#249 Ken Sobel (Hyperframe) — Constructing The Future

Ken Sobel [00:00:00]:
Like look at the people who actually build the buildings and just watch them. Just watch them for, for an hour or a day and look at all the things they have to put up with like make products that, that make it easier for those people. Because I guarantee if you make it easier for the construction workers to build the building, a lot of these other problems will go away on their own.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:20]:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Ohio Fund Report, a show dedicated to raising the collective ambition of Ohio. Before we dive in, just a quick note, this podcast is for informational purposes only. Nothing you hear today should as investment advice, a recommendation or an offer to buy or sell any securities. Please note that the Ohio Fund and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. Any forward looking statements you hear today are based on current expectations and may change. Please do your own research and consult with your advisors before making any investment decisions. For more information on the Ohio Fund, please visit TheOhioFund.com

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:54]:
hello everyone, I am Jeffrey Stern, your host of today's Ohio Fund Report with Ken Sobel, co founder and CEO of Hyperframe co. Ken is an engineer and repeat founder whose entrepreneurial path started early out of college. He launched a fingerprint payments company that predated Apple Pay, which he took through Y Combinator and ultimately was acquired by visa in 2016. Ken grew up in construction, though recalling memories being in his father's workshop as a kid and his long standing passion for construction coupled with his love of engineering and problem solving has culminated in an entrepreneurial desire to rethink one of the most fundamental parts of construction steel framing. Through Hyperframe, Ken has taken traditional metal framing process that's been slow, manual and largely unchanged for decades and reimagined it as a system that is faster, safer and far more efficient. Hyperframe's snap together framing system paired with a full stack software and manufacturing platform is enabling construction crews all over the world to build walls dramatically faster with less labor and with less strain. What started as a conversation about re industrialization coupled with a desire and need to massively scale his operations, Ken made the bold decision to move Hyperframe from California to Ohio where the company is now headquartered and where they are building out their first large scale manufacturing facility. In our conversation we talk about Ken's path into construction, the early insights behind Hyperframe and what it actually takes to rebuild a physical industry from the ground up.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:29]:
We get into the realities of scaling a hard tech company. How do you earn trust in construction? Why he decided to move his whole company and his family from California to Ohio and why Ohio is such an advantageous place to build physical companies. So please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Ken Sobel. Lay of the Land is brought to you and is proudly sponsored by Roundstone Insurance, headquartered in Rocky River, Ohio. Roundstone shares Lay of the Land's same passion for bold ideas and lasting impact from our community's entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders. Since 2005, Roundstone has pioneered a self funded captive health insurance model that delivers robust savings for small and medium sized businesses. They are part of the solution to rising healthcare costs, helping employers offer affordable, high quality care while driving job creation and economic growth throughout Northeast Ohio. Like many of the voices featured on Lay of the Land, including Roundstone's founder and CEO Mike Schroeder, Roundstone believes entrepreneurship, innovation and community to be the cornerstones of progress.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:33]:
To learn more about how Roundstone is transforming employee health benefits by empowering employers to save thousands in per employee per year healthcare costs, Please visit roundstone insurance.com Roundstone Insurance built for entrepreneurs backed by innovation Committed to Cleveland since we connected

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:52]:
back just less than a year ago now, it's been an amazing journey that if you kind of trace the lineage, involves you reaching out cold from a place of genuine curiosity and alignment. From a RE Industrialization Conference panel in Detroit where you heard Mark Kwame discussing this whole resurgence of manufacturing and renewed recognition for the importance of America's industrial capacity and how much of that is happening in Ohio to just a few months later uprooting and moving not just your whole company from California to Ohio, but your whole family as well, and setting up a new manufacturing facility and simultaneously closing a meaningful amount of capital for the business and all of that alone is an amazing story in and of itself that you felt compelled, right? That like the best thing for you to do for the business for your life was to come here. And as someone who is also here in Ohio on my own volition, you know, originally coming from the other coast, it's always fun to see that resonance of the journey within other folks and specifically entrepreneurs. It's obviously not a decision to be made lightly, so I'm looking forward to unpacking that whole story with you.

Ken Sobel [00:05:10]:
Great. Yeah, let's do was a thrilling six or seven months for sure, indeed.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:18]:
And we'll obviously talk about that period of time, we'll talk about hyperframe, the business, the market you're in, your past as an entrepreneur, and lots more around those. But to kick it off, I thought it would be kind of fun to ground the conversation in exploring the crux of that decision and why you felt that you needed to make this move.

Ken Sobel [00:05:41]:
Yeah, sure. We had started Hyperframe, had started its first starter factory in the San Francisco Bay area in California. And by the time I reached out to you, we were almost running that facility for a year. And the good thing is that we had incredible, we achieved incredible product market fit with that facility and we were able to validate that our customers were seeing all the value propositions that we promised them. So that was great. But we also, it became obvious to us over, over that 12 months that California was not the place to scale up a manufacturing startup. It was very expensive from a property standpoint, labor standpoint, freight standpoint. It was not particularly well suited to ship product to all the places in the United States where we wanted to ship.

Ken Sobel [00:06:35]:
And it was, it was kind of a struggle because there was not a huge base of strong industrial talent in the Bay Area. Right. Like everyone says, like, oh, if you're gonna, you're gonna make a startup, you should move to the Bay Area. And that may be true for a lot of companies, but we learned that that's not really true for an industrial company. So we knew that we had to go elsewhere. But we did not immediately land in Ohio. It took, it took some, it probably took, I don't know, four to six months of checking out different areas in the country before we did land in Ohio.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:08]:
I love that, I love that story because it's, it's, I think a lot about an area's actual right to win. Like what, what are the components that actually make it structurally advantaged? What's the history of entrepreneurialism in that place that have positioned it to have an advantage relative to another place when it comes to trying to build a company? And it doesn't make sense to build every single kind of company out in San Francisco, for example.

Ken Sobel [00:07:36]:
No, no. I mean, the cool thing is that there are a lot of like minded people there and you'll find a lot of support for doing something new. But aside from that, there was not really a structural advantage to us building an industrial company there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:49]:
So taking a step back for a moment, you know, when you kind of think of what were the set of experiences that, that led to you being in a position to start a steel framing and manufacturing company. What, what kind of comes to mind as the early career inflection points? Would love to kind of explore the early entrepreneurial journeys that, that you kind of traverse that kind of set the stage for what ultimately becomes Hyperframe.

Ken Sobel [00:08:18]:
Sure. So to answer that question, I Have to go back to when I was a little kid and I grew up around construction since I was in diapers, literally. My dad was a construction law attorney, and so all of his friends and clients were contractors and developers. And so I got some exposure to construction through that. But I think more importantly, my dad was also a construction and woodworking enthusiast, and he had a professional grade wood shop in our basement growing up. And so I was always begging my dad to start using these tools earlier than I probably should have. But I got really good. I got really good.

Ken Sobel [00:09:04]:
I started doing. I started making furniture instead of doing my homework. And so I just fell in love with building real things and I fell in love with construction from a young age. So that's a big reason that we wound up starting the company, you know, many years later. Learned engineering in college. That's what I went to college for. My parents told me I couldn't go into construction because I, you know, I was good at math and I should go to college and do something, do something better. So that's what I did.

Ken Sobel [00:09:32]:
I became a mechanical engineer. And then the other thing that I developed a fascination with since a young age was being an entrepreneur. And I just think growing up in the 90s, that's when Bill Gates and Microsoft, that's when they grew. And it was kind of like, you know, that was kind of like my childhood hero. Yeah, I was like, oh, man, I want to build a big company like that one day. So after I graduated college, I think, I don't know, a couple weeks into my first real job after college, is when I started my first company that was a fingerprint payment company that predated Apple pay. And I had zero business. I knew nothing about the industry.

Ken Sobel [00:10:13]:
We had zero business starting that company, but we did it anyway. And that's what drew me and my co founders out to California in the first place, is that was supposed to be like the technology startup pin, and that's where we should go. So we did. We got into Y Combinator. That became our first company, and we wound up selling it to Visa. So that was a modest success for being in our early to mid-20s.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:39]:
Sure, yeah, modestly.

Ken Sobel [00:10:41]:
But moreover, it was like a lesson in how to start a company because we basically learned everything the hard way. And then so we sold it. I went to go work for one of my angel investors. He was starting his own company. So I went to go work for him for a couple of years, and finally I said, you know, I'm ready to build a more significant company. Now I think, I think I know more about how to build a company. And this time I want to have a lot of fun doing it. I don't want to like have, I don't want to have to, you know, yank myself out of bed against my will every morning.

Ken Sobel [00:11:10]:
I really want to have fun doing this. And so it was obvious that we should try to, you know, we were, we were engineers and we should try to apply engineering to construction in some way. Because construction is one of these industries where the best engineers in the world do not apply themselves historically. And it has so many problems and there's so much low hanging fruit that, that we could fix with, with an engineering toolbox and an engineering skill set. So, so that was like the, that was the first, that was the reason why we chose that industry. And then, and then the question becomes like, okay, well, what are we actually going to do? What problem are we going to solve? And everybody knows whether, you know, construction or not, everybody knows that it's slow and expensive.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:57]:
Right baseline.

Ken Sobel [00:11:58]:
Everybody on the planet knows that. But the question is why? And really, it is one of these labor cost dominated industries, just like healthcare, just like education. Building anything, especially a large commercial building, takes an army of people. Even a small house takes a small army of people. And these people need to build the structure that they are constructing out of building products that were designed many decades ago. And they need to put just an extraordinary amount of work into those products at the construction site to make it into a real building. And I think our unique perspective that Hyperframe took early on was that the reason that construction is so slow and expensive is because we are building from these very primitive basic materials. We can't expect construction workers to work any faster if this is what they have to work with.

Ken Sobel [00:12:59]:
And so at Hyperframe, what we want to do is redesign fundamental building products to be an order of magnitude faster to install and bake that into the way that they are designed. And we decided to do that with metal wall framing for large commercial buildings first. And we spent now seven, almost eight years working on that problem of just the metal framing trade. And that's what Hyperframe does. So what we are making now is a metal wall framing product for large commercial buildings that snaps together with almost no tools and almost no training, at a speed of today, five times faster than traditional wallframe. Would it be helpful to like, yeah, kind of explain what a customer's journey is when they start working with Hyperframe?

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:50]:
Yeah.

Ken Sobel [00:13:51]:
Should we do that? Okay, so there are basically three phases to a hyperframe project. The first phase is design or pre construction. Second phase is manufacturing, and the third phase is installation. And so in the pre construction phase, we give our customers access to a software application called Hyper Bim. And Hyper BIM is a 3D modeling tool that they will use to develop the design of where every single wall stud should go in the building. And we developed this software in a way where once it reads in the architectural model and the model of where all the plumbing and electrical and ductwork needs to go, that the framing design will be automatically calculated. And the customer's only job is to look at a list of issues that make it impossible to build a wall. And their job is to go through that list with the general contractor and the other trades in the project and resolve them.

Ken Sobel [00:14:45]:
And so it's a huge change in the way that, in the way that metal framing is designed. In fact, most metal framing projects are not designed at all ahead of time, and it's just figured out on the job site when they start installing the product. So it's a. That is like half of the engineering investment in our company is just the functionality of that software. And then of course, we will mass produce the product to match the 3D model. And we will manufacture each piece of framing to the proper length, and we will pre fasten a snap connector onto every connection position. And then we will kit that material by zone of the building. So if it's an apartment building, every apartment would have its own kit of framing.

Ken Sobel [00:15:30]:
And then that product is shipped to the building and brought to the proper floor for installation. And then the customer scans each piece with an iPad and the iPad shows them where they snap it in. It ends up being we work with our customer much earlier in the process than traditional metal framing manufacturers do. It is a much more comprehensive workflow. It is totally different than what they do now in every respect, but it gives them this, like, this like Lego set like experience when they, when they install the product on site. It's. And if, if a kid were strong enough, a kid could do it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:10]:
Yeah, no, that's awesome. That's. I think it paints the whole picture, ties it all together. When you exited your last company coming out of Y Combinator, you mentioned you learned the entrepreneurial lessons the hard way and could kind of channel those into. Into hyperframe. How did you approach the onset of Hyper Frame? What do you feel were some of the most salient lessons you were carrying with you at that time that informed how you wanted to do it differently beyond, you know, kind of love of the problem itself.

Ken Sobel [00:16:40]:
We could probably spend an hour talking about that. Here are the ones that come to mind. The first company was in an industry with intense competition. So this was, we started in 2014. And if you go back to 2014, there were dozens, if not more than 100 different companies trying to create a mobile wallet or a next generation payment system. And we were just another one of those. And so that made it really hard. It makes it really hard to differentiate yourself when there's so many other competitors working on the problem.

Ken Sobel [00:17:18]:
It's hard to differentiate yourself to investors, it's hard to differentiate yourself to customers, it's hard to differentiate yourself to employees. And so we intentionally wanted to. With Hyperframe, we wanted to select an industry and a product space where we felt that there would be very few competitors and where we felt that we would have like some, some structural or unfair advantages against the competitors that we did have. And so we kind of thought to ourselves like, well, the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs in the country are probably not applying their efforts towards wall studs. And so that will give us the space to develop something really good without having. So that was a pretty big one. Another related one is like the classic idea of is your product a vitamin or a painkiller? And with the first company, we were trying to make a product that was better than a credit card swipe. But a credit card swipe is pretty good.

Ken Sobel [00:18:15]:
It's pretty fast. Now of course, in the 10 years that has elapsed now people mostly tap their cards but, but still there's credit card swipe only takes a second. And so bringing that down to, you know, sub one second or making it so somebody hasn't taken their card out of their wallet, that's not going to change anybody's life and nobody desperately needs it. But in construction, improvement is desperately needed. If you walk onto any construction site of any kind, you, you will stumble across, I don't know, five or ten major problems in your first 30 minutes of walking around. And even if you look at a big gleaming high rise going up and from the, if you're just a pedestrian on the street watching this thing go up, it looks like this precision engineered marvel of engineering. That's just a perception that's not reality. If you go on any of these projects, there are huge problems and it takes a long time and it's really expensive.

Ken Sobel [00:19:15]:
So with Hyperframe, we're developing something that's much more of a painkiller. And it's like we want to give our customers a product where after they try it, they can never go back.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:26]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:26]:
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Jeffrey Stern [00:20:22]:
I found it really helpful in thinking about and trying to originally understand and learn about what you were building to feel the pain. And so perhaps you could just kind of describe like, what is the status quo of what, what it looks and feels like to do steel framing today. And that can kind of seg us into what is the vision for the future that you're imagining and bringing to fruition.

Ken Sobel [00:20:51]:
Okay, sure. So if you are a metal framer on a commercial building, you probably start your day somewhere between 6 and 7 in the morning. You're gonna work an eight hour day and it could be in the middle of the winter on, you know, and you're 20 floors off the ground with like a 20 degree wind chill. Or it could be in the middle of the summer and it's like 100 degrees outside and everything in between. So that's just, that's just kind of to set the stage of, of the environment that you're walking into. And you're wearing, you're wearing tool bags that weigh, I don't know, 20, 30 pounds, maybe more all day long. And so that's before you even start doing any work. And then you're going to walk onto the job site.

Ken Sobel [00:21:42]:
And metal framing usually arrives to the job site in bundles, large bundles of metal that come in stock lengths. And I don't know, these bundles might be, call it a thousand pounds. Okay. And so they're going to break the strapping on those bundles and they're going to, they're going to manually process each stick of framing in that bundle and build it into a finished wall. And so that means every single piece is going to be measured, it's going to be marked, it's going to be cut, it's going to be screwed. You're using a lot of, you're using a lot of hazardous equipment that's really loud, like a chop saw. You know, you have to use an abrasive chop saw to cut steel studs. And so it's really loud and it creates this like huge spark trail as you're cutting.

Ken Sobel [00:22:32]:
Eddie, you're using that all day long. And a lot of framers don't wear, they don't even wear hearing protection when they're doing this kind of stuff. And, and then, you know, imagine that you're, imagine that your job, you're usually, you're working on a crew of four or five with four or 500 framers when you're framing out a floor. And imagine that your job is you're going to screw the bottom of every stud into the floor. And so that means that you've got those like 30 pound tool bags on your waist and you are hunched over all day, all day with a screw gun and you're installing who knows how many thousands of screws that day. And so your back is really going to hurt when you go home, or you're the guy who screws them in at the top and you're going up and down a scaffold all day long. And so like, ergonomically, it's a very tough job. And so it's been this way for, since metal framing was introduced into the market, which was in the 50s.

Ken Sobel [00:23:33]:
So it's been this way for 70 years plus.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:35]:
And in the entirety of that, that time, why do you feel no one has attempted to kind of remedy the situation in the way that you guys have?

Ken Sobel [00:23:45]:
I think there are a few reasons. Number one, I think that the. Unfortunately, I think that the manufacturers of building products in general, this is definitely true of metal framing, are not like the culture they've developed their companies with a culture that is kind of adverse toward doing things differently. They, you know, they make, they manufacture commodity goods that are sold at relatively low margin. And so in order to make that a good business, they have had to build excellence around trying to make product faster and more efficiently. And if they can sell the product for 2 or 3% less than their competitor, then that's a win for them. But what that means is that if they ever try to do anything new, then, you know, it's hard for them to do anything new because they're risking a relatively small gross profit on their goods. And so they just can't.

Ken Sobel [00:24:44]:
The way that the companies are structured financially is just very difficult for them to make bets on things that are different and new. And I think the other problem that they have is that they are not really well connected to their customers. Generally, building products manufacturers don't sell direct to the customers. They sell to a distributor and the distributor sells to the customer. And that's a really big problem because if you try to make, if you're going to make a new product, the first iteration of the new product that you make is going to be bad. And you need this really tight feedback loop of customer feedback to make it better. And I think it's hard to. I think it's hard for.

Ken Sobel [00:25:22]:
I think it's hard for you to do that when you don't sell directly to the customer. And so I think those are some structural problems with just the way that traditional building manufacturers exist in today's society and how they've evolved over the last however many decades they've been in business. They're building products manufacturers that are 300 years old.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:41]:
Yeah.

Ken Sobel [00:25:44]:
So that's one thing. And then I think the second thing is that I alluded to this before. Unfortunately, the construction industry has gotten a bad rap. And if you talk to the best and brightest engineers at the best engineering colleges in America, none of them aspire to go into the construction industry or even the manufacturing industry. Right. They want to work at like Tesla or OpenAI or some, some other industry that who are who are or some other company led by some visionary CEO has gotten really good at recruiting and making these industries feel like a great place to do your best work and build a career. There's really nothing like that in construction. And so unfortunately, the people in construction who see the problems, who are great people, they don't necessarily have the engineering toolbox to fix it in the best way.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:40]:
Given the lineage of lack of change in the industry, just status quo justification for the way things are are the way things have been. How do you convince people in an industry that's skeptical or averse to that kind of change that you actually have a better mousetrap and now grounded in the, you know, painful picture that you painted of what it is today to do steel framing? What does it look like in the hyper frame vision of that?

Ken Sobel [00:27:11]:
Sure. Okay, first question is how do we position our product in an industry that maybe is adverse to change? Okay. Number one, I think, is giving the customer the impression that we're credible. I think that especially with a lot of the personalities that have become common in the construction industry, there's just, you know, one of the interesting things about the construction industry is that there's not a lot of room for experimentation. Everybody's working on a building that is going to be, that's going to become a finished product. And some of these commercial structures, some of them are $100 million, some of them are $700 million, some of them are billion dollar plus projects. And in the way that a construction site works is there are so many different trades and so many people involved in the process that if even if there's even one problem with one trade in one part of the building, it can cause a dramatic ripple effect in the success of the project and the schedule of the project. And so, and so I think what that means is that the customers who build these or the contractors who build these buildings are really nervous to do something risky.

Ken Sobel [00:28:23]:
And so showing the customer that we are credible is really important. We can't just, you know, it's not enough to just be a couple of smart engineers from a good school with some startup experience and say, like, hey, we're gonna like change the way you build this whole massive project. We spent a lot of time getting to, we spent a lot of time in learning mode. And like wall framing sounds like it's like, it might be simple, but once you spend a few years learning the trade, you learn that it is not. And so we just spent a long time learning. We spent a long time learning from customers, from structural engineers, other manufacturing companies, the organizations who do code approvals. And one of the really important things for us early on was I recruited, I recruited a co founder named Todd Brady who had achieved. He had developed a reputation of being like the most successful metal framing entrepreneur in the United States.

Ken Sobel [00:29:29]:
And he had commercialized products back in the 90s that are now used on every single construction site everywhere. So that was really important because we had the engineering smarts, but we didn't really know all the nitty gritty. And so the result is that for a startup, we spent an unusual amount of time learning the market, learning from our customers and developing the product. And when I say unusual amount of time, I'll say like four to five years before we generated a dollar of revenue. So that's the first question, I think that's the first, that's my first answer to question is, yeah, how do we get a product onto a big project? Is credibility for sure. And credibility comes in a lot of different flavors. It's do we sound credible when we meet the customer and explain what the product does? Does it have all the proper code Approvals, how. What kind of data do we have from, you know, either warehouse testing or other customers who have installed the product to say that it.

Ken Sobel [00:30:31]:
To show that it will work, or it has the speed advantage that we're advertising or the quality or the safety advantage. Is our capability to manufacture the product credible and can we do it on time? And prefabrication has a lot of challenges that a lot of customers have maybe learned the hard way, and so they may be skeptical about a prefabricated product. And so how do we address all of the potential obstacles to prefabrication? So credibility is really important. And then one of the things we've been successful with when we meet a new customer is we say, you do not have to commit an entire tower to Hyperframe before you've ever tried it. We will provide them the product documentation to submit to the architect so that they can submit Hyperframe as an alternate, and they can try Hyperframe on one floor and they can see how that goes. And based on that experience, they can decide to use more and more of the product as they advance the construction of the building. Those have all been. Have all been important.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:35]:
Yeah.

Ken Sobel [00:31:36]:
The second part of your question was,

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:38]:
what is the it's, you know, emerging from. Call it that period of credibility building, of learning, you know, really understanding deeply what the problem is. You emerge from the other side with Hyperframe with a credible, you know, product and offering that is sufficiently compelling to convince people to at least, you know, take a shot on it. Right. So maybe just walk us through, like, what. What changes for a crew on day one if they're working with Hyperframe, and what are the problems that you're solving? Again, kind of grounded in that painful picture that we painted earlier, actually, before

Ken Sobel [00:32:17]:
we even started designing the product. This goes back to the vitamin versus painkiller idea that I just talked about. We knew that if we were going to get a customer Persona to adopt the product who was maybe adverse to trying new things, that the advantage to using Hyperframe would have to be so significant that they would want to take the risk. And so the initial goal for the product before we designed anything, was that it would be 10 times faster to install. And we went from there. So I'll talk about now what our customers actually see when they install Hyperframe on a job site for the first day. I was just on a site with a customer installing for the first time a couple weeks ago. So this is fresh.

Ken Sobel [00:33:07]:
They do have to unlearn what they know a little bit, but what they'll see is they will be working with a crew size that is a fraction of what they usually use. And so perhaps if there's traditionally a crew of six framers that are framing on a floor, we actually have to train our customers to reduce that number down to only two people. Because the. I mean, I think this is true of anything. It's like with a lot of things, the more people that you add into an activity, you know, the more they get in each other's way, and to some extent, the slower that they go. And so Hyperframe is installed the fastest when there are fewer people working on it. And that's not to say that we're trying to slash the number of people on a job site, but, you know, maybe there's two people working on one side of the building and two people working on the other side. And they're not really.

Ken Sobel [00:33:58]:
They're kind of working separately on two in two teams. But you'll notice that right away is that there's only a couple people. And then you will see that those two people will finish in a day. What normally would take them a multiple of multiple days or a multiple of the time. And it will feel kind of unfamiliar to them. And they'll kind of think like, man, am I. Am I doing this right? Because they're, they're. The process of snapping in the framing is just different than what they're used to.

Ken Sobel [00:34:31]:
Instead of building one wall at a time, they're building a zone of walls at a time. And they're just, you know, going back and forth from the pile to the wall that they're building and snapping in these parts, and it kind of. It just looks unfamiliar to them. But then at the end of the day, they. They will look at what they built and they'll say, man, I killed it. And then the end result, just from a quality perspective, will look extremely clean, and it's a lot easier on them. So what I talked about in terms of somebody that needs to hunch over all day to screw the bottoms of all the studs in that does not exist. Every single stud installs from a standing position, only one person.

Ken Sobel [00:35:06]:
And so they don't need to hunch over on the ground and they don't need to get up on ladders or scaffolds. And I think this took us some time to dial this in, like this first day installation experience. But we're at the point now where a customer after the first day will say, man, I really like this product. And they'll see the benefit on day one. Even if it'll take them a few days to get up to full speed. And I think that's unusual. There are other construction products offered by other companies where you might need to finish a whole building with that product and like take a loss on the first project where you install it before the customer sees the benefit. And so the really cool thing is that the customer sees the benefit immediately.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:49]:
Yeah. So let's talk about the current chapter of Hyperframe. It's one a lot more about scaling hard tech, the manufacturing side of it, the supply side, to meet the demand that you're experiencing now. Having a fundamentally solved a problem, met a certain problem in the market and fixed it, and now it's about spreading it. Take us through the vision really from here. How do you see Hyperframe today? Where are you trying to take it and what does the future of construction look like with Hyperframe?

Ken Sobel [00:36:23]:
Minute Great. So when we operated our starter factory in California, it would take us anywhere between one and five weeks to manufacture one floor of framing for a tower. And so when it takes you between one and five weeks to manufacture a floor for a tower, that means that you can only manufacture one, one tower at a time. And that's, we really need to manufacture a much larger volume than that if we have, for example, I don't know, 10 different customers who want to, who want to build 10 different towers at the same time with Hyperframe. And so, so that means that we need to get, we need a much larger and more automated manufacturing facility. And so we relocated the company and I relocated myself to Ohio to do that. And so I'm actually sitting in thousand square foot industrial building on the west side of Columbus that will be Hyperframe's first large scale factory. And I think something that a lot of people don't understand about manufacturing is that you can't necessarily just, you can't design or invent a great new product and then just call somebody and say, can you manufacture this for me? Sometimes you can do that.

Ken Sobel [00:37:35]:
Maybe for consumer electronics you can do that. But if your product requires manufacturing processes that don't exist anywhere else, then you can't do that. Because people say, well, how? I don't know, I don't have the equipment to be able to do that. I don't have the expertise. Because in some cases new equipment and new expertise needs to be developed. And so that is the situation where we found ourselves. And what that meant is that we needed to develop the competency to do those things internally using some help from outside the company. But we Needed to really take the lead on designing and implementing a bunch of new manufacturing processes.

Ken Sobel [00:38:20]:
Unfortunately, the way that metal framing, that metal framing has been manufactured for 70 years is just not capable of manufacturing our product. And so the thing that a lot of people don't understand is that designing the manufacturing system is something like 10 times harder than designing the product itself. It's like one of these, say what you will about Elon Musk, but it's one of those Elon Musk isms that you discover is true if you're trying to manufacture something few different directions.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:49]:
So what, what are you most excited about right now?

Ken Sobel [00:38:52]:
Really excited to. I'm really excited to build out this factory. This will. It's 60,000 square feet. So that's a huge. It's, it's about four times larger than what we started out with in California. But of course it's not easy. Like it's one of the biggest factories in the world.

Ken Sobel [00:39:08]:
But what it will be is it, it will be one of the most technologically advanced building products manufacture factories in the world. And the reason is that for the product that we make, if you look at the manufacturing line, you come back in 12 months and you look at the manufacturing line that we stand up here, it will not produce the same widget over and over and over again. At the end of the line, we are producing a product that is prefabricated to fit the design of the building that we are selling to. And the design of every building is different. It creates, it's one of the things that creates like a beautiful and interesting world is that all the buildings look different. But that's a huge manufacturing challenge because you need, you need a manufacturing line that can automatically make, make goods that are different shapes and different lengths and in different configurations from a standard set of parts. And so this is one of the things that is one of the challenges that goes into manufacturing design for us. And so in order to, in order to do this, in order to ship a kit of framing that will show up to the job site with pieces that are different lengths, different sizes, different configurations, we need to design basically an all new manufacturing process from soup to nuts.

Ken Sobel [00:40:32]:
And it is all driven by a 3D modeling software application that we developed ourselves that that will tell the factory what to make and in what order in a way that, in a way that all these things will stack neatly onto a flatbed truck and go in some cases across the country and then fit perfectly into a building that's something that really hasn't been built before. And we're going to have the first instance of it, and then the really exciting thing after that is then we get to make, you know, we get to make Factory two and Factory three that will be even much larger than what we have. So that's super exciting because we brought the company to this place where we have extreme product market fit, we have extreme demand, and that feels good. And that was kind of like the end of a lot of work, but it's also the beginning of scaling this up. There's only a select few customers who have seen what it's like to build with Hyperframe. Now we get to make that broadly accessible and start that journey.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:34]:
How excited do you feel the industry is about it? Speak a little bit to the projects that have been executed. You know, just like practically what it's looked like to run through this in practice.

Ken Sobel [00:41:47]:
Yeah, sure. We've done, we've done a couple of large, low rise apartment complexes. We did part of our first high rise apartment tower. We did our first medical project, which we dove straight into the deep end and learned the hard way that medical projects are really complicated. We did our first, did our first project in New York City where everything's really big. And so the response that we've gotten from all of those customers is, wow, I can't believe that went so well. And I'm not saying, not saying that Hyperframe was perfect in every one of those projects, but perfection is also not what is needed. What is needed is just something that's dramatically better than what they got.

Ken Sobel [00:42:36]:
And that's obvious to all those customers. And it's obvious that we have this really tight feedback loop and we improve things really quickly. And so we have an enormous sales pipeline at the moment. And that sales pipeline grew almost organically from either additional projects that our existing customers would like to order or just through word of mouth. We've had a couple of instances where new customers see some of the projects that we've done either firsthand or through social media and they say, oh man, this looks like real. It looks real. Now this is not just make believe, it looks real. And we would like to get involved.

Ken Sobel [00:43:16]:
So we're very proud that we just got the 2026 Excellence in Construction Innovation Award from this industry association called awci. That's the association of the walls and ceilings industry. That is the industry that most of our customers belong to. And that has some significance. It's based on achieving real world, tangible results on real construction projects. And so we just got that last month in March. But again, Only a very small slice of America has, or America's metal framing contractors have been able to use it firsthand. We need factories in order to get that out to a larger number of customers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:00]:
What do you feel have been the hardest earned lessons a second time through as an entrepreneur that didn't, you know, you didn't encounter in the first go?

Ken Sobel [00:44:08]:
Let's see. It's a good question. I have never, never asked myself that question. I think that, I think that what we've experienced with this company to a greater degree than the first one is, the first company was not what I would call a hard tech company company, but this one is. And what I mean by that is some of the unique challenges are, yes, we have to design and build entire new manufacturing processes, entire new factory. We need to get our products tested rigorously by all of these building code enforcement bodies for structural performance and fire performance and sound performance. We need to mass produce and mass customize the product in a way that fits into these, into these buildings that are really complicated and unpredictable. And usually the as built condition of the building doesn't match the plan or the model for it.

Ken Sobel [00:45:04]:
And so it's a hard tech company. And what we've needed is just a very high degree of toughness. I just like mental toughness to get through some of these challenges. Like, I think, I think the, the biggest thing, one of the biggest things that I've learned with this company is I think when I started my first one, I felt that being a successful entrepreneur was a function of just being really smart. And if you're really smart, you can design a company that is easy to build and scale. And I think that there's, I think in reality there's actually a very small number of companies where that is their story. I think that for most companies it's not impossible to build a great company, but it's tough and it's doable, but it won't be easy and you need a lot of toughness. So I've definitely felt that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:59]:
Yeah, yeah. It's a hard journey.

Ken Sobel [00:46:03]:
Yeah, yeah. Not every company is like a Microsoft where it's just like, you know, you grow fast from the very beginning. That's, that's unusual.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:12]:
What, what do you wish more people understood about construction?

Ken Sobel [00:46:15]:
Well, I think that it is actually a really fun time in the construction technology space because there is this, like, there's this realization that construction can benefit from good engineering. It's drawing a lot of talented people into the space. I think the challenging thing for a lot of people Is that I see a lot of entrepreneurs that are trying to design a construction solution who don't actually know how construction works. And there are a lot of companies that kind of. They're providing a solution based on some knowledge of how the bidding process works or the estimation process or sort of administrative process in construction. But what I would like to see more of is that I would like to see more construction technology entrepreneurs gain an understanding of how the building is actually built. Because all of the problems that you see, if you trace the root cause of them, they will go down to how the building is actually designed and built. And if you're going to affect, like, lasting and impactful change in the industry, there need to be some changes in how the building is actually built.

Ken Sobel [00:47:39]:
It can't just be like, you know, a better way to band aid over, over the problem, in my view. And so it's. It's certainly not easy. And not every construction technology company needs to be a manufacturing one like we are. But I would like to see more people who learn what the root cause issues are and more people who, you know, really, like, look at the people who actually build the buildings and just watch them, just watch them for, for an hour or a day and look at all the things they have to put up with, like make products that, that make it easier for those people. Because I guarantee if you make it easier for the construction workers to build the building, a lot of these other problems will go away on there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:24]:
I love that. Is there something you wish we, we had talked about here that we haven't touched on yet?

Ken Sobel [00:48:30]:
One of the interesting things about Hyperframe is that it is this fusion of software engineering and manufacturing engineering and product engineering. And it was ambitious and difficult to develop all of those things concurrently. But that is what enables the value of the product that we deliver to our customers. And I think it creates a really strong competitive moat for our business because that those are a lot of different competencies that you have to assemble into one organization.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:04]:
What's been the best part about being in Ohio so far?

Ken Sobel [00:49:08]:
Ooh. To be honest with you, I'm still getting my bearings. We had an intense three months just, you know, relocating my family, relocating all the industrial equipment from our California factory, and shipping out our first order. We just completed an order that went out to the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. So that was a blitz of a three months. I don't think most people move their family and factory in three months. But, you know, I guess there are, there are two things that jump out at me so far. We first noticed this actually when we started identifying a lot of our raw material suppliers.

Ken Sobel [00:49:46]:
This is going back two or three years ago. And we wound up engaging a lot of suppliers that were from the Midwest. And just like the honesty and earnestness that you see from Midwestern business owners is really refreshing. You don't feel. I don't feel like I'm trying to get screwed over by the people I'm working with, which unfortunately, I don't know, is more of a thing in other parts of the country. So I see that there is a difference. There's even a difference in attitude. Even if you look at some of the hourly production workers that, that we hired to ship that first order I talked about, unfortunately, you know, I'm going to make generalizations and this is not true of all people, but we hired a lot of production operators in California who came to work at Hyperframe, and they were looking for ways to try to find an advantage over us or game the system.

Ken Sobel [00:50:45]:
And with my experience hiring production operators here, you know, I'm meeting people who are asking me how they can work harder. You know, I, I don't know. I, I wish, I, I wish that weren't my takeaway about Ohio because it doesn't say anything good about where I came from, but it is really refreshing. And, you know, I've met a lot of people who are just really excited about us building a business like this here. It feels everybody, even though it's still mostly an empty building, everybody wants to come and visit, everybody wants to meet me. And the reason that we moved here to Ohio is that it just felt like, it felt like the perfect place from, from the vantage point of proximity to raw material suppliers, proximity to equipment suppliers cost, proximity to good industrial talent and good industrial leadership, proximity to the major markets where we want to ship, the east coast construction market is huge. It's about double the size of the West Coast. So it makes sense for us to buy Bias, our first large factory closer to cities like New York and Chicago and all the, all the large cities on the eastern seaboard.

Ken Sobel [00:51:54]:
But it's also a great place to ship to everywhere from. So I'm really excited to be here. I feel like we're going to. Hyperframe is going to build the future of building products manufacturing, and we get to do that from right here in Columbus. And that's not something that many people get to do, do, especially at the age of 35. So it's, you know, I have no problem getting out of bed in the morning It's a really, it's a really fun thing to work on.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:22]:
We're grateful and excited that you're, you're here as well.

Ken Sobel [00:52:26]:
Yeah, thank you so much.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:27]:
Well, if, if, if folks said anything, they wanted to learn more about hyperframe, about what you're doing, wanted to connect with you. Where, where, where would you point them?

Ken Sobel [00:52:37]:
Add me on LinkedIn.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:38]:
Perfect. Well, Ken, I just want to thank you again. Really appreciate you, you taking the time and kind of going through your, a bit of your story. It's, it's awesome. And again, yeah, really, really excited that, that you're, that you're here.

Ken Sobel [00:52:50]:
Awesome. Thanks, Jeffrey. Fun conversation.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:55]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffreyoftheland fm or find us on Twitter oddlaioftheland or @sternhefe j et.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:11]:
If you or someone you know would

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We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the upcoming company llc. At the time of this recording, unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next week.