Building Beautiful Homes with Robots: The Future of Construction (Salar al Khafaji, CEO & Founder of Monumental)

We're trying to make construction faster, more affordable, and more beautiful. We want to be able to build a beautiful house within a day in the future, which is not something we can do today, just to be clear, right? But that's the vision we're striving for. How did you land on deciding to take on construction, which is not an industry that has been super friendly to venture capital? I think when you're in software, everything seems to be about technology, right? And then when you zoom out and think about what is the economy made of, you literally think about what is GDP made of. It's actually like such a tiny part of it. Energy is obviously really big. Construction infrastructure is really big. Education is really big. When you get a subcontracting job? What robots are coming into the process? What does that process look like? We would actually deploy today four or eight systems at the same time. When I say system, it's actually like three robots working together. One brings the bricks, one brings the mortar, and then the one that actually does the bricklaying. But we still need operators today for a bunch of things. Instead of having to get 100% perfection with technology, we're just already delivering value and just increasing automation along the way. Hey, I'm Mario. And this is The Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Each week, I sit down with the founders, investors, and visionaries who are living in the future to help you see what's coming next and understand it more clearly. Today, I'm speaking with Salar Al-Khafaji, the CEO and founder of Monumental. Monumental builds robots to assemble buildings, starting with its autonomous bricklaying system. Salar's goal is to shake the construction industry out of its decades-long stagnation and empower humankind to create beautiful buildings faster and more efficiently. In our conversation, we explore why Europe's severe bricklaying shortage has created high wages for skilled masons, how the pursuit of beautiful architecture disappeared after World War II, why Salar chose to build his robotics company in Amsterdam rather than Silicon Valley, and how Palantir's cult-like culture taught him that getting access to interesting problems is a privilege worth fighting for. I walked away from this conversation with lessons on picking truly ambitious problems, why the best robotics companies solve specific issues rather than building general purpose machines, and how to balance structure with productive chaos as you scale. If you enjoy today's episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing and joining us for the incredible conversations we have coming up. Now, here's my conversation with Salar.

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I'm so glad to have you on the podcast. I feel like a lot of times I have folks on who I'm meeting for the first time, but you and I, Salar, know each other quite well. Dare I say we are even friends. Yeah, absolutely. I'm so happy to be able to do this with you. Amazing. Well, I've looked forward to it a lot because I think you're building one of the most interesting companies. in Europe and beyond. And today we'll talk a lot about Monumental, your company, building in Europe, and the pursuit of beauty that you are undertaking with your business. Maybe to start, you can tell us a little bit about what Monumental is and what you're trying to do. Yeah, so what we're trying to do with Monumental is we're trying to make construction faster. more affordable, and more beautiful, right? And we're doing it by making autonomous construction robots. That's kind of like the approach to get there. So the long-term vision, the kind of like very, you know, one sentence pitch for the company is we want to be able to like build a beautiful house within a day in the future, which is, you know, not something we can do today, just to be clear, right? But that's the vision we're striving for. Today, we're focusing on bricklaying. So we picked one trade. that it's like a big deal in Europe, at least, where the biggest shortages out of all types of work in Europe are actually bricklayers. So we picked that one, and that's what we're automating today. I remember the first time someone told me about your company, I think it was Wotar from the Hummingbird team sort of mentioned it. He was like, exceptional founder, but also this fascinating idea. And then a few months later, I got to see some of the first videos of these robots in action. And it is sort of like a pretty mesmerizing and magical experience to see. a robot build a wall let alone a house uh and so yeah excited to go into all those things but i'd love to maybe even start a little bit earlier in your journey uh because you had a successful company that you sold to palantir and then you decided to sort of take some time and think through like what your next big mission was going to be and there's a lot about that sort of act that i think is interesting to founders because i think a lot of people find themselves in this position of wanting to build something and wanting to make sure it's worth their while so yeah maybe we can talk about that a little bit how did you after selling your business land on

deciding to take on construction which is not a not an industry that uh has been super friendly to venture capital historically i decided to take like a year year and a half off travel uh uh take it a bit easy obviously also right like after starting you know having a company and then like uh uh being at palantir But I also decided that that period would also be kind of like a self-funded MBA. That's kind of how I sold it to myself. And that I would also use it to like, not just, you know, vacation all around the world, but like go into a few topics that I was interested in. I think the way I approached it was I started thinking about two different like directions. One is big industries. So I wanted to work on something big, like that was something meaningful. And I literally started looking at like, I think when you're in software, everything seems to be about technology, right? You only think about technology, you only think about like SaaS or whatever. And then when you zoom out and think about like, what is the economy made of? Like you literally think about like, what is GDP made of? Yes. It's actually like such a tiny part of it, right? And then you see like, you know, energy is obviously really big, right? Like construction infrastructure is really big. Education is really big. Healthcare is like, these are like the actual like kind of like double digit percentage chunks of like, and also the ones that I'd argue need the most attention right now, right? Like in our world that need more like productivity growth. So that was like one. lens which was just like learn more about these industries why is technology not working there like why you know why are different companies why it's hard to start a company in those industries and then the other one was the other approach was just try to learn more about like different technologies, different like things that were happening, right? Like when you're building a startup or when you're at a company, you know, at a big tech company, you know, crypto was a big thing back then. And I was like, I knew some things about it. I was like, I'd like to learn more about it. I was like deeply into it, but it was just something I wanted to like learn a bit more about. Same about biotech. I had like a couple of friends who were like really getting into, like from software going, getting into biotech. And I was like, maybe, you know, at least I want to learn a bit more about it.

And then third one, which is obviously like very relevant for what I ended up doing was I knew some things about like machine learning from a data science perspective, which is very different from like autonomy, like what Waymo is doing. So I was like, I need to learn more about that. Like that was really interesting to me. And so I think there was like, those were like the two kind of like axes that I was like exploring. This is maybe too practical a question, but I think there are a lot of would-be entrepreneurs that sort of find themselves in this. interim period. And so maybe I'm being a little practical here, but like, how did you tangibly sort of structure your time? Did you sort of think of it like chapters where you're like, okay, now for this month, I'm going to, you know, really go down the biotech rabbit hole and try and play with ideas as part of that? Or was it more just like following your curiosity from, you know, more moment to moment or day to day? I would argue it was not super structured, but I think I just like, I'm pretty good at going deep into like topics. So once you pick up like two books, you're just going to read the book. I'm not going to like... go through like eight books at the same time. So you just like pick up two books. I tried to like get intros through people I knew, like founders or like people. So I wouldn't just like get passive information, but I would like, I tried to help, like not really consult, but like try to help a few founders on the side, just see if I could just like to get some practical experience, like talk to people that were in the industry in some cases. So I think it was like a mix of those things. And then on a very practical level, I think I was just like trying to do things like where every day I was like spending maybe. two, three hours on like, you know, let's call it like, you know, learning stuff and then maybe taking it easy the rest of the day. And then if it like rabbit hole into like spending the whole day into the topic, that was also fine. Was it difficult to like manage your mindset during that or was it enough sort of break time that you were sort of also, you know, you just come off of selling silk that you were sort of like, it's okay for me to take it easy. Or did you feel like some sort of pressure to find this next thing? Like how, you know, I imagine it's difficult to be in that position of.

uncertainty for a long period of time. Yeah, so a friend of mine actually told me something that was really good, which was when I started this trip or around the time I left Palantir, which was, in his view, the biggest mistake that founders would make when they were basically in that position is to basically start doing this and then three months later get bored. And then somewhere between three and six months, basically pick whatever the best idea is at that point in their mind and start that company. and that was in his view like a huge mistake because in general you basically are still in most cases you probably will end up with a mediocrity right and now you're stuck with it for like five to ten years again especially if you're like building out a team raising money doing that stuff so his advice was basically if you find something you're excited about in like three to six months or you find yourself being bored try to like hold on for like at least another half year and see if you're still excited about it because that's like such a worthwhile investment I think most founders would probably like find themselves getting bored or like wanting to start, you know, going back into like kind of action mode again. I did feel that it's not like pressure, but you do get like the feeling like getting excited to like start a company again. Yes. I think, you know, there's, I've heard some investors talk about. you know, the antsiness you can get when maybe you haven't done a deal for a while and you have this you need to just wait for great. And I think that same sort of principle, although it's a bit of a bumper sticker, I think really applies to that period of time because there are so many ideas that you could possibly come up with. And there's this need to resolve the uncertainty in some respect that you just sort of jump at something. But you, I think, especially held out for something that was like. extremely high ambition, right? Which is building houses with robots and like revitalizing an industry that had really hit a crazy amount of stagnation. Actually, maybe we can talk about that next. Like when was it that you started to realize the scale of the problem in construction specifically and start to think about like, you know, actually there's something to be done here that could be turned into a business. So I think this the.

problem i've been obsessed about for a long time like before this whole like before starting to think about like what would my next company be i think it was just like it felt just like how do you even start thinking about it so i have like different ways to think about this but the the visceral way is just like you walk around like you know nice we're in london right now right like a nice european city or like all parts of the us like downtown new york or something like that and you're like why don't we build this stuff anymore right like i just just like it's impossible for me to be in a place like that and now wonder like why are we not getting better at building this stuff instead of worse. And then there's obviously all the productivity metrics, and you can look at endless numbers to see the raw data behind this. So I think that's been clear for a long time to me. I think what is interesting for someone like me is, even when I was thinking about construction initially, my initial thoughts were, what can I do with software, right? So what kind of like... company could you start like whatever some like productivity app for construction businesses like that kind of stuff like maybe some project management app to like and then i think if you're brutally honest with yourself you discover that it's really unlikely to make a dent right like maybe you're going to make these companies whatever like 0.5 more productive at best yes but like if you zoom out it's like impossible and you really need to like solve the really hard problem which is doing the work and then once you start thinking about doing the work you're like i need to physically move like you know, things around to make, you know, to build a building. And that's a really kind of scary leap to make. And then once you go into that, you basically have to think about things like factories, pre-found modules or robotics, right? Like you end up with like a few directions that, and they're all kind of like big, big leaps from just like starting a software business. So I think that's like the big kind of leap of like, can I do this or should I do this? That you have to make that point. Yeah. And your prior business was like more pure software, right? Like a hundred percent. That was just like a B2B SaaS company, just to be clear. Yeah.

Tell me about that scary feeling, because I think that's kind of interesting. What was that like to be like, hey, I'm actually thinking I might not be a guy who's going to build another B2B SaaS product. I'm going to try and move bricks around and figure out how to build beautiful buildings. Did that feel like you had to sort of almost rearrange your conception of yourself or what it meant to found a company? I think for me, it was like two things. One is... I think I was comfortable with being the kind of founder that would do this. I never thought of myself as a software-only founder. But obviously, you start thinking about, do I have the skills or what do I need to learn basically to be able to pull this off? Obviously, everyone will immediately tell you, every VC friend, every founder friend is going to be like, don't do hardware, don't do robotics. I think actually the same friend I talked about, he also told me, friends don't list, friends start hardware companies. So that was the kind of advice that I got back then. And then I think the other part, which I think is interesting is, i wasn't sure even if the this uh if this idea was like a good one if i would be able to like properly like fund it yes uh both with my own money initially and then like like after you know kind of like maybe cell funding initially like it didn't seem like a vc it didn't seem certain to be like a vc fundable kind of like but yet so there was also a version in my mind where i was like is this the kind of thing where you have to like you know to draw like say an elon musk analogy where you have to like first found a paypal yeah kind of company have another like much bigger outcome where you can like fund what like you know yeah like something like i'll put hundreds of millions into and i think that was like another kind of thing i had to like think about which was how much money will you need to actually make this work and is that something i could like raise or do i need to like do something else to get that money initially. And I think that was like another leap that I needed to like unlock in my mind. How did you resolve that? Like what convinced you, okay, either I can get this money now or, you know, I can get to enough amount of traction bootstrapping myself that someone will take a bet on me. There's this narrative, right? Like everything with hardware, everything with robotics and maybe construction also is going to be capital intensive. And then I actually discovered, I have this framework now, which is

I think the whole kind of capital-intensive, non-intensive framework doesn't make sense to me. I think it's actually like, again, you know, you can look at software companies, like, you know, all the big ones, they've raised like billions of dollars before they went public, right? So that framework doesn't really make sense. So the model I have in mind that I basically ended up with was, what are like the gates you need to clear? Is there a gate where you need to like, you must raise like, say, 300 million or like a billion because you need to say, like build a factory or like build a rocket or something like that? And if you don't raise that money, you're just never going to achieve the next step. And I realized that for what I had in mind, for the types of robots I wanted to build, the skill I wanted to achieve, you actually never had those skills. The Series A I had in mind was actually maybe a relatively... big one, but it's actually, it wasn't like a crazy number. It was like, I need to raise a hundred million to like get to that milestone. And then once I got comfortable with that, I started to actually like try that narrative on some VCs I knew. And I could see that actually resonated with them. Like if you actually explain to them, like what your capital needs are going to be like, why you think this would work, why this would actually perform like a software business with maybe software kind of dynamics, you could kind of tell that maybe this is actually going to work and maybe I'll be able to like, you know, raise funding similar to like a software company. So you'd really thought through like, hurdle after hurdle in a way, like the company journey such that you were like, okay, like here's this set of risks that I can sort of try and address at seed, series A, B, so on. And obviously knowing some amount of it will change, but you had done a little bit of that mapping. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think like, if you want to think about like hardware, robotics, something kind of like unusual, especially like when I was thinking about this like five years ago, this was pre like the whole kind of like American dynism, hard tech renaissance, like it was still kind of nascent. I think... It seems very obvious that one of the main reasons to not do this is access to capital or not being able to clear C to Series A. So I was definitely thinking a lot about that. Really interesting. You talked about the fact that construction doesn't build these beautiful buildings anymore. And I think that's something that in many ways, there's lots of things that are wonderful about America.

But one thing is true is that Europe really spikes when it comes to architectural beauty because of all these old buildings. And so it seems almost natural that it had to be a European company that would come to this problem set with that sort of spirit in mind. But why fundamentally was it the case that we stopped building these types of buildings? Why has that been lost as an art, as an endeavor? Honestly, I think this is like a big open question. I don't have the answer. I've tried to read a lot about this. It seems somehow it's all, you know, it all happened after World War II, right? So there were like obviously movements before World War II, you know, the Bauhaus movement and whatever, like where we went into kind of like modernism. But it's something happened where some people would argue it was like cost, like we just had to like, you know, build a lot of housing very quickly. Cars were clearly part of it, like just like what we were. But there's also a theory that it was... people after the two big wars literally were in a mood where it was like, why even build beautiful things, right? I'll honestly say that I don't even know what the answer is. I don't know if I care at this point. I just want to bring it back. I just don't care. And the other thing I'd say is if you look at early 20th century America, what is left of that? the US built beautiful buildings, right? If you think about the Art Deco buildings in New York City, even Detroit, right? People think about Detroit as kind of like a rundown town. But if you go to like downtown Detroit and see the old buildings that were built in the kind of like heydays of, I guess, like the 20s and 30s, it's just like magnificently beautiful, right? So I think it's really a timing issue. And obviously, Europe has more like history. Totally. There's been more time. But it is true that in Europe, I feel like you can pick. like an almost random city and find something where you're just like, wow, this happens to be quite magnificent. But yes, they have the advantage of time on their side. How did it sort of you start to narrow down towards, OK, I want to bring beautiful buildings back. I want to make that commercially viable. Robots seem like the right way. But.

there are so many different flavors you might take. Like you could have done a humanoid robot, which is not the case. You could have, you know, focused on cement rather than bricklaying. Like what was sort of the idea maze to get to the current iteration? Yeah, so it's really, honestly, it's not easy to like replay the whole thing. I would mention that I also thought for a while quite seriously about infrastructure, like building infrastructure, because it also blows my mind how. uh how expensive and inefficient we've become in building infrastructure so just literally like roads and railroads and those kinds of things where costs are you know they're like most countries are like in the order of 100 million per kilometer or mile at this point which is like crazy money right like just like uh uh the analogy when i actually talk to like investors i i i try to like When you hear like 100 million, you just think it's just like- Per mile of rail? Yeah, yeah. It's actually like, that's kind of like an average number in most industrialized countries. And the way I actually like, it's such a big number that even for people who deal with a lot of money every day, you kind of like can't gauge what it means. So the way I actually like try to help people think about this is think about like a fund size. Like, you know, maybe you have like a 300 million fund or 500 million fund or like a billion dollar fund. And think about if you give it to a government and ask them build infrastructure with this, how many miles of highway or railroads will you get? It's literally a couple of miles. And then think about the innovation you could do. If you're funding startups, what would happen with the same amount of money? It's actually insane to think about this in my mind. So anyway, I thought about that direction for a while. The go-to-market, I would argue, is really challenging because you basically have to win tenders, work with governments. It's hard to start with a small scale. The nice thing about normal construction, residential construction is you can do it like at very, very small scales, like as a startup, right? Like you can start with a tiny wall. You can do a shed. You can scale up to like a house, like a small house. Then you can do like a small development, like small, you know. You can't really do a small, you know, mini railway. You can't be like, let us do like maybe a couple feet or something. Like it doesn't really make sense. No one's going to like likely let you do it. So that's the nice thing I think about like residential construction. It's also more meaningful because.

The housing crisis is a big problem in almost every industrialized nation at this point, like, again, in Europe and the U.S. And then, like, at some point, you have to pick a trade, right? Like, you have to pick something to start with. And I think that's where maybe, you know, we are based in Amsterdam. If you look at, I think, Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., Belgium, probably, like most European countries. and then you start talking about contractors, it immediately, like bricklaying pops out every time, right? It's literally in the top three of every country, I think. The most common contracting jobs? No, the ones with the biggest labor shortage. So the jobs with the biggest labor shortages. Again, I'm not even talking about construction specifically. I'm talking about all job categories. That's how bad it is for a bunch of reasons. And it seemed, the nice thing about bricklaying is It's in line again with our vision of building aesthetically pleasing buildings because bricks, most people think they're beautiful. They allow you to build, you know, the way we were building for like hundreds of years or actually millennia. And with robotics, you're able to basically build every, like you could build a whole development where each house will have a different pattern or even use different bricks without making the construction more expensive, right? So you can actually have variety and like designs and like all of that, which you wouldn't get with most prefab techniques. So it actually is aligned with that vision. And then finally, there's a very clear kind of like next act after it, right? Because once you nail bricklaying, it's ultimately like picking and placing dimensional objects on a construction site. That's not 100% of old tasks on construction, right? Like clearly, you know, pouring a foundation or like doing electrical work is really different, but most things are actually like some version of... picking and placing a processing like a dimensional object so it's a very good kind of like starting point i think for so that was kind of like the the the high level kind of like thinking behind it i remember you telling me at some point that the the shorted the labor shortage on brick layers uh was severe i didn't really i don't think i recalled that it was quite that severe um but such that it's an extremely high paying job right like isn't it the case that it's like a euro a brick or something like that that that folks get paid for it such that

Because of that shortage. So that's basically where you get paid in the Netherlands. I think the UK is actually higher, at least the London area is probably like one point something pound per brick, which is kind of like insane again. Yeah. So hourly wages at like peak times can go up to like 80 euros an hour, which again, it's like for someone who's basically like, you know, most bricklayers we know are being paid as well or better than most people who went to college, right? Like at this point. So, which is telling. Which also sort of opens up the business model that you guys have, which is like literally acting as a subcontractor, right? Like, how did you think about that as the right approach? Because I imagine you also thought through like, oh, should we sell robots? Should we, you know, do X, Y, Z? But was that sort of the opportunity because of that dynamic that you were like, you know, we should we should operate in this way? I don't remember when this was clear to me, but this was actually one of the first insights I had, maybe even before the robotics part. So, and I think there's like two reasons for this. So one is, I actually, one of my biggest learnings from Palantir was that Palantir had this very kind of like, I'd argue unique business model, which is, it wasn't really a SaaS company. It wasn't like, oh, you pay some licensing fee. There was this model, which was like understanding the value you bring to the customer, being very embedded with the customer, which allowed you to price in a very different way. uh basically based on the outcomes you're delivering and so if you're if you're delivering like outsized outcomes with your software it wasn't like well we're charging whatever like you know ten thousand dollars per seat or something like that it was just like you were actually like connecting yourself to the outcome that you're delivering and that was so powerful to me like it was actually like really impressive to to me to see how that worked in practice that that i basically became obsessed with that idea and then i realized that it actually makes so much sense to apply to construction specifically because construction is this industry where everyone subcontracts the work anyways there's no vertically integrated player any in any case and people you know this is very peculiar to the construction industry but even if you're like a huge contractor you might have billions of revenue contractors absolutely hate paying money that is not project cost basically right that basically goes from their like very thin margins and it's really hard to justify that even if it's like a good kind of like roi to them it's really hard to like make that sale whereas

They're actually used to spending billions, like if you're big, like hundreds of millions or billions to like contracts because that's like the way the industry works. So if you're just like picking up one of those like jobs and you're delivering the outcome, they're very comfortable with like funneling that money to you because that's, again, like that's how the industry works anyways. So you're not even convincing them of something really hard as long as you're delivering a service. That's really interesting. Yeah, it's like you're creating this revolutionary offering that actually fits very neatly into the existing buying flow such that it doesn't require them to take like some crazy new risk or exhibit this crazy new behavior. This is such a naive question, but why is it the case that no one's vertically integrated in construction like has no. Why does that simply not make sense? Again, I actually don't really know the answer to this, despite having tried to study it a lot. I think a lot has been written about this. So a few peculiar things about the construction industry is there's almost no consolidation in this industry, right? So I think, again, you could pick any country you want, but I don't think there's any country where the major player has more than five or maybe close to 10% market share. There's definitely no country with one player that has 25% or 30%. market share. There's usually no point in consolidation. They basically have no real CapEx, and they're not vertically integrated. All these things. In the US, for example, we have nationwide players. Some of them are publicly listed. But in reality, they have local subcontractors that are doing most of the job that are different in each metro or region. Interesting. I want to talk more about the idea maze and some of the different paths not taken. At the time that you were starting Monumental, You'll remember better than me, but from my vantage, I was starting in VC at the time. The businesses that I saw trying to address part of this problem were like some version of prefabs, right? Like, you know, very modularized houses that you could sort of put together almost like Lego blocks. That was sort of one approach. And then the other sort of thing you would see every once in a while were like 3D printed houses.

There's obviously an aesthetic reason why that didn't appeal to you because you don't get the sort of real classical beauty of brick and stone. But were there reasons beyond that that you were like, I actually fundamentally don't think these make sense as approaches to address like the stagnation I see in construction? Yeah, so I think there's like two answers. So on the 3D printing part, that one's really easy in my mind, which is it's actually in my mind a very exciting technology. But I think it's, you know, you have to take a realistic view to like. you know, how the market's going to develop, it's a really conservative market. And so again, like, it's so unlikely that you're going to get to see like double digit percentage point changes in like the way we do construction, right? Like think about, I'll give you very, like a very simple example, right? People have tried to do bricklaying robots before. I think everyone that has tried to do this before has made custom mortar because it's more, like it's easier to extrude basically to make a custom mortar. We decided against that. Just like that tiny change, like it doesn't even look different, right? But like that simple change is so important. As soon as you change anything in construction. My analogy is basically that you're doing enterprise sales where you have all these stakeholders, but every stakeholder is actually different every time. Imagine if you would be selling to a big company where you have to convince the CEO, the CIO, whatever, like legal, procurement, and then the next week, it's going to be a different group of people again. The next week, it's going to be a different one again. Any change you make, you have to convince the developer, the general contractor, maybe the subcontractor you work with, local regulators. construction is heavily regulated, especially materials, right? Is it fire, structural integrity, right? And every market you enter, you have to do this again. And who's going to bet on this, right? The building has to stand for at least 50, maybe 100 years. Are they going to bet on your new technology or materials? So I basically took a very conservative approach here where I was like, we're not changing anything in the supply chain, anything, which actually makes it a harder engineering problem. But I think that is actually the price to pay.

be able to like enter this market and like potentially become really big. I think on the prefab side, it's a more nuanced take, which is I actually, when I was at Palantir, I actually saw some really big factories, including car manufacturing, like an Airbus. And I actually got like kind of like real inside access into them, which was really exciting. And I realized how insane their skill was, but also how important it was for them to like have a huge kind of like footprint in the sense of like the market they serve. I don't think there's any prefab modular factory that can claim that even like long-term that they will be able to like serve an entire continent, like all of the US or all of Europe, right? Like most of them I can, you know, are literally doing like a hundred mile area around where they are. And in my view, that actually gives you the worst of all worlds, which is you're always going to achieve subscale, right? Like as a factory, like you can't actually serve like a big market. And then at the same time, you get all the downsides of having a factory, like the cost of retooling if you want to change everything, the capex of setting it up. So it sounds like, to me, it just seems like a kind of bad setup. And by the way, one interesting data point that, from what I could gather, is even in China, which has really nailed prefab, by the way, it's actually not cheaper to do prefab. So it's faster for them, but it's not cheaper. How can it be faster but not cheaper? Because prefab, in a way, it... The word fab implies fabricate. I think people think of factories. In reality, most of prefab is you just have a bunch of dudes in a shed working, right? It's actually not automated. In almost all cases, there's maybe a cleaner production line. There's maybe slightly more process. It's in a building that's air-conditioned or whatever, so you're less dependent on the weather. But it's not that much more productive. However, you actually have to do bulk transport. You need very big equipment to actually move cranes and stuff like that on site to then move the parts together. So you actually trade off a lot of things for more cost in many cases to make it work. So you're basically just shifting the cost from one place to another, essentially. Exactly. And there are cases where, by the way, it does make sense. Again, if you're trying to compress time on your construction site, for example, weather reasons to minimize disruption, it can make sense.

Really interesting. Because of the timing when you started, like, much of or essentially all of the modern AI renaissance had not really taken flight yet. I mean, we're talking about 2017, chat GPT in 2022, another year plus before Google started to show some of its, you know, interesting robotics papers and stuff like that. To what extent were you banking on, like, improvements with AI? Did that need to happen for Monumental to really... take off in the way that you hoped it would? Like, yeah. How did you start to think about that part of the technology? So my, I definitely, I don't want to, I definitely did not predict that we'd be in this world. Like, maybe that would be like the honest starting point. I think the bet I made basically was if you think about the period, like I'd say like 2018, 19, which was when I was like seriously thinking about this, my insight, my kind of main thing I benchmark against was self-driving cars, right? Like autonomous kind of vehicles. which was, and they actually were still not proven, right? Like today, they're driving like in a couple cities. It seems to work. It's still not, I think, compared to the promise of like, I guess, like 2012, 2013, we're still not where we want to be. So that was clear to me. But it will also seem that something was working there. And my insight was, like, in a way, construction is also unstructured, just like, you know, being on public roads. But it's also like a more constrained problem where you can also like... pause and break if something goes wrong, which is a key difference, right? Like if you're on a highway or like on a public road and you're like, whatever, like your algorithm is stuck, like you don't know what to do, you can't really just like stop a car and just see what happens. And that's one of the big challenges, right? With autonomous vehicles. Whereas on a construction site, you can just stop and you can just wait for an operator to intervene. And it's already kind of like, it still is a constraint. closed off environment. There's actually like safety protocols there, right? Like people wear safety hats. So it's not like you can introduce something crazy dangerous, but like the acceptable kind of risk, there's already like heavy equipment there. So my bet was basically autonomous technology doesn't have to get much better compared to where it was at that point.

for this to work at the same time i did make a bet which definitely turned out to be true which was sensors and like all the kind of hardware will definitely come down in price right which was already happening right so like i think i don't remember like the initial lidars that waymo used probably were like i think hundreds of thousands and then they were already getting to like i think sub 10 000 but still like thousand but like it was clear that different you know cameras IMUs, computers, obviously like all of that was just like plummeting in price. So I think that was maybe the more obvious bet I was like looking at. Really interesting. You mentioned Palantir and we've talked in a little bit before about, you know, some of the lessons from Palantir. You talked about this deployment model. One of the things that I loved hearing from you is that on the, and Trey Stevens from Andreal also said this, that one of their recommended books is this like very obscure book on sort of improvisational theater called Impro. I wonder if you can tell me, like, whoa, some of the unusual parts of the Palantir culture that maybe you've picked up on or tried to bring with you to Monumental from that vantage. I thought I took culture seriously before Palantir. And then because of Palantir, I was like, I didn't at all. Like, I think that that's maybe the most important takeaway I would get. I think people... I mean, it's been years now, right? But like used to say that Palantir was almost like a cult at some point, right? Which I actually think that was like- By design. By design, right? Yeah. And I think that was actually like, I was so impressed to see what that actually meant in practice. There's also this saying, which is like culture eats strategy for breakfast, which is meaningless when you just hear, like, it's just like, you know. Yeah. And I think I really saw what that meant in practice, right? On a micro and a macro level, right? So you get all these like young graduates coming into the company. They hear these like- stories, these phrases, these books, like all these things are kind of like repeated in a very, like it seems kind of in a very natural way, but there's like clearly like some logic behind it. And then somehow without a lot of like policies, without a lot of rules, you're able to like steer most of them in a really good direction. And that was like really kind of like eye opening to me, like how effective and how scalable that was. And that also allowed the company like Palantir to be kind of almost an anarchy in many ways. I think most people.

uh again i'm talking about like the period of like 2016 to 18 maybe 19. so this is pre-ipo to be clear you know there were no performance reviews there was like no travel policy like people just like like people just had and it was like how does this even work with like 2 200 employees but it actually worked and it was really really kind of like impressive to me to see like how that how effective that model was i think that was like the biggest learning for for me that i took away from it so that's kind of like the meta point i would actually make I think the other point that was really interesting to me, also related to what we're doing, which is everyone focuses on the forward deployment model, which is obviously like a key innovation of Palantir. But I think one of the things that was said a lot internally was it's actually a privilege to get access to interesting problems. And I really love that framing, right? One way you can think about this is just like in your normal life or like whatever you might be like, oh, whatever, like the government is doing, like there's this stupid thing, whatever, you're standing in line at the DMV or like something like that. And then you're like, I know how to solve this, but no one's going to let you solve it, right? Like actually getting access, like being allowed to like contribute to that conversation, being allowed to contribute to solution can be a privilege. It's almost separate from like the business question of like, are you going to make money off it? And I really love that framing, which was Palantir was a unique company in that. or is a unique company in that it got access to like interesting government problems in the time that most startups or technology companies didn't, right? Or like access to like interesting problems like big industrial conglomerates. And I think about that the same way, right? Like you could almost imagine a company like Monumental today paying money to get access to construction site, to be allowed to like run pilots or train their robots or like their people there and being able to like having the trust of our customers to like try our stuff or like build our stuff while we're still learning. is a privilege. And I think that framing is so powerful if you embrace it. Did it change your relationship with ambition, being at a company like Palantir? Or do you think you always were sort of ready after Silk to do something? Yeah, I would honestly argue that I think I'm a high ambition person. Like, I don't think that changed because of Palantir. Yeah.

Got it. We're talking about Impro and sort of the reading list of Palantir and also, you know, the sense that this is a cult or a religion of some kind. Durkheim has this concept of the ingredients that make up a religion. And one of them is that, you know, every religion has sort of sacred objects, which I sort of think of these reading lists as examples of, in a sense. For Monumental, do you have your version of that, like something that everyone has to read or everyone has to do or buy into that sort of like serve that same purpose? Yeah, definitely. I think. You know, I think you definitely want to have a kind of like, you know, us against the world kind of like mentality at some level, right? Like you want to be like, we are different. That's the whole point of a startup. Otherwise, you don't need that company to exist. I think for us, we also have a reading list. I think one book that's on it that I think is, you know, in my view, really inspiring, but also like really is Liftoff, which is about like the early days of SpaceX, which I'd say is like the most inspiring hardware, like modern hardware company out there, right? Like there's like a lot of learnings in there. And I'd say the kind of like the big conceptual, like the main thing that I think is like so different about us compared to like what most people expect is, you know, people talk about like speed and light, which is a really important value of our company as well, to be clear. But what it actually means is you have to get really comfortable with almost embarrassing like. pushing, embarrassing things like on the field, like, and like almost embracing the kind of like duct tape together, zip tied, like technology, which, you know, doesn't seem like professional, which may be like, if you're, you know, doing diligence on us and like talk to robotics expert, they're like, these people don't know what they're doing. Like, but that's almost like part of our like pride, right? Like people are almost like proud to show like how janky their like design is, but how, like they're like, I did this in two days and it works, right? It works on the field. We can learn from it and maybe it already generates revenue even. And then we'll figure out how to productize it and clean it up later. I think that's a very core part of something you want to embrace early on. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform helping businesses verify users, fight fraud, and build trust. Fraudsters are already using AI to spoof faces, voices, and documents. So your defenses need to adapt just as fast.

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Today, we decide on the number of robots it needs, right? Which is mostly related to like the number of bricks that need to be laid in a week, for example, right? That's kind of like the cadence of most contractors, like some weekly planning. What's the robot per week brick output in a project roughly, like if you're doing that calculation? We have like a target and then there's like the reality, which is like, I think the big kind of like thing we're working on today. But the target is for that to be kind of like per robot system basically is to be in the thousands per week, right? Like in the, that's kind of like, so basically on par or better than a mason. That's kind of like the way to think about it. Most projects would have like four to eight masons. At least this is like, I'm talking about like Dutch scale projects. So we would actually deploy today like something like four or eight like systems at the same time. When I say a system, it's actually like three robots working together, which is actually one of the mesmerizing things you're talking about, right? Because seeing robots work together for some reason, it looks like, I don't know, there's like the orchestration looks really nice. So we have two that do the supply chain basically, right? Like one brings the bricks, one brings the mortar, it keeps it agitated, like mixes it. And then there's like the one that actually does the brick laying and they all work in tandem together to like build a wall. We have operators that we send with the robots. They're part of basically the product we're selling to the contractors. And they drive the robots to the site. They drive them to the wall. But then once they're at the wall, they become autonomous. So they can drive alongside the wall. They know where to go. They know I need to skip this part because there's a doorframe. So I'm going to move another... meter uh to the left or something like that like that is all kind of like the autonomy part uh but we still need operators today for a bunch of things uh uh and edge cases and that i think i'd argue again is like a key part of our model which is instead of like having to get like 100 perfection with technology we're just already delivering value and just like increasing automation along the way and it's really cool to see these robots in action and to see the output that they create because they are capable of creating you know uh

brick walls of different patterns, for example. How complex is it to actually sort of like create a robot in a system that is capable of putting together these different patterns with the level of precision that is needed? Because that was actually another thing that surprised me. You sort of think of laying bricks as like perhaps something that wouldn't be hyper high precision. But when you're actually taking on a job as a subcontractor like. folks are really exacting about this amount of extrusion, this pattern, so on and so forth, really down to a millimeter level. Yeah, so this is honestly one of the surprises to me as well in this industry, which is there's a part of the industry where they really don't care about tolerances. And it's like, we go to construction sites. It's actually one of the advantages of our technology is If you work with, say, a prefab component, you design it to some size. And then in many cases, it actually does not fit because, say, the distance between the two window frames was not what was according to the drawing. And there's a centimeter level difference. And that's accepted. That's totally accepted in construction. No one seems to care. It's not noticeable, right? So there's a version of this where... people don't care about tolerances. You can be off by a centimeter or two and it's fine. You're still going to buy the house. You don't really care about the exact distance between them. But then as an example, if the alignment between the top of the window frames is off by two centimeters, you will notice and it looks ugly and it doesn't look good. So there are some things that matter a lot and some things that don't matter at all. I think with bricks, There are some things that you don't notice. You could be again off by like multiple millimeters and you don't notice. But one simple thing that we discovered basically is if your brick is rotated by just like 0.1 degree, it's so noticeable to the human eye. Like it's immediately noticeable and like it creates shadows. And it's like, it seems like a horror, like just like it sticks out. And that's like a very subtle thing that you really need to get on top of if you want to like, you know, get to the same quality as a mason.

Wow, that's super interesting. What have been the other sort of maybe surprising challenges that, you know, when you were thinking about this back in 2018, 2019, you maybe didn't have on your radar of like, this is actually a really hard part of this problem. I think, you know, you start thinking about this from a technology perspective, obviously, we were from day one, I think our whole company is outcome kind of obsessed. So we were thinking not just about the robots, but the end result, the walls were delivering, the buildings were delivering. I think the part that I completely underestimated is the importance of the human part here, right? So if you think about how does a general contractor decide if their subcontractor is good or bad, obviously, a big part is just like the end result, right? Like, are you building a proper wall? Are you doing a good job? But a huge part is actually just like their opinion of your people. Like, how do they behave on a construction side? And that's also true for us. Despite being a robotics company, the general contractor just looks at our people and just decides, you know, their opinion of us is a big part of just like, if our guys are late. if they leave a mess on site, which happened a lot in the early days, right? Like literally coffee cups, just like leaving them on the ground. Like you think that those things don't matter, but they matter a lot to their opinion of us, like as a company, like the product we're delivering. And it's actually like something we never thought about initially. I think it's not like our natural kind of strength to like, you know, build that kind of discipline in a team. And that's been like both probably the biggest surprise and also like one of the harder things to get right. What's the sort of... the state of play for Monumental today? Like how many houses have you built? What have sort of been the most challenging builds? I remember you guys talking about doing like a quay wall at one point on all these sort of things, but to give listeners sort of an understanding, like, yeah, where are things right now? Yeah, so let me give you like a mini timeline. So I think like two years ago, we probably did our first, our company exists for like less than four years right now, right? So.

We did our first successful build, like tiny wall, just like that still stands, I think two and a half years ago now. I think we started doing bigger and bigger pieces since then. Last year we started doing, so this is like 2024, we started doing entire walls, almost like multiple facades, but still hadn't completed a full house, like all sides of a house, including corners. We started doing more and more, but nothing was done. Since the start of this year, We have finished, I think, like 34 full houses, which is like really kind of gratifying, right? We actually have photos now of like the first houses we started to deliver like the brickwork, to be clear, right? The brickwork of the house is like in January, February. People started to move in this summer, which is like really nice to see people actually like, you know, families coming into their house that we partially built. We built... To, you know, we started building much higher as kind of R&D project, but we built like a 12 meter tall wall for a hotel building. And then actually like more canal walls, which I also love for some reason. It's like a very Dutch thing. Something pretty amazing. But there's something like very, very amazing about that. Also because their life cycle tends to be in centuries. Like they get like, I guess like renovated or like redone every like two or three hundred years. So there's something really magical, honestly, about building something that you know is going to be there for like at least, you know. like for 200, 300 years, right? Like your great-grandchildren might see it or something like that. There's something very special about that to me. It's interesting. I, you know, spend a tiny fraction of the time thinking about this than of course you do. But I remember just visiting your office and... the feeling afterwards of you find yourself just absolutely mesmerized with brickwork. You're like, oh, my gosh, it's incredible to see how that came together. And you start to think about these things in a totally different way when you are seeing it happen in the way the monumental does it. How have you thought through, like, what comes next? Because right now you're doing the brickwork. Obviously, that's a very important part of building a house, but it's not sort of completing it all together. How do you think about the staging of what comes next? Yeah, so I think there's probably three axes you want to consider, right? I think this is kind of a generic framework that you could apply to many things, right? So one is you don't want to start from scratch with your technology, right? You want to use as much of the kind of unique technology you built up and reuse it. So from that perspective, doing...

any kind of dimensional pick and place type of task makes a lot of sense, right? Versus like, say, going into plumbing or, you know, which is completely different, right? So that's like very obvious. The other one is you want to be able to sell to the same type of customer and like the same, right? Like you want to sell into your existing channel that you're starting to build up. So, you know, we could easily do like, say, cobblestone roads, which are very popular in Europe and like a big market, but that's a completely different customer profile, right? Like it doesn't make sense for us to go into that, even though I think it's like kind of like cool thing and our technology would. supported and then i think for for construction specifically you also there's like value in having it be adjacent to your current process in a very literal way right like where you can start combining things together in the same process so for us the obvious like if you take all those things together the very obvious things you want to do are do the whole facade basically right and doing the whole facade in most countries like in the uk and the netherlands and germany is doing an interior wall which is not bricks, but blocks usually like concrete blocks, limestone blocks, like there's different variations of them, but basically just like ugly blocks that you don't see because they will have beautiful bricks on the outside and then plaster or something like that on the inside. Insulation, which goes usually like on top or like on those interior walls. There's usually like some air cavity or something like that for insulation. And then like the brick wall we're doing. If you do those things, like basically like those are like very small kind of like adjacent products, right? Like if you basically do like the bigger blocks, event installation, you've almost done the whole facade. And then if you do like window frames and lintels, the things that go on top of a window frame, you've basically built, automated the entire facade. And that's actually like a really meaningful part of an entire building. I think that's like the really exciting thing to me. Like it seemed so far away a couple of years ago. And now it's like, you can actually think about the roadmap and be like, this is really kind of like.

We're getting close to that vision now, which is still not an entire house, but again, the facade of an entire house completely automated, which also means that you might be able to remove scaffolding altogether, right? It actually allows you to change a huge part of the way you do construction. That's very kind of exciting to me. In the years since you founded Monumental, we've seen so many different robotics companies come to the fore. There's companies, robotics for fishing, there's robotics for factories, all this sort of stuff. One of the sort of movements has been more of this like humanoid robotic, which you see with One X. And I can't remember Tesla's, you know. Optimus. Optimus. There we go. Yeah. Like, is that something that you ever sort of considered made sense for Monumental? Why not? And like, how do you think about that category of robots in general? It definitely didn't make sense to me as a founder. So if you think about founder, like technology fit, if that's even a thing you can think about, I don't think that it doesn't make sense to me. um the main the main kind of the main critique i'd have of the robotics industry is uh just speaking in very general terms here is most people who are into robotics are you know i guess like technologists that are like building technology for the sake of it and then like searching for like i guess like some problem to solve afterwards and i'd say that if you start with solving a problem i don't understand how you'd ever start with a humanoid right like you could start with a subset of a humanoid you could be like for this problem like for so it could be like bricklaying. You could still start with like a humanoid dish design and then, but you probably don't need like, I don't know if you need like all the fingers in the hand or like if you need like full dexterity like to walk or something like that, right? And you could also have completely different use case. Like maybe it's like falling laundry, like fine, like you could pick that. But I think if you start with that, it seems unlikely to me that you'd always start with a full humanoid. All humanoid companies, as far as I can tell, start with a humanoid. And then they try to figure out some like, oh, we're going to do manufacturing. We're going to do domestic.

I think that's just generally such an unlikely way for things to ever work, like in technology. I would caveat that by saying, if you take my perspective, you'd probably never, like, invent GPT, right? So, like, there's probably, I think it's, like, it's true for, like, 99% of the cases. I guess the kind of, like, steel man case, I guess, what I'm saying is, like, maybe that 1% could be a revolutionary. But I think it's just, like, not the way I would want to do it. And the other part that I would emphasize is, if you want to take that approach, it basically means you're going to do research, like, real research for, like, many years, you're going to burn through a lot of investor money, which is just not the kind of company I wanted to found from day one. Like that was just like very clear to me. That's not, that doesn't excite me for some reason. We've talked a little bit about, you know, Monumental being based in Amsterdam and obviously sort of. the european flavor of what you're doing in the sense of you know these beautiful buildings and the heritage europe has but both of us i know are very interested in europe producing more hyper ambitious companies than it does today and that there's sort of in some ways a lack of of that american ambition uh in the startup ecosystem here How have you sort of navigated that as a founder here? Like how do you ensure you're building a sufficiently ambitious culture in Amsterdam? How do you find the people who really want to be on that journey? So I'd say it's hard and easy at the same time, right? Like the easy part is you're just building your own company, right? Like you could just be in your, you can make your own bubble at some level, right? Like, and I think like the... if you're just like recruiting internationally, right, like we have people from all around the world, you can just pick the most ambitious people. And it's kind of like self-selects into, you know, clearly we're building an ambitious company. Clearly the founders are ambitious, the goals, the problems we're solving. And so I think in a way, on a company level, it's not, you know, I don't want to say it's easy because just recruiting is hard, right? Like it's probably the hardest thing we're doing every day. But it's also like, you know, people self-select into what we need, at least as a company.

And I think as founders, I don't need to navigate anything because I'm like, you know, I know what I want. So it doesn't really matter. Like you could put me anywhere. I'm probably still going to be as ambitious with my own personal goals, right? I mean, just to push back on that, to some extent, I feel like your ambition can be amplified or dampened by the people you're around. And so I imagine it takes extra effort that if you either to find other founders in Amsterdam who you're like, actually, these people want to build. hundred billion trillion dollar businesses also or to like fight against the culture that is maybe more surrounding you or the or the friend set or the peer set that you have who are like no i'm look i love to work in tech but i also love to clock off at five and that's how you know i i live i think that's a really good point i would say again this is kind of more of a personal take i think it's both true and not true at some so for me at least i would say It wouldn't matter to me what my founder's friend do. Like, for example, I think most of them are not running a hardware company or like, you know, that's fine with me, right? Like whether they're taking it easier, but also maybe they're like, you know, they're like taking off much faster because they have, you know, crazy valuations with their SaaS company. I'm okay with both. Like that doesn't really affect me or my ambition levels. But I think where you're right, for example, is I think if you're like a hyper ambitious founder. you're based in Europe and you only talk to say like local VCs, like continental European local VCs, I think on a practical level, you will constrain your ambition, right? Like if you can't fundraise or if they all tell you like whatever, like work towards this exit or try to get this deal or do this corporate partnership, like I could totally see how those kinds of things will affect you. So I think that requires you to both be aware of that, I guess, and like be able to cultivate a network that, you know, doesn't have these kinds of like influences. I think that's also true for like, the kind of employees like you could hire probably like ambitious on paper or like at some level employees especially maybe executives but they would still like kind of like push you down into like kind of a very like narrow form of ambition

which is now going to be like, you know, the next sort of like trillion dollar company that's going to change the world. I do think that is actually a very good point. Like you do need to filter for that probably. How do you think because of your time at Palantir, you had sort of already broadened your horizons enough that you sort of understood there were other VCs out there or knew some of those VCs out there who like were thinking about things at a different scale? Or did you sort of have to proactively do some of that, I don't know, networking for lack of a better term to broaden your horizons? No, one common pattern I see actually, I imagine you've seen this too, is I'd say that probably every really ambitious European founder I know has had some exposure of a couple of years to the US in US companies, right? Whether their first startup got acquired, they were working as whatever, like some role. But I think that exposure seems to be important. I think everyone I know that's doing something really interesting right now in Europe has spent like at least two years in like the Bay Area at some point, right? Like, and I think that that gives you like that, maybe like that, just like the kind of like cultural baggage that's helpful there, like resets, kind of recalibrates your ambition levels. Also like what you could expect maybe from like your team or like, and naturally just like also helps you build a network, right? Like you probably just know some people there. They will help you with intros. Like you, I think it's all those things coming together. Do you find that there's sufficient robotics and hardware and software talent in Amsterdam or within Europe for you? Or do you have to end up like, I don't know, having folks come over from the States or having folks come over from Asia? I don't know the percentage, but I think we've... more than half of our teams form. I can't remember right now which country, but it's not just from the US. I think the majority of our team is actually from the UK, interestingly. We hire globally. We try to find the best people. We're not trying to find the best Dutch people or anything like that. It's not even part of our caucus. It's cheaper to not relocate. That's obviously not part of any of our thinking here. I think when people talk about talent, I think one interesting thing that people say to defend Europe, which I

partly agree with is there's enough talent in Europe, which is true, I think, on a skills level, but it's not true on maybe a cultural or ambition level in many cases, right? I think the place where I see the biggest... difference is the hardware part. So I'd say that a lot of software people in Europe, in Amsterdam or other European, they've had exposure to startups. They read hacker news. They've read some books on startups. They know the kind of ecosystem. I think almost every software engineer that I interview, if you talk about whatever equity, they will ask you, what's your vesting schedule? They know something about it, right? And then we interview hardware people from Europe. And they know nothing about this stuff, right? Like they've just not been exposed to- Because they've been at like Boeing and Rolls Royce and whatever. Exactly, right? Like they might be like, they're excellent, like whatever mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and they're like, how does this work? Like you have to literally explain the basics to them, right? Obviously, equity is an example, right? But it's more like the exposure of like, what is this company going to be like? What is- You know, they'll say things like, you know, I'm excited about startups because they're like, I want to work in a small team. And then you're like, but that's not the point, right? Like, we want to grow very quickly. It's going to be very chaotic. Like, do you know what you're going to get into? Like, is that a fit for you? And that's actually like, you know, even their conception of like, what is startup going to be like is not something they're like aware of in many cases from day one. And I think that's kind of like the hard part where you need to do a lot of filtering, selection, or in some cases, just relocation. One thing that I've also seen with a... decent number of European companies, which I hope happens less over time. But some of the most ambitious ones, either VCs will be like, hey, we're going to fund you, but you kind of have to move to the U.S. Or they'll sort of decide to do it of their own volition because they want access to a different talent pool or a different capital pool even more. More so. Did you ever like think through that for Monumental of like maybe maybe this company should be an SF company or should be a.

you know, a Chicago company or whatever it might be. And why was it like the right choice ultimately to say, no, actually it should be in Amsterdam. It should be a European company. And that's the right way for us to scale. Yeah. So I think I actually definitely considered like basically going back to the US after like, because I had spent time there. So it was definitely an option in my mind. And basically there's, you know, my take is basically this, there's like the market and the talent market, like the, you know, the talent side of it. I basically think that talent in Europe, again, is fine if you're willing to relocate people. I think there's also things that people don't consider when they compare those, basically like the US and the most, I say, European kind of talent markets, which is retention in Europe is much better. One thing that always shocks me is how quickly people kind of just move around, even in hot companies, right? There's a version where you look at like... great engineers and they're just like almost like building a portfolio of stock offices right like every two three years and i i don't and i you basically never see that in europe which is i think a good feature once you you know you get uh you've hired these people i think on the market just like the kind of like bd market side right the thing that is i i'd say unique to us but maybe true for other hard tech startups is The biggest advantage of the US, which is this like big, massive market that you kind of get for free, like when you're doing say a SaaS company and you're just like taking one type of credit card or two types of credit cards, you know, and you can just do one channel of marketing, like all that stuff, the stuff that's really hard to like replicate in Europe. It's not true for construction, right? Like there's no one single construction market, right? Like building codes are actually different, like county by county. Like state employment laws, like unions are just different in every U.S. state. Obviously, the U.S. is so big that the way construction happens in, you know. an earthquake area like California is completely different from like say in Arizona or like Florida or whatever. So it doesn't function as a single market in any way. Whereas in Europe, like say in the Netherlands, like the density is so insanely high.

I don't know if you actually can get a higher density per whatever metric you want to use, like square kilometer or hours driven from our headquarters, from our office, and the number of houses being built per year. That number is very, very high in the Netherlands because it's a very dense country. And that is actually a big advantage to us. That's really interesting. Taking sort of monumental out of it, how do you sort of gauge the state of European tech today? What do you feel like needs to happen for the ecosystem to take the next step? I think it's obviously getting better, right? I think there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in the last couple of years and maybe last year specifically. I think there's multiple kind of positive trends. I think the general kind of challenge, I think you've talked to Torsten, the founder of Helsing, about this at some point. I think there's, I'd argue, two versions of the culture and ambition problem, right? One is the founder one, which is there are great founders in Europe, but you could still, especially maybe for their second act or at some point, there's still... you know you could still be more ambitious and we need more of that level of ambition so i think that's one part of it and i think the other part is basically like that let's call it like the talent pool so i think we we definitely need more people uh engineers you know whoever like that are willing to take the bet on different startups that are excited by equity that are excited by the chaos and they're not looking for kind of like the normal path of going into like a corporate company or like some consulting group right i think just like the concept of joining a startup is already so much more mainstream in the us yes versus most of europe like yes definitely true it feels like that it's still more high status and more common to say like I'm going to go to McKinsey or a bank, and rather than say, no, no, no, like, why would I bother? I think people really underestimate this part, actually. Like, it's, by the way, like, it's a big difference within the U.S., right? Like, it's probably, like, in the Bay Area, it's really easy. And then you go to, like, I bet that if you go to, like, Chicago, it's, like, slightly harder. But I think people underestimate how hard it still is to make that, kind of, like, convince people to join startups, like, maybe two or four years out of college versus, like, going into, like, a normal track path.

Yeah, it would be interesting to compare the numbers of like Stanford versus Harvard versus Oxford versus, you know, some of the great other European universities and, you know, Bocconi or whoever. But then take the other continental European, like the good ones, but they're not like Oxford. And I think you'll get a very steep drop. Yeah, I bet you're totally right. I'm sure someone's done that. We should look that up. Yeah, we should talk about that. That's really interesting. The other piece on the sort of European founder ambition. It's one, I think, doing some of the work that you actually did after Silk, which was like, OK, things went well last time, but like I want to do something so much bigger this time, which I think is just hard for anyone to do. But two, you know, as you mentioned, Torsten, we co-published this piece together about like a lot of the time a European founder, there seems to be more of a desire to be like, OK. I made it. I got a nice sale off the books. And now I'm sort of going to be an angel investor and relax a little bit and spend half the year in Tuscany rather than going back into the arena, so to speak, and saying like, no, I'm really good at this. I should try and build my next thing. How do you fix that part, do you think? And I guess, do you agree that that part is even a problem? Yeah, I totally agree. I don't actually, like, I don't know what, I've never had this desire myself, so I don't really know what dynamics kind of like drive it or like, my sense is that there's some form of status game here where like kind of peer influence matters, right? So I think basically, if you're like in the Bay Area, it seems to me that if you sort of semi-retire and you're just going to like spend most of your time vacationing or... or whatever, you're just not going to get invited to like the interesting dinner parties or like kind of interesting conversations. You're just going to kind of like, I think part of that is also that American friendships are actually driven by work, which a lot of Europeans think is like fake friendship, but it's not like, it's a very kind of like inverted way of thinking about like what friendship is probably. And I think like in Europe, it's really easy to basically just like...

not be relevant from like a professional perspective, still have a really fun life, still go to like interesting dinner parties, surrounded by other people that are kind of like well off or something like that. And then maybe your family. And I think if you would end up with a dynamic where there's like a lot of interesting stuff happening and you're not invited to it and people are almost, you don't need to be like looked down upon, but like you feel it's just like, oh, I can't contribute anymore. My like whatever $50 million exit is not that impressive. In that peer group, I can't kind of like be part of that anymore. Maybe that changed things, but I'm actually not sure. Yeah, it'll be really interesting. I think to end on an optimistic note, this part of the discussion, you and I have together like talked to really interesting founders from Europe who are building like really ambitious projects across like industrials, energy, defense. And it does feel like that American dynamism movement that is clearly taken hold in the US has really like got a version of it happening in Europe in a way that I think. Some exciting things are going to come out of it. And so I hope that remains the case. To wrap up, I always like to ask a few philosophical questions. One is, if you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to run? I think maybe one of my random craziest ideas, I don't even know if this makes sense, is I would like to see if you can basically try starting mini societies every decade. So the kind of maybe practical, this is not even really practical, but like my practical version of this is could you find a small town or city every decade where you specifically ship off, like ship off sounds like you forced them, but like where you like let's say like 15 to 25 year olds build up that new town or like that mini society from scratch. And it could almost like, if you think it through, it could almost be an alternative to like modern education even if you, because my sense is that

It allows people to build up like a real form of agency, whatever they want to do, whether they want to literally do construction or they want to like set up like a mini kind of, you know, you have to collect taxes and you have to like maybe have like a police force and like do all these things. But I think like if you build up a small society from scratch and let young people kind of like get involved there, I think you let them do non-fake work from an early age. That allows them to build up agency while kind of like building up like tacit knowledge. To me, one of the kind of like biggest mysteries is like... Look at the founding fathers of the U.S. I think they're all like in their 20s, right? It's kind of incredibly crazy. How could they achieve that at that age? And how is it possible that today we think that if you're under 40, you're not fit to be in the next age? Were they really in their 20s? Now I have to look that up. That's crazy. And there's many of those versions. If you look at whatever your politics, but if you look at early Israel, it's like they literally are founding a new society from scratch. It's all these young people. And then they're literally like, we need someone to start a police force. We need someone to just... figure out infrastructure for this country. We just set up education and they're all young people. They're hyper ambitious, but it almost seems to create a different type of society for the first century maybe. And then at some point that kind of peters out. So I think the question is, can you just like... figure out a way to get that on repeat. And if I could run a random experiment, that would probably be it. And just see if you can give people the opportunity to extend their capabilities in this extremely compressed timescale where they're given this massive responsibility. One other way to think about this, by the way, is the only way I think you could do this today, if you're a very ambitious 18-year-old, I actually think the only thing you can probably do is start your own business, like a startup, where you have full agency, which is great for us, basically.

for people like us, but I think like it is kind of weird that if you want to do something like more normal, like maybe you want to go into law or like the only, like all you can do is just get into this like very slow track path, right? Like go into college, become an intern, like maybe you're like insanely smart, maybe you're, but like there's almost no like escape valve from that route for most professions, for most things that people want to do. We should figure out a way to like help people like escape all these kind of like pathways if they can. Yes, there's this. famous blog post. I would imagine you might have read it by Derek Sivers, which is the I think it's called There Is No Speed Limit. And it's the story of how he when he was a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston, saw some number at a record store and called it. And the guy was like, hey, I'm a music teacher. And he was like, oh, wow, I'm, you know, at Berklee, you know, studying. He was like, oh, I can teach you the entire first year of your prerequisites. in like a couple of months if you just study with me one on one. And he was like, how could that possibly be true? That doesn't make any sense. But he did. He had this incredible teacher who would meet him, I think, for free and teach him, go through all the prerequisite classes such that he was able to just like pass the tests and not have to take literally a couple of years worth of work. And the sort of takeaway is, as the title suggests. In the right environment, there's no speed limit. And all of these things like curriculums and stuff like that are built with a speed limit in mind. You have to take four years to get through college. You have to take 10 years to become a partner at a law firm when in reality, if you're that talented, there really shouldn't be that cap on you, right? Exactly that. Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, that's it. That's such an interesting point. I love that. Okay, last question. If you could assign a book for everyone on earth to read and understand, what would you like to assign? So I think the book that probably has had the most profound impact on me, which is always like, I don't know if you can extrapolate that to other people, is Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. I actually love everything he's written. Like all his books are just like amazing to me. And I think there's like, but it's actually hard to convey like why I think it's interesting. So for me, like the big framework is I think a lot of people today

are almost too used to this framework that he calls legibility, seeking legibility. It's about states, right? It's about how states structure their environment. Everything has to be almost fit in a database, fit in a grid, have a number. But that actually influences the world in a very profound way, right? But there's also a company version of this, right? If you want everything to be like measurable, if you want to have performance reviews, if you want to have, like, it has a specific impact on your company as well. And you can like apply it, I think, to everything, like the architecture. And I think that book influenced me a lot. And I think if you read it and if you kind of like, I guess, take away from it, what I took away from it, it almost lets you become more comfortable with anarchy. I think he's basically like a sort of like proto-anarchist at some level. And I think... It's like understanding the balance that we might have like in many things in society, like, you know, we looked for too much structure. And I think like being kind of like, you know, understanding the cost of that structure, I think it's kind of like a hidden cost to a lot of things. I think understanding that cost is probably like the main thing I would take away from it, where you become more comfortable with, you know, slightly less structure. And I think, you know, the version that I give to my team, for example, is... I think the main reason companies end up with, you know, startups end up with, say, like management layers, middle management, the kind of thing that makes them go corporate. I actually think it comes from the employees where they start saying things like, oh, like, you know, our comms is a chaos or like, you know, multiple people are working on the same stuff. We need to make things more efficient. And like, there are these things that are, they're actually true, right? Those are not like, those things are, but I think it's like understanding the cost of like fixing all of these problems. is actually like, it has a high cost to it, which is you create these management structures, everything has to fit in a box. You suddenly can't employ these interesting journalists anymore. Now you have to suddenly have like, it's like, this is your role. This is how I'm going to like measure your output. If you're suddenly doing this thing that doesn't fit into that framework, we don't value it anymore. And now we're losing all these like talented people that we had like, you know, that were so important to our success in the first couple of years. I think all of these things happen and they're like hidden costs that either people don't understand or

they understand them but think they're just inevitable. There's no way to grow out of them. And again, actually going back to Palantir, I think Palantir is one of the companies which to me showed that there's a different balance than I think the consensus balance that most executives or even VCs like board members would say is acceptable at different skills for startups. You said legibility, which I'm interested in there. Is the idea that that structure adds legibility and then by giving that legibility, you sacrifice some of that flexibility or some sort of similar synonym there? Or what is the role of legibility in that construction? So the role of legibility is as soon as you reduce something to some set of numbers. or some set of metrics or some set of identifiers, you're only going to, at some point, even if you don't want it, you will actually be forced to look at the world. That becomes your lens to measure things, right? So if I assign some metric to your output, I could be like, when I'm setting it up, like, no, no, I will still have casual conversations with Mario. There's countless examples of this, right? Like where maybe my favorite kind of nationwide one is like... There's a book called, you know, someone who came up with a metric GDP. Half the book is about how GDP should never be used. Like it's kind of fascinating. Like half of it is just like talking about like, this is just like a proxy. It's interesting to measure like maybe some time series, but it's never like a real. And then of course we immediately ended up like using it in exactly all the ways that the people who came up with that metric were like, don't do this. And this happens over and over again. And again, I think this is also true. on like kind of micro skills or like company level skills or team level skills. The book is full with like, by the way, crazy examples of like, you know, I think like Prussian forestry techniques, Tanzanian villages. Like it's absolutely fascinating and like kind of eclectic in the way it's written. That sounds amazing. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. It was great to see you. And I'm glad we got to turn one of our conversations into this podcast. Such a pleasure, Mario. Thank you. That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions, so if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.