The innovation team is not the buyer.
Kevin Halter has spent about 15 years figuring out how technology actually gets bought and adopted in construction. He led sales at PlanGrid as the company grew from roughly $5 million to $120 million in revenue before Autodesk acquired it for about $875 million, then spent six years helping combine those acquisitions into what became Autodesk Construction Cloud.
In this episode, Kevin explains why construction software companies so often sell to the wrong people. The innovation team may run the pilot, but it usually has “no budget, no authority to buy.” The real money sits closer to the project — with the people whose P&L, schedule, and bonus depend on getting the job done.
Kevin also tells the story of diligencing the drone market for Emergence Capital before its Series A investment in DroneDeploy. At the time, heavily funded Airware looked formidable. Years later, Airware was gone and DroneDeploy had taken over its office lease. We recorded this conversation the day after Procore announced its acquisition of DroneDeploy.
• Why PlanGrid sent people into the field in hard hats and steel-toed boots instead of trying to understand construction over Zoom
• Why its product team kept removing buttons instead of adding features
• How to run structured pilots that can actually expand across a construction enterprise
• Why one successful project rarely translates automatically into an enterprise-wide rollout
• “Tier zero” contractors, their innovation teams and venture arms, and why they aren't representative of most of the industry
• Why the innovation team often has no budget — and how to find the money on the project P&L
• Why construction software companies need to integrate with competitors rather than trying to own the entire stack
• Why Kevin thinks too many startups are still building for the commercial GC
• Where he sees opportunity instead: the trades, civil, industrial, residential, and owners of capital projects
• Whether the big construction platforms should become more “headless” and let AI-native products sit on top of them
• Who should actually be worried about AI and automation — and why Kevin thinks it isn't the skilled trades
• Why owners ultimately buy certainty of cost and certainty of schedule
• The labor shortage, retirement wave, and data-center boom reshaping the industry
• How construction can become a career people actively choose
• What Kevin makes of private equity rolling up MEP contractors - and why he says, “I don't love it. I don't love it. And I don't know how that ends.”
We also go back to Kevin's path into construction: from engineering at Tufts and healthcare sales at Pfizer to founding an equipment-rental marketplace in 2012, joining PlanGrid, and ultimately spending his career helping construction technology companies figure out how to reach the people doing the work.
02:05 Welcome
04:55 Engineer, Pfizer, and starting Getable
09:40 Kevin Spain and the drone diligence
11:35 Airware's $100 million and the drone wars
12:45 DroneDeploy takes over the competitor's lease
15:30 Joining PlanGrid
18:15 Venture money, boards, and how much to raise
22:15 Labor shortage, retirements, and data centers
25:10 Get off Zoom
29:00 COVID, customer tours, and in-person selling
32:25 Team composition and solution engineers
35:15 Structured pilots and land-and-expand
39:10 In-house innovation teams
40:35 Tier zero
41:40 The innovation team has no budget
43:05 Point tools, services, and integration
47:55 Stop building for the commercial GC
49:50 Sustaining versus disruptive innovation
52:45 Start where the market is underserved
55:30 Consolidation, M&A, and going headless
1:00:45 Who should be afraid of automation
1:01:55 Permitting, zoning, and the cost of building
1:04:15 Owners buy certainty
1:09:20 Making construction a career people choose
1:14:05 PE money and the MEP roll-ups
1:19:35 Ten years out
1:26:10 What Kevin advises on now
BuiltForward
Exploring how AI and other emerging technologies will (and won't) transform the construction industry.
Hosted by Jason Jacobs.
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