Matthew Ohlman

GP @ShadowVentures - investing in and building great ConstructionTech and PropTech startups. Software Engineer. Entrepreneur. Pilot. Georgia Tech alum.

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

@MCCCANM And meanwhile their pay hasn't even kept pace with inflation.

[Nick Durham @pnickdurham]

Last year, we invested in @Monumental_Labs.

They use AI and robotics to reduce the cost of stone fabrication by 90%.

Construction tech is our game and while I think what they are doing with art and sculpture fab is amazing, the bull case for ML imo was doing building scale construction with stone. Essentially, reviving a dormant material type for type I construction to compete directly with steel and concrete.

Before investing, I had to answer a question that's been nagging me for years: exactly when and why did we stop building with natural materials like stone? Where did beauty in our built environment go to die?

It's mostly always been an economic story.

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

Happy daylight saving time day, also known as the day software developers realize they aren’t storing their dates properly.

[Barrett Ames @cbames]

Floorplans are all you need.

Here's a video of our AI that reads floorplans. It reads room labels, finds dimensions, finds dimension lines, and locates doors and windows, all in under 2 minutes.

There are companies with thousands of people who's entire job is to perform that same work. We've automated it with a generative model and a ton of floorplan data.

This is the jaw dropper, this is what gets people excited. When construction executives come to BotBuilt they get excited about this, because it meets them where they are, and can improve their lives now.

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

@shl This is a legit thing people do? Like a voicemail but somehow worse?

[Sahil Lavingia @shl]

If you can’t help yourself, AI won’t help you

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

@reddy_kp Yes, 1045 Exchange.

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

I, for one, hope our new AI overlords choose to spare the jobs of their creators, the lowly “CS major”, and instead get rid of hyperbolic VCs who spew total shit about things they know nothing about usint wild and irrelevant comparisons.

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

Literally nobody who *actually* knows what being a good software engineer entails thinks AI is going to replace software engineers. When someone tells you this, ask them the last time they wrote code was and how exactly they were able to form this opinion.

[Nick Durham @pnickdurham]

Pumped to welcome Okibo to the @shadowventures portfolio.

Okibo is a Tel Aviv based construction robotics company that has built a fully autonomous “finishing” robot for construction – focused on painting, drywalling, and plastering walls.

Why did we invest?

Much ink has been spilled over the current labor shortage in construction, but to distill the challenge to a few overwhelming data points:

- We need to fill 500,000 job openings in 2024 alone to match project demand
- As a result of this supply / demand gap, labor costs are up 25%
- Even after increases in pay rates, 60% of projects still experience delays because of labor constraints

Unacceptable. Robotics can save the trades.

https://t.co/rXPCn2RcWK

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

You laugh, but I've seen this pattern used in the wild, non-ironically, in a production system.

[WebDevCody @webdevcody]

Y'all have been doing sql queries wrong...

[60 Minutes @60Minutes]

60 Minutes got a peek at what will soon be the first large community of 3D-printed houses. A Texas company is printing 100 of them, calling it a "paradigm shift" in how we build our homes. Lesley Stahl reports, Sunday. https://t.co/mEN4CWeXMW

[KP Reddy @reddy_kp]

Calling PreSeed startups. If you are innovating the built environment, here is your chance. https://t.co/Nvyho0mmfZ

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

@reddy_kp (Unless there is some once in a century scientific breakthrough on room temperature semi-conductors, of course.)

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

@reddy_kp Probably not because of cost and form factor. Need lots of GPU processing ($) that is not well suited to laptops (heat and power). Future of personal devices is not tethered to a desk when there is an abundance of cheap cloud compute power and lessening bandwidth constraints.

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

@reddy_kp You can lead a horse to water, something something...

[Matthew Ohlman @matthewohlman]

@reddy_kp You could throw it in cron.. something like:
0 * * * * find ~/Desktop/Screen\ Shot\ *.png -ctime +30 | xargs rm

(not responsible for this deleting your entire file system 😀)

[Peter Walker @PeterJ_Walker]

New Q1 report from @cartainc - full link to report at end of thread.

Overall investment into the 36,000+ Carta cap tables fell 80% vs a year prior.

🧵 with many charts

@alex @tomloverro @TurnerNovak @MacConwell @OfficialBBrooks