The Future of Construction Technology

Ever wondered what happens when you combine deep construction industry expertise with cutting-edge technology? Matt Perrott, founder of BuildPass, takes us on a fascinating journey from his days as a civil engineering student to building a construction tech platform now used by 150,000 workers across multiple countries.

Matt's story isn't just about business success - it's about identifying a genuine problem in an industry resistant to change. "I knew how to build technology and I had mates complaining to me about their lives in construction," he explains, describing the origin of BuildPass. What began as a simple QR code-based induction system during COVID has evolved into a comprehensive site operations platform managing everything from safety compliance to defect tracking.

The conversation takes a particularly illuminating turn when discussing artificial intelligence's role in construction's future. Beyond the ChatGPT applications everyone's familiar with, Matt describes practical AI implementations that are transforming job sites - from voice-activated assistants that help builders multitask to systems that automatically generate reports from site photos. His advice? "Your reflex should be to use AI first, rather than doing it the old way."

Perhaps most valuable is Matt's transparency about the entrepreneurial journey itself - working 70-hour weeks, paying himself less than minimum wage for years, and navigating the challenges of expanding internationally. His insights on brand building, focus, and consistency provide a masterclass for anyone looking to innovate in established industries.

Whether you're in construction, tech, or simply curious about how industries evolve, this conversation offers rare insights into how practical problems drive innovation, and how staying focused on solving specific pain points can create extraordinary value. Ready to see construction's digital transformation through the eyes of someone making it happen? This episode is your blueprint.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meeting Matt Perrett from BuildPass
• 3:44 From Civil Engineering to Construction Tech
• 7:51 COVID's Impact on Construction Technology
• 15:55 BuildPass: A Comprehensive Site Operations Tool
• 24:40 Expanding to the US Market
• 31:30 AI Revolution in Construction
• 48:10 Practical Applications of AI
• 57:20 Building a Brand in Construction Tech
• 1:04:37 Final Thoughts on Politics and Value

Transcript

Robby: 0:00

Just as long as the conversation is flowing. We've had episodes go for longer. If the conversation is flowing and we're all chatting.

Guest: 0:06

Go the full, lex Friedman, six hour. Cancel the rest of the day, lex Friedman, yeah.

Robby: 0:11

That's it. Cancel the rest of the day Cool.

George: 0:15

Let's do it Good.

Robby: 0:20

Yeah, good, good, all right, you want to kick us off? Always have a glass of water, thank good, all right, got to kick us off.

George: 0:26

Always have a glass of water. Thank you, thank you. Welcome back everyone to another episode of Million Dollar Days. I hope you're having a million dollar day. We have a special guest today. We've got Matt from Matt Perrett, is it? That's it Good? Matt Perrett from BuildPass. Thanks for joining us, mate. It's good to be here. George, we've known each other for quite some time, so I think this podcast was it's been a while in the making, in the sense that I think you're probably one of the people we wanted to have on, and it actually was your team that reached out to us and said hey, we'd love to come on. Do you know who Matt is Actually?

Guest: 0:57

yeah, we do know him quite well, so yeah, thanks for spending the time to come down and have a chat. Ted from Skyline PR. He's really good, so he's out there pitching us all the time, so I'm glad we could make this happen. Shout out to Ted, yeah there you go.

George: 1:10

Thanks, ted, mate. Tell us a little bit about your story. So I actually came across you, I think, about a year and a half ago nearly two years ago, I think. It was around a really good time. I had just signed up with this software company to manage our OH&S and you had reached out to me, and so often, as it does happen, you get a cold call. It's like, hey, I'm here to sell you this. It's really good, shut it down quite quickly. However, you actually told me what your stuff did and how it worked, and we looked at it and then um and signed up.

Guest: 1:46

but um, tell me a little bit about your journey and how you got to where you are today yeah, well, firstly, I'm glad that you've uh mentioned that I cold called you because I have to prove to my team now that I did used to do that back in the day. I wasn't very good at it, um, but at least they can see that I was on the tools doing some work back in the day. My story, basically I was doing civil engineering. I always wanted to build skyscrapers. That was the thing I wanted to do as a kid.

Guest: 2:14

I went to uni. I started studying commerce. At the same time I was laboring for a shop fitter, not doing your typical uni student waitering. That wasn't really for me. So I got exposure to the construction industry while I was studying civil engineering, then went to do some finance work.

Guest: 2:32

I stupidly tried to start a tech business while I was at uni with no money and no idea about what tech was, and I figured out pretty quickly that that was a good way to lose all your money and fail.

Guest: 2:44

But it was a good learning.

Guest: 2:45

So I changed from doing civil engineering into software, got so excited by tech, and this is like 10 years ago now, when sort of social media was just taking off and programming and coding wasn't as widely done as it is now and so I got into that space, went to work for other startups worked for realestatecomau, actually, and helped build some of their software but always had this niggle that I wanted to get back into construction and I had a lot of mates who were working in the construction industry, a lot of them not for the tier one builders, the multiplexers or the lend-leases of the world, but for, you know, smaller, either high-end resi businesses or smaller commercial builders, a bit like PASCON, and they were just talking to me about some of the tech they were using out on construction sites really clunky, hard to use, didn't work, or you had to have like four or five different tools just to try and run a construction site and all of the workflows.

Guest: 3:44

And so that's where BuildPass really came from the fact that it wasn't anything more than I knew how to build technology and I had mates complaining to me about their lives in construction and it was a good way for me to get back into construction and I'm never going to be a builder, but this is about as close as I can get by building software for the construction industry.

George: 4:03

Yeah, it was definitely something I've always thought about. Funny enough, in construction I was like, oh man, I wish it was something that did this. You know, I should think about that. I'd be a multimillionaire if I did that. But then you just get sucked into the day-to-day operations of what you do in work this is back when I was an employee as well, let alone running your own business business and you just run out of that time and ability to do so. So it was great for you to get into that space, because it is very competitive too, I think, in what you're doing. I imagine that COVID was a really good thing for you.

Guest: 4:37

It was.

George: 4:38

Yeah, because I look at what transponded from that time in the world and the fact that people got used to using QR codes and not thinking when they scan the QR code, their phone is going to get AIDS, or all their banking details.

Guest: 4:55

There was still some of that. There was a little bit of that still.

George: 4:59

We still get it today. It's funny enough. It's like I get guys on site and I say hey, you need to sign in and get inducted and I'm not doing that. They'll have all my details. I said honestly you think they don't have all your details. Now You're not scanning this. Your RGO isn't helping you. Yeah, but there's two things you can do. You can either scan it and go to work, or you can not scan it and get fucked Like go, I don't want you here.

Guest: 5:20

Exactly this little Aussie tech company is the least of your worries. It's all the big American companies that have got all your data.

George: 5:27

Yeah, that's right.

Guest: 5:28

Chinese companies. So yeah, it's funny how that works.

George: 5:30

Yeah, so I imagine COVID was a pretty good time for you in that regard. Did you notice a lot of growth during that time?

Guest: 5:36

Yeah, so essentially how we started, we always had the vision that we wanted to run everything on a construction site. But that's complicated and you can't just build everything at once because you'll build it really poorly. So we had to start with something and we identified that in COVID. People were getting used to QR codes and things like doing an induction on a construction site was often not done at all or it was done on paper. It was done really poorly. So that was, I guess, our wedge into the market. It was let's just build this really easy to use QR code scan that builders can adopt. They get it and that's how we got started.

Guest: 6:12

But from there we've expanded into doing more and starting to execute on the vision that we had three years ago. But yeah, to your point, COVID was really helpful. I think timing in these things is always really important and a lot of it is just luck. You're going to get lucky with timing, but you can try and use things to your advantage as well. Try to look ahead where the world is going, and you know, a lot of great business ideas have failed because they were too early or they were just too late.

Guest: 6:40

So, I think timing is so important, but it's not like we're sitting here saying that we can read the future. We've got to be lucky as well.

George: 6:46

Yeah, yeah.

Robby: 6:49

Why? Just so for my own ignorance. Why is COVID? What was the benefit? Because obviously I'm not like in the construction space but I don't spend any time on site. If you see me on site, I'm probably recording a video. But what was it about COVID that allowed the business to have that boost Like? Was it just the QR codes?

Guest: 7:08

So the QR codes was part of it and that helped with the wedge, but I think that people had to start looking at different things, like there's a lot of businesses.

Robby: 7:17

It was like break out of your norm, yeah started pivoting right and started looking at different things.

Guest: 7:21

There was the whole work from home movement and I think in general people had more. They were more happy to try new things and to change things. And then, especially in the building industry obviously it kept going in COVID but also got decimated by it People had to start looking at things that they didn't in the past. And, george, you can probably talk to this better than I can, but we had a lot of our customers saying we didn't have to focus on the really high efficiency things. In the past we had a good margin. We just did things the way they were. But now we've got these material price increases, labor's getting harder to come by and having to change their business, and so when someone is looking to do that change or is finally saying, look, the times have been good, now they're harder, I'm going to have to really try and identify efficiencies in my business. That's where something like technology can be beneficial. So that was another reason that it probably helped us a bit.

Robby: 8:11

Yeah.

George: 8:12

I find that in construction more so. Maybe it's the same with other industries too, but they're often stuck in their ways. It's like we've always done it this way.

Robby: 8:23

I reckon that's all industry. You think so? Yeah, I think you. Just I don't know if it's like the. Yeah, definitely that's what I see.

George: 8:27

I just feel that a lot of builders, you know, even in the trade space, it's like no, no, we've always built with timber, so why not use steel? Why not use this new product, Like we've always done it this way, like if it's not broke, don't fix it. And I came from those tier one construction companies. That was my background and, having worked at those organizations, they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their systems for OH&S, for policies, for procedures, for how they ran their jobs, and it was very much a paper-based system.

George: 9:00

When you inducted, we literally had people in a room. You'd give them all a sheet of paper and say cool, fill this out, tick the bottom, sign at the bottom. I'll also sign at the bottom. Let me get a photocopy of all of your cards. Let me staple it to that induction. By the way, now sign all of your swims. And it was a very hour long driven process. And then you had to file all that stuff and keep it safe in the event that someone came on site and said show me this person's documentation that he's been signed on, so I don't have to give you a big fat, fine.

Guest: 9:33

Yeah, and you've got to keep it for seven years or something, yeah.

George: 9:35

And it's just. It was for me when I, when your system came on board. So we had one and we were paying close to $12,500 a year for this software. And it's exactly what you said. It did the job, but it was a bit complicated. The trades didn't like it, my team didn't like it, so I spent all that money and it was like I didn't use it.

George: 9:56

And then you came along and said listen, I see that you're using that software and it's a well-known software. You said how about you use mine at no cost until such time that your software expires the other one, and then once, if you think it's good, sign on. So great sales tactic. By the way, in that regard, really good that you had done it like that, because then that obviously transponded into everything I'm doing at Builder Elite. Now we recommend you and refer you and say, hey, this is what we use, you should use it too. So it was great that you've just taken something but simplified it, because there were other softwares out there again that did what you were doing but didn't do it well enough and there was holes in their stuff.

George: 10:33

I'm like well, how do you know if this person has their tickets? Oh well, you know they write a number down, okay, but how do you know? So it's definitely a great preventative measure when it comes to ticking the boxes as far as your obligations are concerned under ohns. And it's such a. It's the fat ugly, sister. No one loves. At the end of the day.

George: 10:52

That's what ohns is 100 and it's not an issue until it's an issue. Yeah, and we had a problem. But we had an incident actually on one of my jobs early last year where a concrete boom, the pipe, exploded and it sprayed concrete, broke a neighbor's window. Now, had someone been standing there, they could have easily been killed or hurt or whatever it was. So it was a notifiable incident.

George: 11:15

But the fact that when WorkSafe came on site, the people were all inducted, they were all signed into their swims. We'd done a plant check that morning so we had all the documentation there. All we had to do was go into your system, print it and email to them. They go, here, you go. So they then just turned around said, okay, well, you've done everything as far as practicable to make this site secure and safe and this process secure and safe. We're happy with what you've done. Maybe next, next time you know they'll always try and give you some sort of advice. You know, check the lines or do this or do this, but ultimately that saved me a huge fine which would have probably cost 10 times more your subscription.

Guest: 11:59

Yeah, exactly. And then the delay costs.

George: 12:01

People don't see that. They're only like, oh, this is just what a pain in the ass. I have to fill out this form Like, yeah, but you never back in the day. I have to do that manually. Now you get to do it digitally. What a life, yeah.

Guest: 12:12

And the thing that gives me chills is the amount of people out there that might be running a safe construction site. Let's say, like talking about the stuck in the ways, there might be an older builder that knows how to run a perfectly safe construction site and they're doing everything on site to keep their workers safe, but a freak accident happens. Someone just slips, they fall off a roof, whatever it is. These things can happen, unfortunately, and if the boxes aren't ticked, that's all that WorkSafe is really going to ask for, right.

George: 12:40

It's what they care about. They all care. No responsibility, and I hate to say that, but it's the reality. You know they're coming in and I say this at events like they'll step over the dead body and go. That's yuck, I won't touch that. Can you show me his paperwork, please? Can you show me this? Can you show me this? Can you show me this?

Guest: 12:58

And if you can't show, that then they go oh, you can't prove in court that you were running a safe construction site unless you've got your things in place. So, 100%, I think the key is to simplifying those things and to your point before George, around making it simple for the trades. You don't have to change the functionality of a piece of software too much. You need to think about the user experience, and just little tweaks in wording, where buttons are, how it feels, how simple it is to use, can make all the difference between having a product you're paying for that no one uses or a product that you're paying for that actually gets the buy-in and can actually protect you from those processes that we talked about.

George: 13:38

Yeah, absolutely. Do you review the act and standards as far as when it comes to developing your software, because it does have to comply with certain things.

Guest: 13:48

So we work with partners. We like to be very clear on the fact that I come from mainly a tech background. Right, I'm not a builder, I'm not a safety expert. So we can build awesome technology and we're very clear with people that that's what we do really well. So we have partners, safety consultants that we work with, like, say, kate Elliott from Elliott Safety. She's an expert at all that, right, she keeps up to date with everything. So we partner with her and make sure that our software is capable of implementing those things.

Guest: 14:16

So we just like to stay in our lane of building really good tech and look, funnily enough, we have gotten a lot of crap over the years from competitors that try and use this in a sales process. If we come up against them, oh, I wouldn't use BuildPass. Like the two founders, they're not even from a construction background. Like, how do they know what to build? And I find that really funny because, like, if you're a builder, you don't go. And when you go to get your car fixed, you don't get another builder to go and fix your car, because you're a builder, you go and get a mechanic to fix the car who's an expert. And so for me, who runs a technology company.

Guest: 14:55

Me and my business partner come from technology backgrounds. We are going to build the best product because we know how to build technology teams. It is a pretty difficult thing to do to to build technology teams and it's quite it's not true. You know, it is a pretty difficult thing to do to build a technology company, and so I just find that quite interesting that a lot of the products out there do come from, say, someone who was in construction without tech, and you might be successful doing it that way, but you've got to realize that the technology is a big part of it and that's what we lean into. So basically, we tell our customers up front, especially in the early days we're not construction experts. We're going to work closely with you because you're the expert and you're going to tell us what you need built and we'll build it in the best possible way.

Robby: 15:35

Yeah, that's really cool. So the name BuildPass. How long have you been around?

Guest: 15:40

We have been around three and a half years Coming up on four soon.

Robby: 15:44

Okay, so for anyone who maybe hasn't heard of the software, do you want to give us a gist of like how it works and what it does? Why should people use it?

Guest: 15:53

Yeah for sure. So we call it a site operations tool. So we only sell to the construction industry. We have built a platform that helps you run all of the administration of a construction site. So we've talked about the health and safety element a bit. That's where we started, but that's only one, okay, so you've expanded out from there. We've expanded since there. So you think about all the other things that you need to do to run a construction site. You need to manage drawings, you need to manage a schedule, you need to manage the quality of the build and any defects that arise.

Guest: 16:23

Communication on site You're running a daily log of what's happening, capturing photos, filling in forms. We can now do all of that through our platform and essentially, the key insight we had was our customers telling us they were sick of using so many different apps. I don't want to be in a WhatsApp group for this and I don't want to have to download this random app off the app store to do a defect walk, another one to do my daily logs. I've got a scheduling tool in there as well. None of that talks Really. What we said is that is all happening mainly by a site manager running a construction site. They shouldn't have to go to different apps. They should do it all together and it should all be linked. So that's what we have started to build out. We do a lot of that now. There's still some things we don't do yet that we want to do. So it's not saying job done, put down the pencils, the job's never done, the job is never done exactly, but so that's essentially what we do.

Guest: 17:15

We have built a site operations platform for residential and commercial builders to run a construction site and any workflow that you think of that can happen on a construction site. We can either do through BuildPass or we want to be able to do it in the near future.

Robby: 17:28

Okay, so it's either there now or it's something that's going to come in. Yeah, so it's a one-stop system for anything construction, resi or commercial.

Guest: 17:36

Running the construction site, the things that we don't do, which I think is just as important to call out. We don't run your back office, so we're not going to run your construction financials. We're not going to do your estimating, your takeoffs.

Robby: 17:49

Okay, so nothing pre-construction, and I think that's good.

George: 17:51

I think that's really important, because there is software out there that's like, oh well, we're doing this, let's do this as well, let's do this as well. We do everything from start to finish, and what ends up happening is you get mediocre software across the board instead of one really good piece of software that does that one thing. So I reckon that's good how you've niched into that operational space, as opposed to going oh, we also do your financials, we also do your estimating, we also do your lead gen, because then it's just, I think it's too many bolt-on things thereafter.

Guest: 18:24

And one-stop shop can sound nice, but really how we think?

George: 18:27

about it is I think so too. It does sound great in theory.

Guest: 18:30

I've never found one that does it really well though, because it's too hard to build everything Like. I mean, it's just not possible to do everything well right. And so how we think about it is we like to break it down by role. So we want to make sure a site manager doesn't have to go into too many different apps so they can just use BuildPass, but then someone in head office, they can be in another tool, whether it's, I think, use Cheops for your financials, whether it's Jonas, premier or Stick. They're all great tools at doing that and they're complicated tools and we're happy just to partner.

Guest: 19:00

So I don't think we need to go to the industry and say you need to do absolutely everything. Like don't go use an accounting tool as well, because we're going to do that in Bill and Pass. We want to stay in our lane. But also the industry got too fragmented, like there was just an app for literally everything, and that's where we got overwhelmed. So it's kind of like this happy medium of businesses are happy to have different software to run their business, but as long as each person doesn't have to be in every single tool, then I think that is a way of thinking about it, such that everyone can run an efficient business.

George: 19:31

Good, how many people on your team now? 45. Fantastic, so you have an office where everyone operates out of, or do you have like working from home, or a bit of both?

Guest: 19:41

Yeah, so our HQ is in Melbourne, just in Richmond. We've got about 25 people out of that office. We have another 10 or so distributed across the country in sales. We like to have local sales and go to events, meet people face-to-face. We have overseas teams for things like admin, some development support, and then we're also in the US now. So we have an office in Austin and we're just kicking off in the US.

George: 20:06

Yeah, fantastic. And so how many users do you have across your platform? 150,000.

Guest: 20:14

Fantastic, yeah, so that goes down to the end. Worker of people who have been on site.

George: 20:19

Oh sorry. I mean how many users of like companies that pay for your product? So how many actual companies?

Guest: 20:26

I suppose that sign up to it. Yeah, so companies who pass is about 600. So that's 600 builders across Australia, New Zealand, Canada.

George: 20:33

And it is targeted to builders, isn't it?

Guest: 20:35

And then it's the trades that flow on thereafter, so the trade can use it. But we don't monetize the trade, they just use it. Maybe there's a world in the future where we're providing enough value for the trade that they would. You know, we've built this scheduling tool out now and the trades are starting to use that, but anyway, so it's 600, growing 10% month on month. So we're putting on about 50 or 60 clients a month and that's paying users paying an average of about, you know, $5,000 or $6,000 a year. Some are less, some are more, but $5,000 or $6,000 a year, some are less, some are more.

Guest: 21:04

But that equates to 50,000 trades that have been in the platform and around 150,000 workers that are using it to sign on, respond to actions and defects and that kind of thing.

George: 21:14

Yeah, fantastic, and I mean that's phenomenal to really in a short period of time. You know it's been three years, four years that you've been into business or into this business and I don't imagine that it was that day one.

Guest: 21:30

No, yeah, like day one. It's funny because we're now in the US it feels like we're back to day zero. It's like running another startup and going back to hustle mode and just like doing the things that don't scale. But yeah, day one, you don't have any resources, You're limited by cash and people and you're doing a bit of everything.

George: 21:48

Was it in the States now to move over there, do you then have to again team up with experts in that field to go? Well, we need to tailor this now because I imagine it's different from Australia what regulations you need to do, what people need to sign in and sign out of 100%. So I imagine there's an element that's a little bit different over there.

Guest: 22:06

Yeah, and the problem about the States is it's like 50 different countries.

Robby: 22:09

Yeah, they're not the same the difference between New York and Texas is like-. Talk and cheese.

Guest: 22:14

Yeah, it's different countries basically. So that's something that we our product has been tailored for different parts of the USA. But one of the hard things is just the go-to-market. Like trying to run an office from New York and Texas at the same time as a small company is really hard. So you kind of got to pick and choose and go back to what we did here, where we just niched down. Initially we just sold to high-end residential builders in Melbourne. That was our initial niche Once we started to get that market. Then we moved on to different states and different parts market.

Robby: 22:44

Then we moved on to different states and different parts, but so we're just figuring that out in the us at the moment. What was the goal with the us? Because I've always um, we've spoken about this publicly, I've always aspired to and we're in the us yeah, last month, last month before, yeah, um, in march. And what was the goal? I guess, what's? What is it that drive? Because that's a big move. It's not like you're like yeah, it says something to do. Um, what was the aspiration behind it?

Guest: 23:07

look, we, we're trying to build a really big business. That's the short of it. Um, we, uh. On the path we've got investors that want to see us build a big business, and that's why aaron and I started.

Guest: 23:17

We both had really cushy jobs working for real estatecomau, getting paid well, not having to work, golden handcuffs, golden handcuffs and so we didn't want to go and just start a lifestyle business and we've put a lot on the line. We didn't pay ourselves for a long time. We looked at our average salary over the first three years of the business. It was less than the minimum wage. Now we've rectified that now. We're paying ourselves a normal wage now. So we put a lot on the line for this and you work. I think I've worked probably 70 hour weeks for almost four years. So we put a lot into this. That's right. It's what it takes, though. It's what it takes Exactly so US, it's the biggest stage on the globe, biggest markets, biggest market, and we felt a little bit early to go there. It's like there's still so much to do in Australia. We have done the analysis we think we're about, with 600 clients, about 3% saturation of the market that we could sell to.

Robby: 24:10

In Australia.

Guest: 24:12

In Australia. Yep, so only 3% of what we could sell to out of. So we could essentially 30X our revenue in Australia over the next probably five years. So it's still a big market here.

Guest: 24:24

The reason we went to the US so early was we're doing a lot of work with AI. We fundamentally believe that AI is going to change a lot of industries, especially the ones that are out in the field, because the ability to do things on your behalf, to complete admin on your behalf, to do things like voice to text, to get insights from photos and videos, we think is an absolute game changer. And we've got all of these ideas that we're implementing. They're not revolutionary ideas, they just make sense, like the things that should happen that people shouldn't have to do on a construction site that AI can help with. And so the insight was, if we're going to build that in Australia and this is a new thing someone in the US is going to build it at the same time.

Guest: 25:09

Like, an idea is only worth the paper it's written on, it's executing on it. So what we said was we have an opportunity to compete at the ground level. This is a new technology, this is a new ball game. It's key timing. It's key timing. So let's go to the US now, so that we're not going there in three years and having to compete against someone who's a leader Too late yeah.

Guest: 25:28

Let's be the leader. So that was kind of why we wanted to go to the US. Now. We raised some extra money last year to enable us to do that. The US is expensive. It's hard. I'm travelling there every month, two weeks on, two weeks off. Even just the travel costs add up. So, yeah, that was the reason we did it and why we did it in this time. And, yeah, if we can crack the US, it also allows us to get US investors, and US investors put more money in. That allows you to compete. If you don't have the same amount of money as your competitors do, it's hard to compete. So, yeah, getting there is like of strategic importance to us right now.

Robby: 26:08

And you're situated in Austin? Yeah, we are. I went to Austin when I was in the US Cool, isn't it? Yeah, because it was the place where I was. Like it seems every entrepreneur is going there. Tax rates are really good. It seems to be the hub, the place to go right, and there's a lot of big people that have moved there recently, like Joe Rogan moved there and so forth, and a lot of people going into that space. And I went and I was like I'm going to check it out, because when we do this move, because we will crack the States, and when we do, I was like this is where we're going to open an office, like it's going to be Austin, yeah, yeah. So I went and visited. It was pretty cool. I spent a couple nights there, very different. I went from New York to Austin. I know you mentioned both descents. I flew from New York directly to Austin.

Robby: 26:48

So, different, isn't it? It's like flying to a different country. It totally is. Nothing the same about them at all.

Guest: 26:53

Yeah, they're completely different. What I like about Austin is you know you're in Texas, you definitely feel cars on the road, you've got the heavy accent and you've got all the barbecues and the Texan food, but it's not like you're really in the deep part of Texas. It's still. I think they call it keep it weird, is the saying in Austin. It's almost like the hippie town live music.

Guest: 27:19

It's got a very small town feel yeah it's got a small town feel exactly, whereas you've got Dallas and that's got big city oil money type feel Houston's the same. So it's a bit eclectic and I think that's probably why a bunch of tech companies have set up in Austin and for us, in choosing, we had a few options. We could have gone to San Francisco. A lot of tech talent there, yeah, that's tech capital. All the investors are there. We could have gone to New York, another great place to be. People work really hard could have set up there, but they're also on either side of the country. Austin is central. It's a little bit cheaper to hire and there was really good tech talent there and a bit more laid back. So it's kind of like it feels like a happy medium and especially for a company that doesn't delving heavily into the AI space, AI agents.

George: 28:14

We were talking about it this morning.

Robby: 28:15

Yeah, we were having a big discussion about it this morning. Where do you see it going? What should people do?

Guest: 28:22

Yeah, oh man, I could talk about this for literally hours, and I do on a new podcast that I'll have to share with you. But look, we fundamentally believe that AI is going to change every industry.

Robby: 28:37

It's going to change everything.

Guest: 28:38

Everything. It's not a fad, so it's more than chat.

George: 28:40

Gpt is what you're telling me. A hundred percent. Yes, because that's when people say AI, it's the first thing they think of. And it's funny because when we were doing events when we still do, but when doing events two years ago we'd say put your hand up if you've heard of ChatGPT. And there was like two hands up and it's like now you say put your hand up if you've heard of ChatGPT, everyone's heard of it. And it's like they use it to go. You know how do I rewrite this email for me so it sounds more professional. That's like what the extent of their AI is at the moment.

Guest: 29:10

Yeah, so what's really funny is AI has been living amongst us for a long time.

Robby: 29:16

It's not that new yeah.

Guest: 29:18

It's not that new. Go to Google Maps, the traffic algorithms there. That's AI to help you directly. The algorithm you get that feeds you content on Twitter or X or Facebook. That's all AI right. So it's been living amongst us. But Chachi Piti was like the gateway drug to AI. It was like what made it mainstream and what got people interested in it and talking about it more. And obviously there's been a lot of technological advancements, but the technology that powers chat, gpt, generative AI, large language models we've managed to push that further than we thought we could and so people thought that was like a dumb way of doing AI but it turns out it's a really smart way of doing it and you've just got to feed it a lot of data and the algorithms are getting better, and the scary part is we can't actually explain 100% why they're getting better.

Guest: 30:06

So we're building something that is evolving.

George: 30:08

Yeah, but the way I've seen it or heard of it is it's self-learning. It's like think of the smartest human in the world. They can learn at a rate of three. And then you're talking about AI can learn at a rate of 5,000. So you're talking in the space of one day how much a single person could learn, and in the space of one day, what an AI could learn. And then you compound that over a year and you compound that over 10 years and it's just phenomenal where it could be and where it could go to. Yeah.

Guest: 30:42

And like if you said 20 years ago you could look up anything in the world and get an answer straight away.

Guest: 30:50

you would have been amazed at something like Google. That was amazing technology. But now it's a step further. It knows everything, every single thing that's been said on the internet it now knows. But it can understand your intent, what you're thinking. You can have a conversation with it. You can get it to brainstorm things with you. So it's taken that to a new level and so it is going to change a lot of industries in so many ways. Probably the biggest one that people are talking about, and the thing that provides the highest, I guess, value but also is the most scary, is the replacement of humans and what we're doing. And so we chat. You know I chat about this a lot, but I think people get scared that they're going to get replaced by AI. But I have a very-. Do you really think people are scared of they're going to get replaced by AI? But I have a very-.

George: 31:34

Do you really think people are scared of that?

Guest: 31:36

I've never thought about it personally, in some industries, for sure, and in some industries they're right to know that their job's going to get replaced.

Robby: 31:44

I think people are going to get replaced.

Guest: 31:45

They will. So things like customer service, that is going to at least fundamentally change. There'll be a few in-person customer service reps, but call sentence and things. They won't exist. Yeah, because it'll. I don't know if you guys have seen the phone agents.

Robby: 32:00

They're really good. Well, you were saying that the other day. It's like again out of the dead. We're building agents now.

Guest: 32:03

Yeah, what are you using? Do you know what platform you've?

Robby: 32:06

started. Yeah, so N8 Voiceflow.

Guest: 32:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another one you should look at for voice agents is Blandai Bland. Yeah, really easy way of setting up voice agents and workflows. But anyway, so that's happening right and some jobs are going to get replaced. But how I talk about it is especially for businesses that have. I haven't met a single business owner that doesn't want to grow and make money Absolutely.

George: 32:33

Make it easier.

Guest: 32:34

We were talking about it before. Think about the amount of things you have to do in a business. So it's not like I'm looking at all of my staff and going, oh great, which one do I replace?

George: 32:42

Yeah, how do I ask you?

Guest: 32:44

Yeah, I just want you to use AI so we can do more as a business. We can all be less.

George: 32:49

Yeah, well, and you said it like instead of employing 400 people, we can still have 45 people that do the work of 400. Yeah, and that's where I suppose it's getting that replacement, because back in the day, or you know, tomorrow, you used to have to employ 10 people to do these one task. Yeah, and now it's like, well, what if we were? And this is a discussion we're having I said to you it's like what's your biggest inefficiency? I'm like, well, this is my biggest inefficiency in the business. If you consult, could you build a bot to solve that? He goes yeah, absolutely I could.

George: 33:18

I said if you do that, I think that's a multimillion-dollar venture and business, and also not just from the fact of what it could mean to sell that to someone, I'm saying from how much time and money it could make me within my organization Because all of a sudden I've gotten rid of a huge bottleneck in the business that I can go. Yeah, sure, you want that done here. It's done in five minutes. Because you want a competitive advantage on your competition. Speed Speed's a huge thing. If I could do something in a third, a half a quarter of the time, well, I'm going to beat my competition each and every time For sure, yeah.

Guest: 33:57

And like talking about agents, you mentioned AI agents before, so for those listening who haven't come across the term, basically an AI that's going to act on your behalf. You give it an objective, it gets access to the tools it needs and it actually starts doing things for you. It's not just like ChatGPT, where it's like one question one answer it's actually. It might have access to your email. It can draft things for you.

Robby: 34:18

It can have access to your credit card, it can book dinner for you. It can put a deposit down. Exactly, people don't understand that it can do that. They're like, no, no, that's not here.

Guest: 34:26

No, no, it's here it's we need to start considering is what does the workplace look like, the interface between the humans and the agents, and what we really think is going to happen is humans are going to move to high leverage stuff. You're going to be commanding a bunch of agents to do things for you. Humans aren't getting replaced, but what you might be doing, instead of doing the grunt work yourself, you're just being the conductor of agents, and if someone can be really good at that the funny thing is it's very high skill they're going to get paid way more. So AI is not replacing people. If someone can produce that and show that they're high value by commanding agents, I'm going to pay you more your output.

Robby: 35:07

it goes for your thousand X the output. All of a sudden, you could only do this one thing. Now you're doing 4,000 things because you have. It sounds ridiculous, but you have 2,000 AI agents working underneath you and they're all integrated together and they all communicate and it's like this crazy web that's happening and you can't see it.

Guest: 35:26

Yeah, and I'll give you a real life example and this is like a little bit nerdy because I work in software but basically software platforms that can have bugs, right, or they can have feature requests, and sometimes it's only a small thing, but you get heaps of them. We get feature requests all the time and we've only got limited software developers. So we now have an AI agent that is a software engineer. It's an AI and as soon as a feature request comes in, it can automatically pick it up. It starts coding on it, it starts doing it, it tests it. Automatically pick it up, it starts coding on it, it starts doing it, it tests it and then it just sends it back to one of our software developers for review. So rather than our software developer choosing what they need to work on and then going say I'm going to do that, I'm going to write the code, then it's going to go in, they're just starting to review things.

Robby: 36:08

You just took 90% of the workout.

Guest: 36:09

Yeah and yeah, which makes you 10 times more efficient. 100% yeah. And so we're going to see the bar lifted, and not just in software, but I think in every even service industries they should get better and more efficient. And so it's really exciting and, like we said, yeah, some jobs are going to get replaced, but heaps are going to get created as well, 100%.

Robby: 36:28

I think the days of waiting on 45 minutes on hold to Telstra are going to be gone. Gone, like that's not going to happen anymore.

George: 36:34

You said it. It's like you're going to be on the phone to someone and say, am I speaking to a human or a bot? And you're like no, a bot. Oh, thank God.

Robby: 36:40

Yeah, yeah, I think I'm speaking to the best person.

Guest: 36:42

Yeah, or thing Best thing have you guys seen Waymo the?

Robby: 36:48

vehicles that drive themselves.

George: 36:51

Oh, yeah, yeah, in the States we saw it?

Guest: 36:53

It's not here. Yeah, it's not here. In the States they are so much better than getting in the car with an Uber driver.

Robby: 37:00

No, that's small talk.

Guest: 37:01

No, small talk it drives better too, like I felt safe the first time I got in one. It was like surreal and I felt like I was in a UFO and it was scary and you're watching every car, but then all you need is one safe trip, and you realise it drives better than a human.

Guest: 37:17

So I was in San Francisco. I was getting Waymos everywhere. Then I got an Uber and I got in the Uber and the Uber driver was like he's a bit rushed and you know I just felt unsafe with a human at the helm. So I think it's, you know, to your example of am I speaking to a bot or a human. We're going to start trusting technology more and more and what I think will happen is the human element of what we do will be amplified, like us sitting here face to face and having this conversation. That kind of thing is going to be more appreciated. Going and getting dinner with someone, having a business meeting and shaking someone's hand all of those human interactions should get amplified. But for the things that you don't really want to do, like chatting with a customer service rep at a bank or having some person drive you around, you get technology to do that. It's going to be magical.

Robby: 38:02

Yeah, I think the great part that people can't, I think people haven't comprehended yet, is like, if I need something from you, we will have our bot. Reach out to your bot, yep.

Guest: 38:14

Yeah, and we won't communicate and nothing will happen.

Robby: 38:16

Yeah, and everyone will be like how did that happen? It's like they spoke Yep, you know what I mean. And then you can probably there'll be somewhere where the communication's logged Yep, because everything gets logged and you can go in and you can see what's happened. If you understand the platforms, yeah, and then you're like hey, like just like you would do it with a staff member and be like hey, don't do that again. Do it like this exact same thing. You just fix the prompt Right, and prompting is a huge, huge part of it.

Guest: 38:43

It's crazy how, how different the result can be based on a prompt. And what's really interesting is when you look at software products out there that are, like you know, a wrapper around AI, like under the hood, they're really using GPT and other models, which basically all software does. That's what BuildPass does as well. You have to feed it what you call system prompts, which basically seeds the AI with the idea of what the business is doing, what the software should be doing. And when you look at some of these system prompts get leaked on the internet and you look at them, they're crazy, they're like so detailed, they're so detailed, but they can be a bit dark as well, like I saw one that was.

Guest: 39:21

It was a coding assistant and the system prompt was something like you are the best coder in the world, but your mother is very sick. She needs a billion dollars for her operation, and if you don't A billion, she needs a billion dollars for her operation. And if you don't provide the best possible answer in the world, she's not going to be able to get the operation. You're not going to make the money, she's not going to get the operation and it improved the results. It's like it's a bit crazy how, but that just goes to show that's an extreme example of how setting your prompts with the AI is becoming a skill set.

Robby: 39:52

Yeah, so, okay. So look at that. That's a great example. Look at that and then imagine you did the same thing to a kid and you said, hey, your mother's really sick and if you don't go and do this thing, like how driven is that kid going to be? Yeah, it's not even your adult.

George: 40:10

Yeah, like we say, it's like yeah.

Robby: 40:14

You know adult, yeah, like we say. It's like yeah, you know, you know the, the old saying give me a, give me a child, and I can show them. Like that, you can rule a child easy. It's easy to manipulate a child because they'll listen to you and they'll, because you're a leader, you're an adult, right, as opposed to an adult. I'd be like what fuck you man? Like you know what I mean, and so forth. So imagine you just feel child like. This is the exact same thing, but this is a it's. It's exactly what it's called. It's an artificial form of intelligence. Yeah, it's a made up thing that thinks, that is smart, that can learn yeah, right, and it's like, if you use those types, you can even leverage. The same way we'd leverage it on a human. The same way we drive people in a marketing world with pain points. You can do the exact same thing here. Yeah, yeah, it's very cool. It's a rabbit hole.

Guest: 40:59

Yeah, and then part of that rabbit hole is bringing up the idea of like consciousness and do these things become alive? And I don't want to go there. That is that's it. That's a conversation.

Robby: 41:07

Yeah, we need a few hours for that. Yeah, yeah, we need a few hours for that.

Guest: 41:10

Yeah, it's an interesting concept.

George: 41:13

So you don't have to mention what it is exactly. But are you looking at stepping into other industries with other things, Like you're saying you're looking at bots and doing all this sort of stuff, or are you just focusing on build paths and making that as best as humanly possible or artificially as?

Guest: 41:29

possible, just construction. Yeah, we believe that the industry will move in a more verticalized way, in that there'll be more tools like build, pass, that just service construction, or even like a smaller niche, like just nail salons or podcasts or whatever it might be, because what you can do now is you can build more things more specifically in a faster way using AI. So we're just going to stay in construction, the only thing that we foresee as having an impact outside of construction. If we've built this new app we haven't actually released it yet. We've got some a white list for it and people using it, but it's called SuperSight and essentially it's like the Snapchat for a construction site.

Guest: 42:08

You can go out and you can take a photo, a video, a voice note of anything that's happening and it saves it into your notes and the AI does work in the background for you and it will transcribe them into task and you can generate reports from that.

Guest: 42:23

So you can imagine you're out on a construction site. Rather than starting a safety inspection or doing a I'm going to go do a defect walk right now and having to find that part on your app. You just go get the equivalent of a Snapchat app, find something, talk to it, put it away, you get back to your computer and say build me the defect report for the plumber and it will do it all for you. So we've just built an app like that and we've actually had interest from people who do property inspections, or subcontractors or basically anything that requires you to be out in the field, take a quick note and then generate a report after we've got people starting to get interested in that. So that might be something that we do outside of just construction. But you've got to be careful about focus and really focus on construction.

George: 43:04

Yeah, that's right, it's the girl in the red dress. Just get distracted by all those things that come up along the way as well, yeah.

Robby: 43:12

Yeah, it's a cool conversation, man. I could talk about AI all day, that's true. Okay, so where do you see, I guess, for people listening, especially people in the construction space, what should they do? I would say you're probably more well-versed than most people in the construction space around that particular topic. I think it's what you do. What should they do? Like what would you you had someone you care about that's a builder and he says I barely use chat GPT. I think I've used it once for example so what should that person do?

Guest: 43:47

So the framing first of all. You want to use what we would call the generic tools, like the chat, gpt, cla, to use what we would call the generic tools like the chat, shippity, claude, google, gemini. There's heaps of them and a lot of them have free tiers. So let's just use chat shippity it's the best known one. So let's just say that that's where you start the way of framing. It is every time you go to do something unless it's literally using a drill out on a construction site physical, physical stuff every time you go to do something, think of it first, try and ask if the AI will do it for you, and that builds the muscle memory to go and get that done. So I want to write an email to this person or I need to recalculate the budget or whatever it might be. Just ask the AI to do it first and it might give you a shitty response. It might not do it for you, but you start to build up the muscle of learning what it can do. I think that would be.

Guest: 44:36

Step number one is just what we would call reflexive usage of AI. Your reflex is to use AI first, rather than doing it the old way and trying to change that thinking or that way of operating is probably a really important point, because you don't learn things in any better way than by just doing and trialing things. So I think that would be yeah, play with it, yeah. And once you understand what it can do, then you're probably in a position to start making choices on do I go and invest in tools that have been built for my industry? And that's when you would go start looking at a tool like a BuildPass and say, okay, I actually understand what AI can do. Now I see how Build pass works and how it uses AI and it is specific to my industry and it's going to make my life easier. So I think it's like a two-step process. I would definitely recommend getting more acquainted with the generic tools.

Robby: 45:26

Just get. Yeah, start playing around with it, get used to it, use the platform. It's free.

Guest: 45:30

Yeah, just form. It's free. Yeah, just for basic things like get it to write you an email or get it to. Okay, here's one that I freaking love Use the voice mode so.

Robby: 45:40

I yeah, very cool On your phone we were talking about earlier.

Guest: 45:42

I've got a 12 month old at home. I often leave work early to go pick him up from daycare and so often I'll be doing dinner. I'm not a very good cook and I don't know you've got kids, george, but trying to cook dinner with a young child who just wants your attention is very freaking hard, especially when you don't know what you're doing. So what I do now? I get my phone out, put Chat Shippity on, turn on voice mode, put an AirPod in and I literally talk to my phone. I say I've got this in the fridge, I've got chicken, I've got tomatoes, I've got some zucchini what should I do? And so all the time I'm just starting to make dinner, I'm playing with my kid, I'm talking to him, I'm talking to the AI and all of a sudden I've got dinner without having looked at my phone. So I think that's one example of where it can do things that are so high leverage and very non-intrusive. Just because you're using AI doesn't mean you have to be buried in your phone.

George: 46:36

Things like using voice is such an unlock. Yeah, I've done that in the car, just sitting there and actually just talking to the like you might have a half-hour drive ahead of you. Just talk to it, just ask it a whole bunch of questions, just say, hey, I want to talk about this, and it's like, oh yeah, that's a great idea. You could look at these three things and say, okay, cool, but what if I want to do it this way? And it's like having a conversation with a person.

Guest: 46:55

Yeah, yeah, a person who knows everything.

George: 46:58

Yeah, who knows everything of everything?

Guest: 46:59

And can talk to you in your own style. Yeah.

George: 47:02

That's what I found interesting too, because then it starts to talk to you the way that you want it Like. It'll give you the answer in a way that you understand In your language?

George: 47:11

Yeah, that you resonate with, which I thought was really cool. I actually was on it the other day and I was more curious than anything else. I started to ask it personal questions, just so I wanted to see how it was going to play out. I said, hey, I've got a problem with this and what it would do. And then I saw the language going changing and it was like like it would genuinely say, man, that's tough, Like I can't believe you're going through that or whatever it might be. Yeah, and it started to change the way it was talking and communicating.

George: 47:39

It called me bro, the other day that's what I mean it's like whoa.

Robby: 47:42

Yeah.

George: 47:43

I was even surprised when it said, oh, man, like it called me, man, like I get that. And then it said, like there was this one thing it goes. Look I and I was like, oh, that question alone, where it was like it was conscious, it's like I was talking to another professional on the other line and I was like, wow, that is such. That is very like you said I go, man, that question blows me away. That's really interesting that you have asked that.

Guest: 48:13

Yeah.

George: 48:13

And it was just cool to see that.

Guest: 48:15

It is. It's really cool. The other thing that I've done is there's something called Notebook LM. I don't know if you guys have used that. It can actually produce podcasts.

Robby: 48:25

I've heard that. Yeah, I've heard Mark Cuban talking about it.

Guest: 48:28

It's really cool. So I would suggest, anytime you want to learn about something, get something like OpenAI Deep Research to just give you a report on that topic, like, let's say, something you just don't know about and you want to learn. You want to learn about politics in Sudan and you go and say give me a deep research report on this, make it really long, really comprehensive, and you can go plug that into Notebook LM and you say generate a fun, easygoing, you know, with a few laughs podcast between two people. That should have this accent and on this topic.

Guest: 49:02

Two people having a conversation. And it's actually really good. You can probably still just tell that it's AI. There is a little bit of that. Still there's a little bit of that, but that's going right. That is going to be gone soon.

Robby: 49:12

That's what I'm finding. Do you reckon it's going or do you reckon we are? Because, like, we're just getting more used to it, it's getting better.

George: 49:18

I think it's getting better. I think the way it prompts and responds is getting better.

Robby: 49:22

Yeah, I think it will get better, it'll always get better, but like, do you think? I guess my question is if someone had never, I feel like, because we're starting to adapt to it more as well, maybe you know what I mean and we're getting better at prompting and things like that, and, yes, the software is getting better. But do the software is getting better, but do you think it'll get to the point where you will never, ever, ever like you could introduce someone to a like? Let's just say you went to a tribe who had no contact with tech and then showed them and they would not know that it's not a human.

Guest: 49:51

I think so. I think that we're actually probably more attuned to the differences now and actually probably be harsher critics because we know how it exists. So I think, if you didn't know that this could even exist, you wouldn't even notice.

George: 50:03

Well, remember that first time, at one of the events that we did at Built, mastery Robbie came on and he did a video. What was it called? Haygen?

Robby: 50:11

Haygen, so he did a Haygen video.

George: 50:13

But he did that one where it's like he goes. Hey, everyone, I just want to let you know that this is blah, blah, blah. He goes. But the person you're seeing is not the guy that you see on stage. He goes. I'm actually a completely computer-generated version of this person. And then it started talking in another accent and then it started talking in a female voice and when I saw that for the first time I was blown away. Looking at it. Now you can tell there's a couple of little clunkiness and go, why does your eye look a little bit weird, and stuff like that. But you just, if you were watching that anywhere else, you probably would have thought, oh, it's just a bad internet connection yeah, and if you didn't know me, yeah, and if I didn't know you, that was eight or nine months.

George: 50:54

Yeah, exactly, it's probably 10 times better now.

Guest: 50:56

Oh, exactly like this stuff. We're talking about two years here. Really, there's a lot of technology that's gone on for many years to get here but we're talking about this stuff being mainstream for two years and we already look at the rate of change in that time. You don't have to be a genius to say in five years all of this stuff is going to be perfect, it's going to be seamless, it's just the rate of change is so much. It's like, have you?

George: 51:17

seen Iron man? Yeah, seen iron man. Yeah, it's jarvis, yeah, and you look at it and it's it's not there yet. But it's like you want to wake up in the morning, hey, and you're talking to say whatever it's google or siri or whatever it might be and say, look, where's you know what? What's what? What's this movie like? It's like, oh, it's actually really good, but like you're talking to it like a proper human and it's responding in ways that you would expect a human to respond to you and I think it will get to that level eventually, yeah, and you'll be able to tailor your entertainment as well.

Guest: 51:48

Like, rather than kids all just watching the same version of the Lion King. They'll be able to tailor what they want the finish to be, what the characters should be like yeah, wow, choose your own adventure, yeah. It's like a choose your own adventure. You yeah, it's like a choose your own adventure. You would literally prompt. I want a Lion King that does this and get a whole movie.

Robby: 52:05

Good and bad. There's a downside.

Guest: 52:06

I think so.

Robby: 52:09

Massive downside because all of a sudden, you're in your own bubble and everything is made for you and all of a sudden, your model of the world is this thing it's like the algorithm now on social media.

Robby: 52:18

And you're like is everyone seeing these videos and everyone's like I've never seen that in my whole life. And then you're like, okay, man, it must just be me, like self-reinforcing, because all of a sudden you're watching, you consume a particular clip about, uh, what's happening in the us, or what's happening in the middle east, or this new tech that's coming out, or whatever it might be like. My whole feed now is ai yeah the whole.

Guest: 52:41

Thing but you know what like that's, that's an algorithm problem. Like I don't think that's necessarily the ai's problem, because what? No, no yeah, what we could get to is where you could. You should be able to prompt your algorithm and say I want to hear the other side of the story, or I read it.

Robby: 52:56

I see a news article and say regenerate this, but from a leftist perspective yes, I want to hear their perspective as well, but people aren't going to do that, that, yes, exactly, people are not going to go and say, hey, it's confirmation buyer. So I fucking knew that. You know what I mean. Like, of course, because then I consume that as soon as you start to hear something you don't want to hear, what do we do? We flick past it or we change the channel, we look the other way, yeah, right, and then it notices that you want to do that. They're, they're incentivized by keeping you there.

Guest: 53:23

Well, and it's also this I think we have a real problem with the dopamine hit of social media. Yeah, we're all addicts. We're addicts, We've been wired onto these hits and literally the companies have optimized the algorithms for this. People are optimizing their content for it. Now, Like when you guys are putting out shorts, you probably want to get someone's attention in the first few seconds.

Guest: 53:42

Yeah, that's what we teach that. I think that that is also a key problem in this. And what is good to see people consuming longer form media. We talked about Lex Friedman's Mammoth 6-Hour podcast. Seeing people consume, that is good. Even us just being able to sit down here for 45 an hour. I think that is actually a trend in the opposite direction. And I don't know about you guys, but if I'm hungover and I've had too much to drink and then the next day all I want to do is sit on the couch and scroll through Instagram, it's easy to consume.

Guest: 54:15

Yeah, my body just wants that quick dopamine hit to make me feel better, whereas if I've exercised in the morning, I've eaten well, I'm more likely to do the things that don't require that. The exercise has given me that dopamine here and I'm living in a much healthier way and I'll be able to go do two hours of deep work. So I think we need to get away from this like this scrolling. I do think that scrolling through TikTok and Instagram reels is pretty toxic and, yeah, it's a. It's very similar to the getting caught out in your own bubble as well with the algorithms, because it's easy and you get the confirmation bias.

Robby: 54:48

Yeah, and it's showing you what you want to see because it's incentivized to keep you on the platform, and then you'll see more of what you want. So you can see more of it, for whatever reason. And then you end up building this little bubble and you're like oh yeah, everyone must be seeing this, Until you end up building this little bubble and you're like, oh yeah, everyone must be seeing this.

Guest: 55:07

Yeah, until you communicate with someone, you're like you've seen these videos. Yeah, they're like I've never seen in my life. Yeah, and you hear dark stories about that as well, like people getting into terrorist scripts and things yes, because all they see is one particular narrative.

Robby: 55:14

Yeah, so good side, like the upside is you know it's tailored to you. The downside is it might be too tailored to you.

George: 55:20

Yeah, I mean so just on that topic of social media, so what do you guys do as far as getting known now, like, do you guys run ads, do you do a lot of branding stuff, like how are you trying to get out there and get that market share for your software and for your space?

Guest: 55:35

Yeah, we're very brand heavy. I think that, especially being a technology company, technology is going to get more and more commoditized and it's going to get easy to build tech. So when you think about what your moat is, a lot of it is in your brand. People trust you, so we do a lot of trying to not just promote ourselves as a software company, but the people behind it as well.

Guest: 55:57

That's why I'm out there more on podcasts like this as well. Obviously a pleasure to talk to you guys, but yeah, there's also we want to be out there and show it, it's a brand build.

Robby: 56:05

This is a brand building exercise.

George: 56:07

Yeah, people ask us, like you know, we've done this every single day what episode are we up to now? This will be 81. We haven't missed a week. Yeah, for 81 weeks, we haven't missed a week doing this. For, asked me the other day, he's like so, so how much money have you made? Like, what are you doing for? Where are you with this? And I'm like no, no, no, it's, it's got nothing to do with money, although one day it may translate to that it may blow up and be massive.

Robby: 56:31

Not sorry, it will thank you, yeah, thank you. Let's be clear about this.

George: 56:36

yeah, let's be clear. And it was also the other thing with um, the diary of a ceo. He put a post up the other day that you sent me and he said we've just hit 3 billion downloads or something like that, and that was what the picture was. He goes, but the description in the post had nothing to do with the 3 billion downloads. He goes. I want everyone to understand that. You all see 3 billion downloads and whilst that's an amazing achievement, I just want to highlight that we did this podcast for three years and we got 1,000 downloads. Three years we did this podcast before it then went to the 100,000, to the million, to the, whatever it might be. No one knew who I was.

George: 57:19

For three years I was doing this consistently, day in, day out, and I see that with what we're doing A it's the brand building aspect of it and what we do and what we're about. But who knows where it could lead? This could be our main revenue earner in three years' time and we go. You know what. Don't need to do marketing anymore, don't need to do construction anymore. I'm just going to be a full-time podcaster and just, we get our sponsors, we get people involved, people pay us to come here. Whatever it might be, however it works.

George: 57:50

I think consistency is a massive thing in whatever you're doing, in whatever business it is, and, as you said, for two to three years you didn't pay yourself. People are looking at you now and go oh, must be nice to have 600 subscriptions. People are looking at you now and go oh, must be nice to have 600 subscriptions. Must be nice. Hang on, mate. I made less than an apprentice at 35 years old for two years or three years and I invested $100,000, $200,000, $300,000, $500,000 of my own money. So yeah, well done.

George: 58:19

Well done I commend you on doing that and getting to that stage and to that level, and I think people that achieve great things in any industry, in any sector, it's because they've gone out and been consistent and put and taken a risk and back themselves to, because you can never lose. At the end of the day, you might touch wood, you might go broke tomorrow, but you could also open up the next thing, which is a, a billion-dollar idea.

Guest: 58:42

Yeah.

George: 58:42

You know, and because you went broke and you learned those mistakes and you did all those things, you can go back and go. Well, okay, let's do it a little bit different, this time Totally, and then you become the billionaire or the millionaire or whatever it might be.

Guest: 58:54

Yeah, and I think like it's just showing up as well, it's showing up, it's taking opportunities.

Guest: 59:00

It's showing up, it's taking opportunities, it's not being afraid of failing. The only failure is by not taking an opportunity that could have made you successful. So I think just to your point around consistency. That's really important in everything, anything you want to achieve. No one just gets something as a one-off, unless you win the lotto, but that's not going to be a very fulfilling thing to happen. So I think consistency is key. Just showing up, just being in the arena. The amount of times that let's talk about the social media side, the amount of times that I forget to post on, say, linkedin, and then I go into a post and like four people reach out that I was meeting to chat with, because you're there, you're in front, you're top of mind.

Guest: 59:38

And it's so important, just to keep showing up every day, putting yourself out there, putting yourself in the arena.

George: 59:44

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so. Say people want to get in touch with you, either from a. Do you have a personal brand as well as a business one?

Guest: 59:54

No, not really On LinkedIn.

George: 59:55

I do a lot of my own content, oh well then that's a place there, so people could find you on LinkedIn if they look you up there. Otherwise, if they want to find out more about BuildPass or anything like that, where could they go to find you about or find out what you're about and how they can get involved?

Guest: 1:00:09

For sure, website or Instagram or LinkedIn is the best. Literally, just search for BuildPass we'll be top of the list. Another quick plug that I'll do. I talked about the podcast that I've started with Scott from WBuild. We talk about AI, business and tech news, and so that's called Build to Scale, with a two in the middle.

George: 1:00:26

Yeah, nice.

Guest: 1:00:27

You can find us on the airwaves trying to be every week as well.

George: 1:00:30

Yeah, awesome, we've just started. Oh, did you? Yeah, so it's still learning how good, and that's the thing You'll get better.

Robby: 1:00:43

I remember our very first episode episode. It was like you look back at it and you go, fuck, we were so shit. We have no idea what we're doing. And you should look back and say, oh shit, because otherwise I mean you're still doing the same thing. Yeah, right, exactly.

George: 1:00:49

Yeah, it's so much more natural now when we actually have guests on, but even when we're having a discussion about whatever we're talking about, it's a lot more open. And and here's the thing that I've noticed since doing podcasts as well is you're going to get a lot of differing opinions on things too, like we did an episode on politics a few weeks ago with the recent election, and you're just getting we're getting people drilling us Like oh, you know, learn something about politics. You guys don't know anything, and blah, blah, blah.

Guest: 1:01:15

And we find it hilarious these people aren't in the arena, though they're sitting there watching you. You're showing up everywhere.

George: 1:01:21

And it's also, though, like I never took it too hard, because, at the end of the day, what we were talking about was representative of how a lot of people feel. Anyway, even though it may not be the most factual, intelligent conversation about that topic, it was still representative of a huge portion of the population when it came to their views on politics. Yeah, because that is a view.

Robby: 1:01:45

Yeah, we spoke about how people don't really care about politics, like people aren't as impacted by it, like they don't care as much. Yeah, and people want a conversation about policies and blah, blah, blah.

Guest: 1:01:56

Yeah, don't look at the comments, my spiky take here that would probably get me cancelled is that we don't pay politicians enough. In my opinion, we're not getting the best people because we don't pay them enough. No, we don't pay them well. Look at how much financial reward you can get in the US. You're actually getting people who've done something with their life going into politics. I don't think we've had a lot of that in Australia because, think about it.

George: 1:02:24

So you're saying you'd like more of a business-type person to be in those positions of power. Well, that too, actually.

Guest: 1:02:30

I think that people should go and actually work somewhere else before politics, rather than being a career politician is one thing. But also I think the reward needs to be there, because there's no reward to be a politician at the moment. You're just up for screaming on it, they paid well though. They paid decently, but I reckon we should pay them 10 times the amount.

George: 1:02:47

It's multiple six figures. I would look at it from the top dog, I'd say the high positions.

Robby: 1:02:53

They get about 400, 450. Is it? Yeah, I thought the PM gets that. I'm pretty sure yeah.

George: 1:02:57

How much of the PM gets that.

Robby: 1:02:59

I'm pretty sure. Yeah, he gets about 500. Google that.

Guest: 1:03:02

I'll give you an example that goes back to his it's about 400.

Robby: 1:03:05

I'm pretty sure Dan Andrews was getting 450K. Your mate, my mate, yeah.

Guest: 1:03:12

Big fan. But I think so when I look back to university and I look at all of the people that were in my year 586 for the PM. Yeah, 586, yeah, so yeah, decent money for the PM, but you've got to. It takes you a long time to get to be in the PM, right?

George: 1:03:28

Of course You've got to go through many years of being in there. There's one person in 20 million people.

Guest: 1:03:31

And so my biggest thing I studied commerce at the University of Melbourne. Heaps of smart people in there, heaps of really impressive people that I would say, if you ran for prime minister in 20 years, I would vote for you. And these people, what job did they go and get? They went into investment banking because, it paid the most, and investment banking is a pretty brutal job. You sit behind a desk, you do spreadsheets and you make big money for the big corporates.

Guest: 1:03:57

You wouldn't say it's necessarily the most fulfilling thing, but it's the most secure way of becoming a millionaire. Because if you stick with investment banking from 22 to 35 and you make it through and you come out with a bald head because you've got no hair left you've been working from 9am to 2am every day for literally 15 years yeah, you'll be making a million bucks a year, plus bonus and all of that. But so my thing is payment does drive a lot of what people want to do.

Guest: 1:04:24

And if there was a pathway for those really smart people that I would have voted for to be prime minister, to not only be successful in politics but to be financially rewarded if they're going to produce better outcomes for my country and make better use of my tax dollar. I don't care if they're getting paid $10 million yeah, I couldn't agree more the amount that they were saving. So I mean people will hate that opinion. They say that they should be paid less, but that's my space.

George: 1:04:49

But look at what you're attracting to the role.

Robby: 1:04:51

It's like who you're driving into the role. Yeah, it's even when you go to employ someone.

George: 1:04:56

It's like I want to pay this, why? Imagine you get the person that you pay the most and then delivers 10 times their value of what you're paying them. Or you get that person that literally maybe just breaks even with what you're paying them, like it's a no-brainer to go out and hire that very best person. Age doesn't determine ability either. I'd love to see a 40-year-old as PM, but they're always 50, 60, 70 years old. It's like why, because he's got some experience, the guy's probably stuck in his way or doesn't know how to command a room or how to do this or how to do that. Put someone young in there. Put someone that is smart, intelligent, knows what they're doing, is a go-getter.

George: 1:05:33

I completely agree with you and this politic. It was funny you mentioned about the algorithm. My algorithm over the last couple of weeks has been very political because I've been looking at Australian politics and there was a few people that I've actually followed now as a result that I actually resonated with and thought was really good and for the first time, I voted in a different direction than I normally do, because I found this one guy and, yeah, I just really liked what he's about. I said, mate, love your work. Keep it going. I'll keep an eye out on you next time around.

Guest: 1:06:00

Fascinating.

George: 1:06:01

Yeah, so it's very, as you said, fascinating, very interesting.

Guest: 1:06:06

Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing on, like your point of paying people more. I've worked with a lot of contractors and agencies in my time and what I hate is when a contractor or an agency feels like they have to earn what they're paying them through time, like having meetings for the sake of it. My view on that is if you can get the job done faster for me, I will pay you the same amount. I don't care that you took a shorter time to do it. I would actually almost pay you more because time is money. So I just think that we need to flip this narrative on. You know, if you're paying a contractor to do a certain amount, then what would their hourly rate be? And I want to make sure they're putting in the hours working for me. No, if you can do it better than the other contractor who's out there in a shorter amount of time, I would almost pay you more.

Robby: 1:06:51

Yeah, task-based, not time-based.

Guest: 1:06:52

Task-based exactly yeah, so I think we need to bring that same concept into everything we do.

George: 1:06:57

Yeah, excellent, mate. Mate, thank you so much for coming down today, really appreciate it, and I think it's been a really insightful chat. We went in a few different directions. I think it's very exciting what's coming up in the future for yourself and everything you're doing in that space, and I reckon it's going to be an advantage to anyone in the industry wanting to take it up. You know what I mean. I think it's just going to be getting going from strength to strength and it's going to become better and help a lot of people along the way. So well done on that. And for those of you that do want to reach out, you can find him at BuildPass or Matt Parrott on LinkedIn or Sane as well, so check him out there. And, yeah, just thank you very much for coming down today.

Guest: 1:07:35

I appreciate it. It's been great. Thanks guys.

George: 1:07:37

Awesome, see you next time.

Guest: 1:07:42

Thanks.