wire built to so I think why to build to me is the
33:40
ability to find the the thick that helps people to be walking
33:48
and aligned and united under the same goal, provide the public
33:56
the service that we promise. And and to me, I think that
33:59
wiring that goes around everybody is the is the language
34:05
that we could build together to, you know, eventually build
34:08
faster and build a greater because it's eventually at the
34:13
end of the day it's a capacity issue.
34:16
And I think it's relates to that the wire to build serves the
34:20
capacity challenge that we have. And I'm with you, it is the, how
34:24
do we, how do we streamline like everything and make sure
34:27
everybody's working together as opposed to against each other.
34:31
And in two weeks, we're going to dig into what structured utility
34:35
data can look like and the massive impact it has on safety,
34:39
schedule, cost, and all the things we know our owners care
34:42
about on our projects. And so if today's conversation
34:45
sparked something for you, make sure you share it with a friend,
34:48
a colleague, or part of your team, you know, have that
34:50
conversation. Feel free to tag us and include
34:53
us in it. And make sure to follow Wire to
34:55
build wherever you get your podcasts.
34:57
And if you haven't yet, sign up to our newsletter for more
34:59
insights on how data, tech and people are shaping the future of
35:02
construction. I want to thank you for joining
35:04
us today. It's sick.
35:05
It's great getting to learn about you and excited to kind of
35:08
have our next conversation here where we're going to start to
35:11
dig into the topic. Thank you.
35:14
Great being here.