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

23:25I'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?

23:54So 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, it's a very clear, 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 all tasks on construction, right? Like clearly, you know, boring 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.

24:27So it's a very good kind of like starting point, I think for, so that was kind of like the, the, the, the high level kind of like thinking behind it. I remember you telling me at some point that the, the shortage, the labor shortage on bricklayers was severe. I didn't really, I don't think I recalled that it was quite that severe, 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 folks get paid for it such that because of that shortage. So that's basically what 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.

25:02So 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, 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 operate in this way?

25:41I 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, basically based on the outcomes you're delivering.

26:12And so if you're delivering like outsized outcomes with your software, it wasn't like, well, we're charging whatever, like, you know,$10 ,000 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 me to see how that worked in practice 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 to work anyways.

26:41There's no vertically integrated player 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 a big, like hundreds of millions or billions to like contractors, because that's like the way the industry works.

27:11So if you're just picking up one of those jobs and you're delivering the outcome, they're very comfortable with funneling that money to you because, again, 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 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?

27:44Why 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 like 25 or 30 % market share. There's usually no point in consolidation. They basically have no real CapEx and they're not vertically integrated, right?

28:19Like 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 kind of metro or region. Interesting. I want to talk more about sort of the idea maze and some of the different paths not taken at the time that you were starting monumental You'll 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.

29:01And 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 was 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.

29:36It'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 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.

30:05As soon as you change anything in construction, you know, my analogy is basically that you're doing enterprise sales where you have like all these stakeholders, but every stakeholder is actually like different every time. So you're not even like, so imagine if you would be selling to like a big company where you have to convince like the CEO, the CIO, whatever, like legal, procurement, and then the next week it's going to be a different group of people again. And the next week is going to be a different one again. So any change you make, you have to convince the developer, the general contractor, maybe the subcontractor you work with, local regulators, right?

30:36Like construction is heavily regulated, like especially materials, right? Like is it like fire, structural integrity, right? And every market you enter, you have to do this again. And who's going to bet on this, right? Like the building has to stand for at least like 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, like anything, which actually makes it a harder engineering problem. But I think that is actually like, you know, the price to pay to be able to like enter this market and like potentially become really big.

31:09I 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, footprint in the sense of like the market they serve. I don't think there's any prefab modular factory that can claim that they even like long term that they will be able to like serve an entire continent, like all of the US or all of Europe.

31:44Right. Like most of them I can, you know, are literally doing like 100 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 as a factory. 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.

32:16So it's faster for them, but it's not cheaper. How can it be faster but not cheaper? Because prefab, in a way, 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 the cranes and stuff like that on site to then move the parts together.

32:56So 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, ChatGPT in 2022, another year plus before Google started to show some of its, you know, interesting robotics papers and stuff like that.

33:36To what extent were you banking on improvements with AI? Did that need to happen for Monumental to really take off in the way that you hoped it would? How did you start to think about that part of the technology? I definitely did not predict that we'd be in this world. Maybe that would be the honest starting point. I think the bet I made basically was, if you think about the period, I'd say 2018, 2019, which was when I was 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?

34:11Like today they're driving like in a couple of cities. It seems to work. It doesn't, 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 the number, 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 brake 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.

34:46And 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's still a constraint, closed off environment. people 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 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 that at that point for this to uh 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 which was already happening, right?

35:28So 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 thousands. 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 Andrea also said this, that one of their recommended books is this like very obscure book on sort of improvisational theater called Impro.

36:09I wonder, like, if you 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 from that vantage. I thought I took culture seriously before Palantir. And then because of Palantir, I was like, I didn't at all. I think that that's maybe the most important takeaway I would get. I think people used to say, 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.

36:44There'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. 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 young graduates coming into the company. They hear these stories, these phrases, these books. All these things are kind of repeated in a very... It seems kind of in a very natural way, but there's clearly some logic behind it. And then somehow, without a lot of policies, without a lot of rules, you're able to steer most of them in a really good direction.

37:16And that was really kind of 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, 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 had, and it was like, how does this even work with like 2 ,000, 2 ,200 employees? But it actually worked. And it was really, really kind of like impressive to me to see like how effective that model was.

37:48I think that was like the biggest learning 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 deployed 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? So like, boy, 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.

38:27And 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 interesting government problems in the time that most startups or technology companies didn't, right? Or access to interesting problems like big industrial conglomerates.

38:57And I think about that the same way, right? Like you could almost imagine a company like Monumental today paying money to get access to the construction site, to be allowed to run pilots or train their robots or 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? See, 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.

39:33Like I don't think that changed because of Palantir. Yeah, got it. We're talking about Impro and sort of the reading list at 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?

40:03Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, I think you definitely want to have kind of like us against the world kind of like mentality at some level, right? 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, in my view, really inspiring, but also really is Liftoff, which is about the early days of SpaceX, which I'd say is the most inspiring modern hardware company out there, right? There's a lot learnings in there. And I'd say the big conceptual difference, the main thing that I think is so different about us compared to what most people expect is, people talk about speed, which is a really important value of our company as well, to be clear.

40:48But what it actually means is you have to get really comfortable with almost embarrassing, pushing embarrassing things on the field, and almost embracing the kind of duct tape together, zip tied technology, which doesn't seem professional, which maybe if you're doing diligence on us and talk to a robotics expert, they're like, these people don't know what they're doing. But that's almost part of our pride. People are almost proud to show how janky their design is. But they're like, I did this in two days and it works. It works on the field and we can learn from it. And maybe it already generates revenue even.

41:22And 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. Persona helps secure some of the Internet's largest and most trusted platforms with identity verification. If you're building a product where trust matters, identity should be a priority. You've probably already experienced Persona without realizing it.

41:58verifying your LinkedIn profile, signing up for Etsy, or renting a scooter with Lime. Trusted by leading companies like Square, Brex, and Twilio, Persona gives you the building blocks to create identity flows that adapt to your customers, risk tolerance, and locales you operate in, whether you're verifying age, onboarding businesses, or automating KYC. It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to with persona dot com slash generalist and check it out. I say this as a compliment, but when I got to sort of go to your office in Amsterdam, you see the really polished stuff, which is you see this robot literally building walls every single day in the sort of courtyard of your office.

42:45But one of the other things I remember was one of your engineers showing me like they they were working on some part of the extrusion mechanism that needed to be better in some way. And they had like quickly 3D printed some little version that worked. And you were like, it's not going to be the perfect version, but it sort of does the job for right now. And, you know, was was sort of solving the problem in that way. So, yeah, it was really it was really cool to see that. Maybe we can talk about, you know, how Monumental is actually working today. When you get a subcontracting job, like what does that look like from sort of start to finish?

43:19What robots are coming into the process? What does that process look like? Yeah, so we got a we basically like we got a project we reviewed. we don't say yes to everything, right? There's a lot like, you know, startups have like an ideal, most startups would have like an ideal customer profile, I guess. We have like an ideal kind of project profile, right? Like what does a good project look like for us right now, given the opportunity cost? But what's like, it's passed that pipeline. We basically, today we decide on the number of robots it needs, right? Which is mostly related to like the number, like the number of bricks that need to be laid in a week, for example, right?

43:52That'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, if you're doing that calculation? So we have a target and then there's the reality, which is I think the big thing we're working on today. But the target is for that to be per robot system basically is to be in the thousands per week.

44:18So basically on par or better than a mason. That's kind of 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 thing 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?

44:48Like one brings the bricks, one brings the mortar, it keeps it agitated, mixes it. And then there's the one that actually does the bricklaying. And they all work in tandem together to 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 drive alongside the wall. They know where to go. They know I need to skip this part because there's like a doorframe. So I'm going to whatever, like move another like meter to the left or something like that.

45:22Like that is all kind of like the autonomy part. But we still need operators today for a bunch of things 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 to like a hundred percent 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, 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, yeah, putting together these different patterns with the level of precision that is needed?

46:02Because 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 like this amount of, you know, extrusion, this pattern, so on and so forth, really down to like 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, you know, we go to construction sizes. Actually, one of the advantages of our technology is, unlike say, like if you work with, say, like a prefab component, you design it to like some size.

46:44And then in many cases, it actually does not fit because, say, the distance between the two window frames was not what was like according to the drawing. And there's like a centimeter level difference. And that's accepted. Like 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 like a centimeter or two and like it's fine, right? Like you're still going to buy the house. Like 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, right?

47:18So 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 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. 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.

47:49Wow. 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, 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.

48:21So if you think about how does a general contractor decide if their subcontractor is good or bad, obviously, a big part is just the end result. Are you building a proper wall? Are you doing a good job? But a huge part is actually just 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.

48:53Like 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 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?

49:29Yeah. 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 like successful build, like tiny wall, just like that still stands, I think two and a half years ago now. I think we started doing like bigger and bigger pieces since then. Last year we started doing, so this is like 2024, we started doing like entire walls, almost like multiple facades, but still hadn't completed like a full house, like all sides of a house, including corners. We started doing more and more, but like nothing was like done.

50:01Since the start of this year, we have finished, I think, like 34 full houses, which is really kind of gratifying. We actually have photos now of the first houses we started to deliver, the brickwork to be clear, the brickwork of the houses. In January, February, people started to move in this summer, which is really nice to see people actually, families coming into their house that we partially built. We built two, you know, we started building much higher as kind of our new 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.

50:35It's like a very Dutch thing. Something pretty amazing. But there's something like very, very amazing about that. Also because they, their life cycle tends to be in centuries. Like they get like, I guess like renovate 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.

51:08But 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, you know, completing it all together. Like, how do you think about the staging of what comes next?

51:41Yeah, so I think there's like probably like three axes you want to consider, right? I think this is kind of a generic framework that you could apply to many things. So one is you don't want to start from scratch with your technology. You want to use as much of the 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 versus, say, going into plumbing, which is completely different. So that's very obvious. The other one is you want to be able to sell to the same type of customer. You want to sell into your existing channel that you're starting to build up.

52:13So, 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 support it. And then I think for construction specifically, there's 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 wanna do are do the whole facade basically, right?

52:46And 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.

53:16If 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 of the insulation, 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 getting close.

53:45We're getting close to that like 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 rebuild 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. You know, there's companies, you know, 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.

54:18And I can't remember Tesla's, you know. Optimus. Optimus. There we go. Yeah. Is that something that you ever sort of considered made sense for Monumental? Why not? And how do you think about that category of robots in general? It definitely did make sense to me as a founder. So if you think about founder like TechnologyFit, if that's even a thing you can think about, I don't think that it doesn't make sense to me. Because the main critique I'd have of the robotics industry is, just speaking in very general terms here, is most people who are into robotics are, 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.

54:58And 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. Maybe it's like falling laundry. Fine. You could pick that.

55:25But 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 something 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 invent GPT. right? So I think it's true for 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 not the way I would want to do it.

56:01And the other part of 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 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. That was just very clear to me. 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.

56:36And that there's sort of in some ways a lack of of that American ambition 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?

57:06Like 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 the, you know, So clearly we're building this 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.

57:36So 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 100 billion trillion dollar businesses also, or to like fight against the culture that is maybe more surrounding you or the friend set or the peer set that you have who are like, no, look, I love to work in tech, but I also love to clock off at five.

58:15And that's how 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. 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 crazy valuations with their SaaS company. I'm okay with both. That doesn't really affect me or my ambition levels.

58:45But I think where you're right, for example, is I think if you're a hyper-ambitious founder, you're based in Europe, and you only talk to, say, local VCs, like continental European local VCs, I think on a practical level, you will constrain your ambition, right? If you can't fundraise or if they all tell you, whatever, work towards this exit or try to get this deal or do this corporate partnership. 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 be able to cultivate a network that doesn't have these kind of influences.

59:18I think that's also true for the kind of employees. You could hire probably ambitious on paper or at some level employees, especially maybe executives, but they would still kind of push you down into a very narrow form of ambition, which is now going to be like, you know, the next whatever 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?

59:56Or 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, you know, some role at like, but I think that exposure, it 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?

1:00:34Like, and I think that gives you like, 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 I think it's all those things coming together. Do you find that there's sufficient robotics and, you know, 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?

1:01:13I don't know the percentage, but I think we've like more than half of our team's forum. So like, I don't know the exact, like, I can't remember right now which country, but like, it's not just like from the US. I think the majority of our team is actually from the UK, interestingly. We definitely don't only, like, we hire globally. We try to find the best people. We're not trying to find, like, the best Dutch people or anything like that. And we're not, it's not even part of our caucus. Like, it's like whatever, cheaper to not relocate. Like, that's obviously not part of any of our thinking here.

1:01:40I think when people talk about talent, I think one interesting thing that, you know, people say to defend Europe, which I partly agree with, is, you know, 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 like 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 and Amsterdam or like 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.

1:02:13I think almost every software engineer that I interview, if you talk about whatever like 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? They've just not been exposed to - Because they've been at like Boeing and Rolls-Royce and whatever. Exactly, right? They might be like, they're excellent, like whatever mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and they're like, how does this work? You have to literally explain the basics to them, right? Obviously equity is an example, right?

1:02:41but 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.

1:03:10One thing that I've also seen with a decent number of 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 US 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 an Amsterdam.

1:03:49It 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 U.S. after like because I had spent time there. So it was definitely an option in my mind. And basically, my take is basically this. There's the market and 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.

1:04:26One thing that always shocks me is how quickly people kind of just move around, even in hot companies. There's a version where you look at great engineers and they're just almost like building a portfolio of stock offices every two or three years. And you basically never see that in Europe, which is, I think, a good feature once 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'd say unique to us, but maybe true for other hard tech startups is that 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 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?

1:05:15Like there's no one single construction market, right? Building codes are actually different county by county. State employment laws, unions are just different in every US state. Obviously, the US is so big that the way construction happens in an earthquake area like California is completely different from, say, in Arizona or Florida or whatever. Interesting. It doesn't function as a single market in any way. Whereas in Europe, say, in the Netherlands, 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, like hours driven from our headquarters, like from our office, and the number of houses being built per year.

1:05:53That 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? Like, I think there's, like, a lot of exciting stuff happening in the last couple years and maybe last year specifically. Like, I think there's, like, multiple kind of, like, positive trends. I think the general kind of, like, challenge, I think you've talked to Torsten, the founder of Helsing, about this at some point.

1:06:27I think there's, I'd argue, two versions of, like, the culture and ambition problem, right? Like, one is the founder one, which is there are great founders in Europe, but you could still, you know, especially maybe for their, like, second act or, like, at some point there's still, you know, you can 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 definitely need more people, 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.

1:07:07Right. I think just like the concept of joining a startup is already so much more mainstream in the U.S. versus most of Europe. 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 a slightly harder.

1:07:40But 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.

1:08:08We 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, okay, things went well last time, but I want to do something so much bigger this time, which I think is just hard for anyone to do. But two, 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, okay, I made it. I got a nice sale off the books and now I'm sort of gonna 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.

1:08:53I 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 let me start. So I don't really know what the, what, like what dynamics kind of like drive it or like, my sense is that there's some form of a 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 retire, 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 the kind of interesting conversations.

1:09:30You'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.

1:10:07My 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 changes 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, And 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 U.S. 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.

1:10:44And 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 crazy side is, I don't even know if this like makes sense, is I would like to see if you can basically try starting mini societies every decade. So they're 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 chip hop sounds like you forced them but like yeah where you like let let let 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 think it through it could almost be an alternative to like modern education even if you if you and because my sense is that it 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.

1:11:52But 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 US. I think they're all like in their twenties, right? Like it's kind of a ridiculous, It's incredibly crazy. How could they achieve that at that age? How is it possible that today we think that if you're under 40, you're not fit to be the next age?

1:12:22Were they really in their 20s? Now I have to look that up. That's crazy. There's many of those versions. If you look at whatever your politics, but if you look at early Israel, they literally are finding a new society from scratch. It's all these young people. They're literally like, we need someone to start a police force. We need someone to just like figure out like infrastructure for this country. Like we need to set up education and like they're all young people. They're hyper ambitious, but it almost seems to like create a different type of society for like the first century maybe. And then at some point that kind of peters out.

1:12:53So I think the question is like, can you just like figure out a way to like get that on like repeat? And if I could run like a random experiment, that would probably be it. And just see if you can create, give people the opportunity to like 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 like the only way I think you could do this today as a young, if you're like 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 like full agency, which is great for like us, basically, like for people like us.

1:13:26But 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. Maybe you're like insanely smart, but there's almost no escape valve from that route for most professions, for most things that people want to do. We should figure out a way to help people escape all these kind of pathways if they can. Yes, there's this famous blog post, I would imagine you might've read it, by Derek Sivers, which is the, I think it's called There Is No Speed Limit.

1:14:02And 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 years worth of work.

1:14:44And the sort of takeaway is, as the title suggests, in the right environment, there's no speed limit. And, you know, 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?

1:15:17So 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. All his books are just amazing to me. And I think there's... But it's actually hard to convey why I think it's interesting. There's... So for me, 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, like have a number, but that actually influences like the world in a very profound way.

1:16:00Right. But there's also a company version of this, right. Where if you want everything to be like measurable, if you want to have performance reviews, if you want to have, it has a specific impact on your company as well. And you can like apply it, I think to everything, like the architecture to, 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.

1:16:38And 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 slightly less structure. And I think the version that I give to my team, for example, is I think the main reason companies end up with, startups end up with, say, 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, our comms is a chaos, or multiple people are working on the same stuff.

1:17:15We need to make things more efficient. And 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.

1:17:43and now we're losing all these talented people that were so important to our success in the first couple of years. I think all of these things happen and they're a hidden cause 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.

1:18:13Is 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 like 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 and I will...

1:18:53There's countless examples of this, right? Like where maybe my favorite kind of nationwide one is there's a book called, someone who came up with a metric GDP. Half the book is about how GDP should never be used to it. It's kind of fascinating. Half of it is just talking about this is just a proxy. It's interesting to measure maybe some time series, but it's never a real... And then, of course, we immediately ended up 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 micro skills or company level skills or team level skills.

1:19:29The book is full with, by the way, crazy examples of, I think, 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.

1:20:05So 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.