Fran Maranchello

Time to start building in public. After 7 years in the AEC industry, first as an architect and then building software for AEC firms, I kept seeing the same pattern. Every BIM manager has a backlog. Revit add-ins their team needs. Autodesk Construction Cloud workflows that should exist. QC checks, sheet tools, model exports, naming convention fixes. The ideas are there. The expertise is there. What’s missing is the path from “we know what we need” to “this works in production.” Today that usually means: A 6-month IT queue. A Dynamo script nobody maintains. A $15–40K custom dev project for one tool. That gap is what I’m building Conduit to close. Conduit lets AEC teams describe the Revit add-in or ACC workflow they need in plain language. Then it generates it, compiles it, versions it, and deploys it to their team with one click. No developer required. The point isn’t AI for the sake of AI. The point is getting production-ready internal software into the hands of the teams who already know exactly what they need. Hours instead of months.

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

Build a life where you're energized in the morning and exhausted at night. Energized in the morning means you're excited about the things you get to work on and the people you get to work on them with. Exhausted at night means you gave your all to those things and people. Your best life is built in that collision.

Your entire life will change when you realize that nobody is thinking about you. I often wonder how many extraordinary people waste their entire lives fearing the judgement of people who were never even thinking about them in the first place. Fearing a spotlight that was never even on. Performing for an audience that was never even there. Because the truth is that you aren't afraid of failure. Not really. You're afraid of other people seeing you fail. You're afraid of what other people will think of you if you fail. But nobody is thinking about you. Everybody is too busy thinking about themselves. So, that thing you've always wanted to do? Go do it.

@coreyganim @matiolmos1 👀

The biggest competitive advantage no one is talking about in AI: Having a "second brain" internal knowledge base containing all your company data. By 2027 every company will have one. They'd be insane not to. Call transcripts. Slack messages. Emails. Meeting notes. SOPs. Everything. This matters because data is the foundation of every AI deployment. The companies that get their context organized will ship AI projects faster than everyone else. I don't think people realize how much of a massive competitive moat this is. There are 2 ways to play this: If you're a business owner: start building your second brain now. Get a Hermes agent and use the built-in LLM-wiki skill. Feed it any source. It tags, organizes, and adds it to your wiki. Within 90 days it's a competitive asset. If you're looking for a startup idea: this is one of the biggest opportunities in the AI age. It's the AI equivalent of selling picks and shovels during the gold rush. You can charge a fortune to organize their data because the ROI is enormous once the project ships. Go build it.

We expanded this idea here: getconduit.us/blog/build-acc…

The ACC workflows that usually deserve software are rarely glamorous. It’s the Friday report someone rebuilds by hand, or the drawing metadata check before publishing. The RFI summary that depends on three exports and one person remembering where the latest file lives. Most teams already know what hurts. The harder part is getting from “we do this manually every week” to something the team can actually trust in production. That means auth, permissions, hosting, testing, deployment, versioning, and maintenance. By the time all of that is scoped, the workflow has usually grown another spreadsheet. The useful first app is usually smaller than people think: - weekly RFI summary - drawing metadata checker - submittal routing rule - report that pulls from ACC and lands in someone’s inbox Small, specific, annoying enough that people actually use it. That’s the kind of workflow we’re building Conduit for. It's not a vibe coding tool, it's a platform that manages all your AEC automations, with versioning, rollouts, deployments, authentication, and hosting, using proven structures that came from 7 years of building custom automations for almost 100 companies.

@jjschnyder @speedrun we're building an AI platform for architecture, engineering, and construction teams to automate and put parts of their work on autopilot without devs/consultants. Just DM'd you

Doing @speedrun was one of the best decisions we ever made The team is awesome and helped us across sales, hiring and more. Very bullish on the program. 007 applications are open right now and the program only got better. You should probably apply :) P.S. Happy to give a referral + possible 10k scout check

@rdominguezibar @speedrun just DM'd you

@rdominguezibar @speedrun AI for architecture, engineering, and construction teams to automate and put parts of their work on autopilot getconduit.us

it's official, I'm a a16z @speedrun scout founders: let me know what you are building + traction (if any) + team I can write checks in 24 hours and help you get into the program 🔥

@hanghuang_ just DM’d! interested in your feedback

YC S26 deadline is in 7 days. We got in with a rough idea. Now InsForge serves 25K+ AI native developers. With AI and InsForge, 7 days is enough time to build something real. DM me. I’ll give you $1K credits, share the application that got us in, and help review yours.

@NVoitenkov @speedrun hey Natan! we're building getconduit.us, an AI software factory for architecture, engineering, and construction. I'm an architect and come from the industry, spent 8 years building software and startups in this space, first-time going full-time on a product-focused one.

It's official - @speedrun 07 applications are open. Yes - as a scout I can write you a cheque within 24h but I wanna do better than that. I am looking for a few early stage founders to mentor. My sweet spot are folks with international background, who come from underprivileged backgrounds, and never had anything handed to them. Comment with a blurb of what you are building and I will DM you my Demo Day pitch recording. Here is a tip I gave folks in the past. Your product and vision will take you from 10-->100 but for the 0-->1 part it's about the TEAM. Read the "Dinner Party Jerk" essay by @andrewchen. That's how u should pitch yourself.

Worrying that your startup will be eaten by the model companies is like worrying that your life will be constrained after you become a movie star. You're far more likely simply to fail.

always on the delusionally optimistic side of life

The goal stays simple: One BIM manager. One conversation. One deployed Revit add-in or cloud ACC app. If your VDC team has a backlog of internal tools, Conduit is open now.

And GPT-5.5 is now fully implemented in Conduit. Smarter agents, with more AEC domain context, for generating Revit add-ins and ACC workflows that are closer to what teams actually need.

Conduit update for the week: We removed the waitlist. You can now sign up, describe the Revit add-in or ACC app your team needs, and start building. 100 credits included. No credit card required.

i agree, filtering noise as a skill is more critical than ever