Everyone tells you not to start a company.
It's hard, grueling, with a roller-coaster of ups and downs. So why did we?
Because there’s a problem to solve. And no one has figured it out yet.
To step back, when I think about where to spend my time and passion, there are three important aspects:
- focus on an industry that would accelerate climate technology
- solve a big problem at the source
- work with collaborative people I respect
My co-founders, Jon and Richie, certainly fit the bill for the last bullet point.
And when we’ve talked about big problems - whether its residential housing, electrification, or any industry building infrastructure - we kept circling back to city codes. Why were codes such a blocker? Permitting is a widely acknowledged pain point - in fact 20% of permits filed are rejected, frequently because city codes change and people didn’t know. Since there are over 28k municipalities, it makes sense that its hard to track changes.
The current solutions aren't working.
Electrification, emerging clean technology and the residential housing crisis hinge on being able to move faster than what current solutions provide.
No one has figured it out.
So I got in touch with a couple of city planners to understand more about city codes and what their pain points are. And it turned out they have similar problems as developers: city codes are confusing for internal teams who don’t work with them daily, citizens are confused and take up a ton of city workers’ time, codes are too complex to find conflicting codes until developers or citizens run into them.
Ultimately, cities and developers want the same thing: a national database of codes that they can quickly search and find what they need. For cities, what they need is insight into codes that are successful in other cities that they can adapt and implement - this saves them time and resources. For developers, its fast access to accurate information so they can move quickly with confidence, and not get bogged down in costly fees and delays.
If we can solve the complexity of city codes for both cities and developers, everyone can build and electrify faster.
This is a daunting task, but the timing is right. AI through Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the capability to tackle huge amounts of data and pluck out clear answers through the right process and training. And the speed of innovation is presenting more and more opportunity to solve these large problems through a novel approach.
A big problem impacting multiple important industries, including climate tech, solvable at the source by the right team.
Let’s go.
