The following interview is a conversation we had with William Sankey, CEO and Head of Product, Co-Founder of Northspyre, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $32 Million Raised to Revolutionize Real Estate with Proactive Intelligence.
William Sankey
Brett, thanks so much for having me on to talk to you and your Category Visionaries audience.
Brett
No problem. Super excited chat. And before we dive into the company, we always like to begin with just a few questions to better understand who you are as a Founder and as a leader. So can you just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
William Sankey
Yeah, definitely. So I’m William, I am the Co-Founder here at Northspyre. And just quick synopsis is that we are I like to call a subtractive intelligence technology that allows real estate developers to leverage advanced technologies like automation and data to deliver complex building projects and construction projects in a more predictable, repeatable, easier fashion, as opposed to the old way where people use a lot of error prone spreadsheets and things like that. So that’s what we do to date, I guess I mentioned that because I come from the traditional side of the real estate development industry and I guess the built environment has been how places get built, how cities get built has really always been very central to my interest and focus. Even if I were to go all the way back to my teen years in school, I was a bit of a tech nerd, but also like a real estate and city nerd, even back then.
William Sankey
I like to say things started around that time where I was involved in a lot of these nerdy competitions around doing architectural models and computering and drawings of buildings and things like that. And so I think that really parlayed itself to me going to college and studying architecture. So again, I was very focused on like, how do you build better places, how do you build a better world, better city, right? And so I study architecture, really love studying architect. Pretty passionate about it. But one of the things I thought in terms of just like a career and profession was that for me, it was a little bit too focused on the design aspect of the environment. And I thought there are just so many other factors that come into play to making a great place. And so at the time, it was in the middle of the great Recession back 2008, 2009.
William Sankey
And if you’re around back then, there wasn’t a lot of great jobs for people that are studying architecture. There wasn’t a lot of building happening. And so I went right to grad school where I studied urban planning or real estate development. So this is me still very curious and interested in how places get built, but broadening beyond the design aspect and more focused on some of these other aspects. How do capital markets impact what gets built? What are some of the economic underlying currents that impact things, the social aspect. And so that was sort of urban planning aspect, but then also the real estate development side of things, which is just how do you get things done? I didn’t want to just be someone that had dreams or ideas or plans, but I wanted to really be about execution and action. And I felt like real estate developers were often the people on the front lines of having to execute on how you build places and cities and buildings.
William Sankey
So I studied real estate development, and when I left grad school, I went into working in real estate development in New York City, where I had an awesome opportunity to work on all types of incredible projects, whether it was building helping to build sports arenas, it was building, like, hundreds of units of rental housing or condo buildings as well. And even doing converting historic warehouses into neat office retail opportunities, like in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the South Bronx. So a lot of different types of projects I had a chance to work on that gave me a lot of visibility into how the industry worked from the front lines. And it gave me a lot of exposure, which eventually led to Northspyre, which I’m happy to talk a lot more about how Northspyre happened and the origin. But I’ll pause there, Brett, and see if there’s anything else.
Brett
There a couple of other questions that we like to ask, and the first one here is just going to be is there a specific CEO that you really admire? And if so, who is it and what do you admire about them?
William Sankey
That’s such a tough question because there are so many great founders and entrepreneurs out there, and I admire a lot of them. Like a lot of them. I think maybe if I’m answering that question, I can look at maybe two different directions. I think on the more personal side of things, I grew up in a family that had my broader family, had three entrepreneurs, including my dad. One of those entrepreneurs was also my uncle, who ran an urban planning or real estate development company. So that really opened my eyes, how things got built. And also just like not just company, but also the built environment, right. And I got a chance to see the ups and downs up close. I got a chance to see how they took ideas and their vision and tried to enact it. And so I got to see it up close and it was pretty inspiring to me at the time.
William Sankey
And so I like to say, on a personal note, I really admire those entrepreneurs, right. But on a more well known basis. Right. I look around, there’s just so many incredible, inspirational entrepreneurs. Norsefire, we’re assas technology. So you always think about Mark Benioff, the godfather of SAS. Right. But I think maybe one person I’ll lean into a little bit, which I think a lot of people might think about and probably are impacted every day by, is Jeff Bezos and what he was able to accomplish with Amazon. When I look at Amazon and how it came to be the Amazon we know today, what I really liked was the boldness and the ambition, even back in the early days, right? In the mid 90s, when Amazon was getting started, when they were shipping books to our house and used books even. Right. And it started with this simple idea that was this witch that allowed it to really power itself into being ecommerce, being this, like, the world’s largest cloud service provider and so many more things.
William Sankey
Right. And it all started with this small concept, but the ambition was always there. Right. They called themselves Amazon for a reason. And so I really love that it started small, but they incrementally work towards leveraging their success at each successive space into something greater right. Versus greater mission. And they’re still at it today. And it’s so impactful now that you can ask for anything in the palm of your hand and get it delivered to you, sometimes the same day now. And that is remarkable. And when I look at what we’re doing at Northspyre, I like to hope that one day we’ll look back 20 years from now, we’ll say, you know, Northspyre, they look like, on the outside, distant company that was selling software to real estate development company. But they leverage that into something even greater. Right. Not that is not a great purpose.
William Sankey
That is a massive purpose in the world’s largest industry. Right? Like how the built environment gets built and giving them software to do that in an easier fashion. But we have a lot of ambitions, which I’m happy to talk about, which I hope that we’ll fulfill those ambitions in the same way Amazon has grown and Jesus really grew that company. So that is my longest answer to that. Brett.
Brett
Nice. I love it. And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder and leader? And this can be a classic business book or just a book that really influenced how you personally view the world?
William Sankey
Sure. I think if we think about business books as sort of like founders, right. It’s like a lot of great ones out there. And over the years, you spend so much time you pick up a lot of great what I’ll call me, canopy startup books. You think of things. Whether it is like reading books by Dale Carnegie about how to sell things to people or whether it is the good old classic the Lean Startup by Eric Rice or more recently, one that I enjoyed reading is called the cold start problem by Andrew Chan over at Andreson Horowitz, which really sort of dives a little bit more into leveraging network effects and taking things from zero to something massive using network effects. Right. And I think all books are very influential. But maybe if I were to go, like, a slightly different direction and I think you mentioned trying to get a little bit into how I think, so maybe you can interpret this, but I think sometimes I really like to read about strategy.
William Sankey
And I think two books that come to mind. One is sort of well known Chinese classic, the Art of War by Sunzu, which is really a treatise on the lessons learned from conducting warfare and strategy, which is interesting. Right? And then I think there’s another book I think about sort of in that general genre of strategy and historical things, which is more of a historical nonfiction called The Battle Cry of Freedom by James Pearson, which really chronicles a lot of the American Civil War and some of the strategies around it. And I guess I mentioned those books because I think some of the key takeaways that are really intriguing about those books is that they apply a lot of these strategies and thought processes around. Like how do you look at your competitive landscape, how do you look at what is happening in the environment around you and come out of the top, right?
William Sankey
And I think if you’re running a startup in a competitive environment or any technology company, I think there’s a lot to think about there, right? Like if you’re thinking about The Art of War, one of the quotes I like to pull from that book sometimes is the battle was often won before it’s ever fought. So that’s really the critical importance of planning and having a plan that you could execute on is so important to everything you do. Definitely applies to what we do at a startup, right, and a technology company. But on the other hand, I think of the other book I mentioned, battle Cry of Freedom about the Civil War. The converse may be that sometimes planning too much, sometimes it’s better to be fast than to have the best late plan. And so while you’re laying your most meticulous plan, you might be disrupted or defeated by a smaller, faster, more nimble competitor.
William Sankey
So as a startup Founder, I think these are the types of things that we think about a lot in a startup environment. Right. These are books about strategy, but they are also very applicable how you think about building a company. So I hope that’s a fair way to answer that.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. And one follow up question then, just on the topic of urban planning, have you read the book The Power Broker robert Moses in the Fall of New York?
William Sankey
Yes, that’s definitely a classic.
Brett
Do you recommend reading it? I have it in front of me. I’ve had multiple friends recommend it, and I ordered it the other day, and it’s like.
William Sankey
Ambitious. Bread and theory. Fantastic book. I would say yes, I recommend it. But you are dipping your toe into reading about City, so you’re diving into the deep end for sure.
Brett
Nice. All right, I’ll circle back after I make it through these 1300 pages and.
William Sankey
I’ll let you know. Let me know.
Brett
Sounds good. Sounds good. All right, so that was super helpful context, and I think that gives us a better idea of really who you are a little bit there. So let’s switch gears now and let’s talk about the origin story. So can you take me back to the early days of Northspyre and what really prompted you to say, all right, this is it, I’m going to start a company around this?
William Sankey
Yeah, definitely. I think while I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship and building things, I don’t think I was someone that ever thought if you were to go back, I don’t know, 15 years ago, I probably would not have imagined I’d be in a technology company. That wasn’t a career ambition of mine by any means. The way things came to be, the way Norse Fire can be, the origin behind that is. Like I mentioned, I started my career on the traditional side of the real estate development industry, building all types of projects in New York. One of the first projects I had a chance to work on, I was pretty fortunate. I mentioned that I came into the industry during the Great Recession, wherein there just weren’t a lot of projects being built, and I was fortunate to get a job on a pretty iconic project.
William Sankey
They were doing a billion dollar expansion or renovation of Madison Square Garden Arena in New York, and I was the assistant to the project executive there. So what was interesting about that point in time was that because there weren’t that many projects being built in New York, that team that they pulled together to work on the project was sort of like a dream team of sorts, right? Like people that typically may have been building, like the new Yankee Stadium, or building a new terminal at JFK Airport or retrofitting the Empire State Building. There weren’t many projects. They had all come together and they were working on this project. And I was sort of an assistant lowly assistant, sort of mired and sprayed sheets and crouching numbers to help them do their jobs effectively. But it was a great observation, perch to see how a lot of the best it was a great observation perch to see how a lot of the best people in the industry went about delivering complex projects.
William Sankey
Now, one thing I noticed was that these people are the very best at what they do, some of the very best in the industry, but they spend a lot of their time doing a lot of tedious administrative work, and they spend a lot of their time reconciling, discrepancies and spreadsheets to try to get information. A lot of that flowed down to me in the role I was in, where sometimes we would spend two months digging through 16,000 points of information and data that had come in to try to understand what was happening on the project and make a decision about how to move forward. But the problem with the human doing that job was that by the time I crushed those 16,000 data points and reconciled it to make sure it’s accurate, that information was now two months old, right? So you have teams using two month old information to make decisions about where their project is going to be 12, 18, 24 months in the future, which is sort of an inherently, like, backwards way of running anything.
William Sankey
So I thought, well, that’s interesting. This is one of the best projects in the city with all star cast. Is that how it’s done? All over the industry? And so I was fortunate to have a chance. Two years later, I went to work for a couple of other developers in New York. One a family firm by a really iconic developer in New York where we built incredible condo buildings. And then I had a chance to work some really smart whiz finance guys, prime equity guys, that started a real estate development arm on their TV firm. And I guess I thought to myself, all these companies looked completely different on the outside, but on the inside, in terms of how products were delivered, everybody was leveraging convoluted, air prone spreadsheets. Everybody was spending 30% to 50% of their time doing low value administrative work. And I thought, at some point there probably might be a robot that does some of this, because this could better.
William Sankey
I probably should learn to code. So it was mostly to future proof myself, just in case me and my number crunch ended up being out of a job. And I started learning to code by night. So I like to say I took these software development classes at night, online, for several years, three, four years. So I was a software developer by night, real estate developer by day, and I guess over time, I built a little tool to help me automate little parts of my day job as a real estate developer. And what that really grew into over time was, I think, some ideas and thoughts about how you can really be able to take certain data points and do something pretty transformative across the industry. So one of the things I built was a prototype across some of those ideas. And a much smarter guy to me, my Co-Founder, Mark Newport, who’s a brilliant engineer, he took this sort of prototype I built.
William Sankey
He turned it into something that was very graceful. He built in a lot of advanced technologies like automation. And we have this great tool for how you run projects. Now, instead of using a spreadsheet, you can leverage something that was proactive, serve the proactive insights, but also eliminate it. Like even the need to do things like data entry. Right? And so it felt neat, but it wasn’t really validated by the market until were pretty fortunate. We started as a bootstrap company and maybe three months in, our first customer was the Museum of Martin Arthama in New York. They were doing a 400 million dollar expansion and renovation and we really, you know, it was sort of a struck Troke of luck. They were working on this project. A fantastic lady there, Jean Sabisky, who’s the director of real estate. We got in front of her, we said, hey, look at this prototype.
William Sankey
Like, would you be willing to pay us to use this? And Gene, incredibly open minded, her visionary in her own right. She’d done a lot of great projects in New York City and she said, I was just getting ready to hire a couple of people because this project is pretty massive. It’s difficult for me to wrangle everything. But you know what? I’ll give this a shot and if it doesn’t work, I’ll hire those people. Right? And she gave us a shot and were off to the races. It was now we had a prototype and we actually had a paying customer. And I like to say that was the beginning of the Real Norse Fire.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. And you had mentioned there that the industry relies on just a lot of manual tasks and work. Why do you think that is? Why does the industry just accept that? And why has the industry been slow to embrace and adopt new technology, would you say?
William Sankey
Yeah, I think you look across the entire economy, right. Over time, a lot of technology is coming to all these different verticals. Right. And I think, unfortunately, real estate development has been on the tail end of that transition. And I think part of the reason is just because real estate is delivering a complex real estate project. One, it is very complicated and requires a lot of unique domain expertise. So it’s the type of thing that I do think there are a lot of insanely brilliant technologists in places like Silicon Valley. But this was a difficult challenge to tackle. Not because they couldn’t build the technology, but because it took a lot of understanding around what is really important to real estate developers. What do they really need to be able to accomplish and do and what are the critical pieces of data that you need to achieve this, right.
William Sankey
Those are things that, unless you’re very much in the weeds of how things work, is hard to see. So I think, one, there just weren’t many great solutions being put in front of the industry in the first place. You had people still leveraging spreadsheets to manage $200 million, and that is the standard today. It was the standard when we started Northspyre, and it was the standard going back to the 90s. Right. Probably the biggest change to the industry has been email. Right. Like, email is great, but there was so much more to do. So I think were fortunate. I had real estate expertise. I married that with a brilliant technologist. And then I think that’s something that’s in our DNA as a company, is we always try to hire a lot of real estate professionals. So if you look at our company today, we have quite a few people on our staff, like a lot of people on our staff that have actual hands on experience running and delivering projects.
William Sankey
They really get it. They haven’t just done a few user interviews. They lift it and walk the walk. And so I do think that allow us to be able to translate the problems into a very graceful, easy to use solution for the industry. And I think that’s why we’ve become, like, this early category leader in the space in a way that a space that was stagnant in the past. And I could get more into that if you like.
Brett
Me, too, Brett. Yeah. I have to imagine that the made for developers, by developers. That has to be very impactful. And I don’t know if it’s the case in this industry, but what I’ve seen in a lot of other industries is you have 220 year old kids out of Stanford who say this market is ripe for disruption. We’re going to go disrupt it. And they don’t come from the industry. They don’t understand the ins and outs and how the industry works, but they go out and try to tackle this problem. So are you seeing that at all? Are there any other young startups that are coming in or popping up that are trying to also disrupt this market? Or what does that competitive landscape look like?
William Sankey
Yeah, so we’ve been around almost six years now at Northspyre, and in that time, we started in New York City and quickly branched out to Boston. So we’re pretty new York and Boston. Centric. And today we operate in every major city across the US. And a lot of secondary and tertiary markets, whether we’re building projects in Montana and Iowa, all over the country. And so I think were fortunate in some ways that when we entered this space, were competing against Excel, which is a fantastic product and an extremely sticky product. Very difficult to disrupt, Excel. Right. And I think were sort of on the front lines of trying to show people in new ways, sort of enact behavioral change as well, and show people the possibilities of leveraging technology, automation, data analytics, even artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver projects. Right? And so we are fortunate because this industry was set up in this fashion.
William Sankey
I was describing about needing a lot of domain expertise to sort of even be in the conversation. I think there weren’t many other entrants in the space. And I think one funny thing is that it was also a space that people were wary of. I’m sometimes embarrassed to say this, Brett, but we’re a company that my Co-Founder and I were ejected twice by Y Combinator. And it was back before it was obvious that vertical SaaS was going to exist in every major industry. But even very smart technologies looked at the space and said, you know what, those people, they’re pretty wedded to the spirit. She’s like good technology, but I’m not going to trust that, right? And so I think as we sort of proven out, that, yes, there is definitely a desire real estate developers, people that build our cities, there are people that want their lives to be easier.
William Sankey
They want to better at their jobs as well. They have started to shift over to leveraging technologies like Norsefire. And I think as we’ve had a lot of growth and raised a few rounds of funding, you’ve definitely had a few smaller companies make that observation and have tried to enter the space most times, people without real estate development like hands on experience, which I think has. I think that’s always a bit of our competitive advantage that we have. But I think the great thing for the entire industry is that now they have options of solutions out there. In the past, there was nothing. So I’m excited what the future holds. The North Side, but also just like this is such a big industry, there’s room for companies to come in and be part of that conversation. And we’re excited about it.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. And are there any numbers that you can share that just demonstrate some of that traction and adoption that you’re seeing with customers?
William Sankey
Yeah, definitely. So I think it’ll be six years. Inmate and I’ll say like the first two years of North Star’s existence. Again, were mostly bootstrapped, so were iterating on that check we got once a quarter from the momo, which kept us alive that it was some ramen noodles for a mo time while we continue to iterate on the product. And I think what was interesting was that we sort of reached a point where we sort of built a lot of Ford functionality. We listened a lot to the moline and some other customers we picked up along the way. And I think we got to this point of product market fit probably getting into late 2018 and into early 2019. If you look at that year. We had sort of an explosive year from just steady like bootstrapping along to a bit of explosive growth in 2019, and it was off to the races.
William Sankey
So if you look at from that point in 2020, we raised our Series A right before the Pandemic started with Craft Ventures, believed in this space. And I like to say that despite the Pandemic and all the disruption in the world since that point in time, we’ve grown revenue more than ten X. And again, we have customers now not only in New York City, but every major city in the US. We’ve completed and ran over more than like 2000 projects across the country. More than $125,000,000,000 of projects. So it’s a massive industry. Right. There’s almost $2 trillion of projects a year. But we are by far, like, out front as sort of the early category leader in sort of bringing these technologies to the space. And I think that amount of traction is not. I like to hope that it’s not a coincidence or a fluke, but that the industry now is basically following the path that a lot of other sophisticated knowledge industries have.
William Sankey
Followed. Which is? They have smart people. They look for tools that help them better, more effective, make more money at what they do. And they adopt those tools. And now real estate development, they have that ability to do the same. And we are there. So I’m pretty happy with the traction we’ve received.
Brett
Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s so incredible. Now let’s talk about challenges. So I’m sure along this journey of building the company, you may have dealt with one or two challenges along the way. So if we had to pick one challenge that you experienced and overcame, what would that challenge be and how do you overcome it?
William Sankey
Yeah, like every stage of the company, there are really very different challenges. Right. We’re bootstrapped in the beginning. So where you’re bootstrapped, the challenge is staying alive. And everything you do is to get another dollar in the door so that you can stay alive to fight another day. Right. Like, there were challenges where I remember the one time we ever missed payroll. We are almost out of money. We have $700 in our company bank account, and then we got paid by a customer $40,000 check came in and were like, we’re alive for a few more months. Right. And so those type of challenges very different in how you operate. Everything you do, every new feature you roll out, it must be about, can it lead to more revenue immediately to stay alive? I think if you zoom back out, like, today, the challenges are different.
William Sankey
Right. I think we clearly have a product that the market has started to adopt. And if you go on our website, we have customers that are willing to get on camera and say, norsepire is giving me new confidence in how I deliver projects, or. You must be crazy if you’re not using Norsepire. And I’m always super humble by seeing people say those things about our company because we definitely started out very scrappy. And I would say the challenge now, the greatest challenge is how do you take that initial traction where we have a couple of hundred developers using Northspyre across the country, but there’s over 20,000 developers in the US. And then they work with every one of those developers, works with hundreds of vendors, right. Architect, surveyors, lightning, designers, construction companies. How do you leverage this position we’re in and grow that and scale that into something even more massive?
William Sankey
And I think the challenge today is a lot around how do you transition from a go to market that was built around one where I can personally tell a lot of the story to one where we can do this at scale in every single month. We can add as many customers that it took us, like, two years to add, like, in the early days. And that’s a huge challenge that we’re figuring out today. The pains and growing pains of how do you do that in a way that’s great for our customers. Because I do think customer delight is at the core of everything we want to do and believe in. We personally feel, like, bad if something doesn’t go really well for a customer. Right. And so how do you deliver? How do you scale delight for our customers? But also, how do you do that in a way that you stay at the forefront and you do it with a team that you don’t want to burn out your team.
William Sankey
You want your team to be happy and fulfilled. And I think everybody on our team is pretty passionate about what they’re doing. But how do we always say the very best at giving customers delight while at the same time rolling out, like, new features, like, every week? We’re really fast. How do you balance all that and keep scaling to an infinity? So that is the challenge that we are in the midst of. And I hopefully I could tell you the answer to that in a few years if we get it right.
Brett
Brett amazing. Well, we’re almost up on time, so our last question for today is going to be about vision and what the future is going to look like. So can you try to paint a picture for us, let’s say three to five years from today? What do you hope the company looks like and what’s that impact overall on customers?
William Sankey
Yeah, it’s always exciting to step back because day to day, you’re very much like in the weeds. Whether you are looking at passages of code that the engineers are writing or you are on customer success calls, working with customers directly, you’re sort of in the weeds day to day, like, delivering that experience, hopefully bringing to life to customers. And I think if we could step back, then we could say, well, where do we hope things will be in three to five years? I do think that fundamentally what we’re doing is transforming the way people build our cities, right? Like you look at what we’re doing today is we give them software that allows them to eliminate that 30, 40% of low value administrative work. That was taking a lot of mind sharing effort from leaders on real estate projects, right? And so if you think about that, if we could take 30% to 40% of your manpower back and mental effort in your job and reapply that towards value creation, towards strategic decision making, what can you do with that?
William Sankey
I mean, the easy answer, you probably can run more projects, you probably can get better returns and make more money. But I think the more powerful things that I think really drive me and our team are that these people can focus on building better places, building better cities. If you think about project delivery, a city is a collection of spaces that somebody thought about really hard about, someone had to finance. Some hundreds of vendors probably worked on it. The ones that are obvious, like architects, but people that you may not think about, like surveyors or even door hardware consultants, right? And there’s it’s a bit like conducting an orchestra, right? That process and the end result is usually some type of space, right? One in a city that is either unpleasant for people or unaffordable for people, or one that is extraordinary, a place where you want to be, a place that you can afford to be, that is environmentally sustainable to be.
William Sankey
And the hope is, if you can take people’s focus off of this sort of, again, a sort of burden of the tedium of low value administrative work, what do you do when you get that time back? And I think what we’re seeing a lot of teams do is they’re just building better projects, they’re making cities better, and I think they’re doing in a more predictable, repeatable fashion. And I like to mention the repeatable predictable fashion because in this era and period where there’s a lot of talk about how expensive housing is, and that is really a problem to solve our generation, right, this issue of the cost of housing, and there’s a lot of inputs into that. So North Star, we can’t solve every input into that. But one of the reasons it’s also difficult is just like every project is a little bit unpredictable in how it gets delivered, right?
William Sankey
Projects take so long to happen, it can take three to six years to deliver a project. And so you could think about all the things that could go wrong in that process just from executing on delivering a project. When you’re working on average with like 250 vendors, right? Like, all these vendors have to be in lockstep, all their costs have to line up unexpected things might happen. How do you stay ahead of those? How do you get proactive alerts? That is what a tool like Norsemar allows people to do. Today. We’re not only like Cloud 1.0, bringing this stuff into the cloud so that it’s visible in real time, but we’re also combing through the data proactively, looking for early warnings, alerts proactive intel that helps you just make smarter. Faster decisions. So you can then focus on that sort of high value building, better places that create more value.
William Sankey
But hopefully that creates more profit, right? So I’m thinking about what’s the future hold. Maybe the future is better places because we made it very predictable, but also more affordable because you take that risk out of project delivery that goes into building.
Brett
Right.
William Sankey
You have to pay investors back. The more risky it is, the more investor premium. So I think that’s the city, like, visionary in me speaking, and I think what we do at the root of that, how do we be impactful in that fashion as a company? I hope five years from now that we’re in the early category today, I hope that we are in a lot of ways. I admire companies like Pro for what they were able to accomplish on the construction side. Now they are sort of like the default technology that people use. If you are a general contractor, I hope that we’re in that position, but that we’re leveraging that platform that we built to do these other incredibly ambitious things around data, which just two days ago, where we unbuilt a new product, where we combed across $125,000,000,000 of project data. And now we’re not only helping to execute on project, but we’re giving you market data into what things might cost in different markets and help you to understand the risks around your core assumptions.
William Sankey
So that two reasons projects go over budget. One is execution report. We can fix that. We can help you fix that with the product as it exists, but with data around the market that we’re going to feed back to you. We can also help you make the right assumptions because the other reason is the budget was wrong to start with. We could help you make right assumptions about what the budget should be, what vendors you are working with, because we know hundreds of vendors and we know what they charge. We know which vendors being low and they hit you with a lot of changes. We’re indexing all that data. So if you think about that, there’s some really neat things for up to break. Probably can’t say too much more than that, but I think hopefully you’ll think five years from now, wow, didn’t see that coming from Norse fire.
William Sankey
I thought they just sold software.
Brett
Amazing. Well, that’s super exciting stuff, William. And I’d love to keep you on and keep asking you questions here, but unfortunately we do have to wrap. So before we do if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
William Sankey
Definitely we are at Norsefire so www.norsefire.com. That spire like on top of a building, except with aystyre.com so Norsefire.com. And oftentimes we produce a blog at Northspyre Comblog and some of those articles I actually get pretty hands on with. So if you want to stay in touch and how I think and correspond a little bit, check on our blog and shoot me a LinkedIn message occasionally.
Brett
Awesome. William, thank you so much for taking the time to come on, share your story and talk about everything that you’re building here. It’s super interesting and super exciting and look forward to follow along with your journey as you execute and make this happen.
William Sankey
Thank you so much, Brett, and thank you to the Category Visionaries audience. I appreciate it spending time with you day.
Brett
It’s amazing. Keep in touch. Take care.
William Sankey
You too. Take care.
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