Darren Bechtel, Brick & Mortar Ventures Founder on Construction Tech

Grace Gong (0:01)

We are live. Hi, Darren. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

Darren Bechtel (0:04)

Good morning.

Grace Gong (0:06)

I'm so excited to dive into everything, Constructing Tech and Data Center. But before that, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor.

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Okay. I want to start with your journey into Brick & Mortar Ventures. Obviously, your family has been in construction tech and you have been doing very successfully in this space. Maybe we could start from how you started Brick & Mortar Ventures 11 years ago and we can dive into everything.

Darren Bechtel (1:05)

Yeah.

Grace Gong (1:05)

Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Bechtel (1:06)

Happy to. It is pretty wild that we're now entering our 12th year. I don't know where time flies, but I guess we're some of the old dogs now. Oh, geez. Yeah, exactly.

We launched Brick & Mortar back in 2015 At that point in time, there had not yet been a single unicorn valuation, let alone exit of a construction tech startup.

To say that there were some skeptics would be an understatement. That I think nowadays, it's fairly en vogue, or at least data suggests that being a specialist, either stage preference or technology or sector, seems to be a winning strategy, unless you're trying to become one of the juggernaut, generalist platforms. There's a tendency to see emerging managers also outperform some of their peers from a benchmark standpoint, but that specificity launching in an unproven category, there were people far smarter than us saying, maybe there's a reason why nobody's had a construction tech firm, construction tech VC. But to us, when we were launching, that seemed like fairly short-sighted, saying, the industry has never really seriously innovated or embraced technology, it's never going to happen. I don't think that's fair to all of the men and women and hard-working folks across the construction value chain. We rewind time back to the mid-20 teens, it was just then that you're starting to see the real ubiquity of mobile computing devices, smartphones, connectivity. I think many people forget that with construction, especially mega project scale construction, you are assembling a temporary team, like a mashup of people that usually have never done a job all together before, usually involving a bunch of different stakeholders, subcontractors or specialists for different trades. And so it's like standing up a scrimmage game, but in some cases with tens of thousands of people all doing incredibly complex work. And on the extreme end of the spectrum of complexity, some of the world's most complex projects, everybody's new. They're all working together with a common goal. And there's limited or in some cases no infrastructure. And so things we take for granted, especially in urban centers around like reliable connection to data, you can't take for granted on a construction job site.

A good anecdote would just be if you're putting the first cell tower in a developing country, like you don't have cellular connectivity. Now with satellite-based communications being accessible to the masses, it's really exciting that you can really start to envision a much more productive and safe and efficient future for these complex jobs scattered all around the world because the people delivering those projects can standardize on new workflows that they can rely upon regardless where in the world they are. It's still not 100% game day ready. But in the early 2010s, just being able to have reliable Wi-Fi on a job site was extremely difficult and I would say impossible without having to really invest a ton of energy just setting up that temporary infrastructure. In the case of construction, if it's a horizontal project, if it takes you a week to rig everything up so that you can start using some of these IoT devices but by the time it's ready to go, your crew is already a mile down. You've got this constant leapfrogging trying to keep up with the work face. So it was a uniquely challenging environment. One that I was definitely very familiar with having been born into the world of engineering and construction.

You hinted at it but our family business, Bechtel, is in its 128th year of operations, currently run by my brother Brendan. Yeah, our first job site experience was when I was six months old and he was a year and a half old and we moved into a trailer in the jungles of Borneo when my dad was doing project management work for the business. So while I don't recall a whole lot of Indonesia being handbag size, we did work summers throughout school. I worked as an architect after school for a few years doing construction administration. So I saw firsthand the exciting work that the construction industry and the architecture and engineering verticals would be designing and building, and how productive that industry really was, but how far behind the industry was from really having modern day tools, definitely digital tools, communication tools accessible to it, to really bring about a whole another era of productivity and transparency into the workflow. So I was a believer having been a user, also being born and raised in Silicon Valley, and having a front row seat to this almost science fiction technology that was being developed. And so I was definitely a bit of an oddball that I was a citizen of a bunch of these different populations, the construction world, the design world, the venture world, and the technology world. But I'm glad we did.