HC-Build

@hthieblot lol

I'm investing up to 250k first checks in teams building: - robotics, drones, space - crypto - applied ai/ml - ar/vr - manufacturing, logistics DMs always open. Tell me what you're building!

In 1999, Viega started pushing US code bodies to approve copper press fittings. New York City said no. For eleven years, the largest commercial construction market in the country refused to let contractors use a faster, fire-free, proven connection method. The reason wasn’t safety data. NYC was still running its 1968 plumbing code. The rulebook predated the personal computer. NYC finally approved ProPress in 2010. Jobs went quicker. Commercial mechanical contractors got a new tool. The trade did not die. The plumbers who learned to press are still working. The ones who refused on principle mostly retired into the same world they tried to freeze. Now we’re standing in front of the same door. Critical infrastructure is booming. Data centers, hospitals, hyperscale jobs stacking up faster than the trades can staff them. PMs are holding a million bits of project data per project while running three jobs. That’s where the margin bleeds out. The tool that solves this is intelligence. AI and code built with MEP at the front of mind. A cognitive assistant that learns the contract, tracks every layer of the work, and answers the only question that matters: will we finish on time and on budget. Not in 2030. Now. The contractors who adapt will own the next decade. The ones who don’t will watch it happen. Lead and oakum joints. You don’t see those anymore. The plumbers are still here. The materials, the tooling, and the techniques evolve. That’s the only way to win. You’ve seen this movie before. You know how it ends. contractormag.com/piping/article…

@ericbahn Hedonic adaption, in the trades we call it lifestyle creep.

Not surprised that so man y $500,000+ earners are living paycheck to paycheck. Hedonic adaption is human nature.

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” — Maya Angelou Keep your head up It gets better

Worth it youtu.be/Yy659EQA2k4?si…

Just wrapped a meeting with two new partners. This is a huge moment for Harlan Charles. The trades have always been gated by luck. Did you get the right journeyman. Did you have the recall. Did you have the soft skills to survive the rough moment before the real teaching started. Talented people wash out every year, not because they couldn’t do the work, but because the knowledge transfer was arbitrary. That’s ending. Shops stop living and dying by their two best guys. The knowledge stops walking off the jobsite at 3pm. Top performers stay top performers. Everyone else gets access to what used to be locked behind a decade of being in the right trucks, the right Forman or Journeyman, with the right people. Who you learn from is everything. MEP stops fighting to stay ahead of the work. And the tradesperson who has been carrying tomorrow’s problem home in their head every night for twenty years finally gets to put it down when they walk through the door. That bandwidth belongs to their family. Not the job. MEP and the trades , the future is what we make of it. Don’t fear the change. Build it

VC: we like your business Founder: cool :) VC: tell us more, like everything, Founder: ok VC: we like your business but if you did this we would like it more. Founder: hmmm, okay VC: click this link and pay $1500 and we will get back to you. Also 2400 a year and you can have access to our special access training, but don’t read the TOS. Seriously don’t read it. Founder: :( VC: … Founders don’t become the ICP There will always be viable a market for Hope solve a problem Build Sell Solve Build Sell solve Build sell

@RKRigney @speedrun Claude code for active construction on large scale long duration critical infrastructure builds. Not precon, not estimation active construction intelligence. We solved this.

If you're interested in @speedrun and want to speak with a partner at the firm, I'm opening up my calendar tomorrow. Hit me in the replies with a blurb about what you're working on and I'll DM the calendly link to book a slot.

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Meta's AI agents review 15% of their code autonomously. That's not futurism. That's Tuesday. MEP contractors are still managing million-piece scopes with folders named FINAL_.pdf FINAL_v3_.pdf ACTUALLY_FINAL_rev3.pdf Text chains that look like a group therapy session for confused PMs. We're building the future of MEP intelligence — because the intelligence gap between what's possible and what's happening in the field is costing real money on real jobs. All this goes away when you resolve the core issue. The symptoms disappear when the root cause is refactored and improved. The firms that bridge this gap earliest will compete in a different category. lets build it

@Meta_Engineers When innovation starts in the field the likelihood of it becoming a tool that actually gets used in the field goes up. The gap between open source and field adoption closes faster when the people building it have stood where the people using it stand.

We're open-sourcing BOxCrete, a new AI model for the construction industry. Using Bayesian optimization, BOxCrete helps producers rapidly design concrete mixes with domestic materials, bypassing months of lab work. The results from our data center build in Rosemount, MN: 🚀 43% faster time to full structural strength 🛠️ 10% reduction in cracking risk 🇺🇸 100% domestic material usage We are open-sourcing the model and the foundational data to empower producers everywhere. Check out the full technical deep dive on our Engineering blog: go.meta.me/90538a

The violence is f'd up. That should never happen and we need to move away from that mentality. What you wrote about democratization is worth the honest conversation. The word lands differently depending on which side of the cap table you are standing on. What does it actually mean when the infrastructure to participate costs more than most organizations can afford. That gap is the real question.

I wrote this early this morning and I wasn't sure if I would actually publish it, but here it is: blog.samaltman.com/2279512

Words land differently depending on where you're standing. Democratization sounds like an open door from the top. From outside the cap table it looks like a word on a price tag. What does democratization of AI actually mean when the cost of participation is the question nobody is answering.

🔥 Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman's home • Suspect arrested at OpenAI HQ threatening to burn it down • Attack followed New Yorker profile on Altman's "will to power" Altman: "I have underestimated the power of words" #AI #OpenAI #SamAltman

Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house last night. His family was inside. That is wrong and nothing justifies it. He wrote something afterward worth sitting with. “AI has to be democratized. Control of the future belongs to all people.” To someone outside the tech industry that sounds appealing. Welcoming even. It sounds like the door is open. So what does it actually mean? blog.samaltman.com

I was a construction PM making $125K a year. No CS degree. No tech background. No funding. I built TxtCart nights and weekends for 4 years before I went all-in. 7pm to 11pm, every night, while managing construction sites during the day. There was no "aha moment." No investor who believed in me. No Y Combinator acceptance letter. Just a stubborn belief that eCommerce brands were leaving money on the table with bad SMS marketing. 6 years later, TxtCart has processed over 100 million SMS messages and crossed $4.3M ARR. I'm 29 years old. No code was written by me. I hired good engineers. I obsessed over the product and the customers. The construction background taught me more about project management and execution than any MBA would have. If you're building something while holding down a job, you're not "not ready." You're compounding. Keep going.

@JamesKaen @levie The teams building this relationship with AI earliest will have a competitive advantage the market can't replicate. Because their system will know things about how they work that no competitor's ever will.

Living this in construction right now. We automated tenant communications and project tracking with AI; didn't hire fewer people. Instead we started running digital twins, factory production analytics, and deal simulations we never would have attempted before. The scope didn't shrink. It exploded. And the builders who think AI means "same work, fewer bodies" are going to get lapped by the ones who realize it means "10x the ambition, same team.

The thing that most people miss initially with agents is that the scope of what we will produce will go up commensurate with what the tools can now automate, which basically means we’ll working the same or even more. Everyone thinks that we will use AI to do what we already do but cheaper and faster, which would lead to fewer people or getting more time back. In fact it will just mean we’re doing more things. Once we figured out that we can automate a particular task, you then expand the size of work to do many more of those or other tasks in a project. The result is that you’re actually combining many other previously hard to combine tasks into a single workflow, causing even more work. The software project scope now multiplies because you know you can build far more. The customer insights project now balloons because you know you can reasonably aggregate far more data. The marketing campaign has even more creative production because it’s cheaper and easier. This is going to happen in almost every field of work.

Something that surprised us. The real problems showed up in casual conversations weeks or months before they made it to any schedule or dispatch. Not the obvious stuff like missed deliveries or things that can be visually detected. Where does drift start, what does it look like, how do you convey that to a section of code and then cap it in a workflow? Cool problems to solve and cool tech pictured.

The U.S. construction industry builds $2.1 trillion in projects each year, but many face delays. A team at Virginia Tech is working on a solution: using robots, drones, & AI-powered technology to monitor construction sites & keep projects on track. 🔗: go.vt.edu/um2sT

Phoenix tech week kicked off last night with a great event. @PHX_FWD events all week, check it out!!

We've signed an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, coming online starting in 2027, to train and serve frontier Claude models.