 |
|
|
|||||
Over the course of a decade at Amazon, Vikas Enti helped lead the retail giants deployment of robots in its fulfillment centers. Then he started thinking about how the same skills could be applied to one of the worlds biggest challenges: how to build low-carbon, affordable housing. The biggest catalyst was me becoming a dad of twin daughters, he says. My kids being born prompted introspection on where else I could be applying my skills that had greater benefits to society. He knew that the U.S. has a shortage of millions of homes, and a shortage of hundreds of thousands of construction workers. He also knew that buildings, which are responsible for around 40% of global emissions, are a key part of tackling climate change. And he realized that the approach his team had taken at Amazon could translate to the construction industry. Vikas Enti [Photo: courtesy Reframe Systems] In 2022, along with two other former Amazon employees, Enti cofounded Reframe Systems, a startup thats using software and robotic microfactories to drive down the cost of building housing. Today the company announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding led by Eclipse and VoLo Earth Ventures. [Image: courtesy Reframe Systems] Rethinking factory-built housing The construction industry has been relatively slow to embrace new tech. Its been a function of how fragmented the industry is,” Enti says. A home might be built with 25 subcontractors, and each subcontractor is typically a small business. “Construction as an industry has chronically underinvested in R&D because there have actually been very few players that have grown large enough to be able to afford an R&D budget,” he says. In theory, modular construction in factories could help bring down costs and build more housing faster. But of the handful of companies that have tried to scale up factory-built homes, some have struggled, like Katerra, which raised more than $2 billion before eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2021. Reframe’s founders started by talking to 18 different housing factories around the world to understand what worked and what didn’t. Some, particularly in Europe and Japan, had succeeded. Others had failed. Reframe also talked to developers to understand what it would take for them to consider switching to a new method of construction. [Photo: courtesy Reframe Systems] Before jumping to the step of designing robots, “we really obsessed over the problem,” Enti says. “What does it look like for us to build millions of residential homes that are great for the planet but also great for people’s wallets?” They landed on three main requirements. If they were going to build factories, they needed to be very cost-efficient and fast to buildless than $5 million and possible to deploy within 100 days. (By contrast, one of Katerra’s factories reportedly cost $150 million to build.) Additionally, each home needed to be cost-efficient to build, with at least 35% gross margins. And the factories needed to be easily adaptable to local zoning requirements that change from city to city. [Image: courtesy Reframe Systems] Mass customization Most factory-built housing takes an assembly-line approach. But Enti argues that it doesn’t work. “People say if you could only mass-produce homes the way you mass-produce cars, everything would be better,” he says. “The reality is when you look at the nuances of site conditions with 30,000 zoning jurisdictions in the country and with different state codes, it’s very hard to get one product that actually fits all these constraints.” Instead, he says, Reframe Systems embraces the idea that construction is highly local and diverse. “We’re not going to fight it,” he says. “So what technology do we need to develop so we can actually build snowflakes at scale?” [Image: courtesy Reframe Systems] It’s not unlike the challenge they faced in Amazon’s fulfillment centers, where each order was unpredictable. “You let the customer pick and choose anything they wanta red pen, blue pen, and teddy bear in the same orderand the job of the software and the robotics in the background was to make sure that the marginal cost to deliver this variability was zero,” Enti says. For housing, that meant developing custom software that can adapt to zoning codes, site requirements, or the architectural style that the property owner prefers. (Cosmic, another startup, is taking a similar approach.) The system also needed the ability to easily switch between housing types, from accessory dwelling units to single-family homes to apartment buildings. Reframe is particularly focused on missing middle housing, like duplexes and other small multifamily buildings. [Image: courtesy Reframe Systems] “We effectively have to invent what we call a high-mix, high-volume manufacturing process, which breaks the assembly line,” Enti says. In two of its first projects, currently under construction in Somerville, a suburb of Boston, the company is building two three-story triplexes. The designs are similar, but because one building sits on a corner, it has different requirements, including additional windows on one side. It’s the type of change that could be complex in traditional construction, but it took Reframe only a day to adjust and produce new plans. [Photo: courtesy Reframe Systems] How the system works At the company’s first microfactory, near Boston, it builds modules that are as fully finished as possible, such as kitchens complete with appliances. Then the modules can be delivered nearby and assembled on a building site. So far the company’s robot performs only a tiny fraction of the work: A robotic arm frames walls and ceilings. Reframe Systems aims to eventually automate around 60% of building tasks. Wiring and plumbing is installed in walls and floors by workers at the factory. Parts are precut and printed with instructions. The company’s goal is to make it feel more like assembling Ikea furniture or a Lego kit, in an industrialized way. Enti says even workers who are new to construction can handle complex steps through the process. The company’s approach can cut costs in a few different ways. First, Enti says, by eliminating subcontractors, it can reduce the markups that get passed on to customers. Building in a systematic way in a factory helps cut the use of materials, another major source of cost. The process is more efficient for workers, cutting the cost of labor. It’s also two to three times faster than traditional construction, so if a building is constructed for a developer, they can start getting returns more quickly. The houses are also ultra-efficient and wired for solar power and batteries, so residents can save money on electric bills. A network of microfactories The first microfactory is around 18,000 square feet, but later factories will be 50,000 square feet, or roughly the size of the garden center at a Home Depot. Reframe envisions running a network of factories across the country. The next location will be in Southern California, where the company plans to help rebuild homes in Altadena that were destroyed by the wildfire in January. The team is currently getting feedback from residents on single-family bungalows designed to fit into the neighborhood, from a Spanish-style house to a Craftsman cottage. [Image: courtesy Reframe Systems] At first, the company plans to build a handful of homes at its Massachusetts factory and ship them to California. Then, as it proves the demand is there, it plans to build a second microfactory in Los Angeles. “This is going to be our playbook to enter new markets,” Enti says. “We will always try to have demand precede capacity because we can launch our factory in 100 days. So the goal is that we ship product from existing factories to a new market, use that product to drum up demand, and then we convert that to go set up a new microfactory.” [Image: courtesy Reframe Systems] Reframe wants to build a million homes by 2045. (For reference, it took D.R. Horton, the largest builder in the U.S., about twice as long to build a million homes.) That would require around 800 microfactories to be up and running. [Image: courtesy Reframe Systems] “They might seem like large, scary numbers,” Enti says, but he points to Amazon, where the robotics team built only 300 robots in its first year a decade ago, but recently built its millionth robot. “It’s very hard to forecast exponential growth and scale,” he says. “My message to the team is it’s always going to be one home at a time, one microfactory at a time. But every microfactory that we build will be responsible for seeding the team that’s going to build five more microfactories. The demand is therethe need for housing is there.”
Category:
E-Commerce
My first job as an opinion columnist was here at Fast Company, writing the back page column for the magazine, circa 2006 or so. The column was about the absurdities of the innovation industry and over-the-top marketing stunts, and anything that could be mined for comic fodder while saying something interesting about the mid-00s post-crash business environment. I stopped writing the column because, well, Fortune magazine recruited me and offered me a big pile of money, which is always a pretty good incentive to switch employers. There, I wrote about economics, technology, and media. Before I went into media at the ripe old age of 23, I had been a buy-side tech equity analyst, and had also started a Wall Street site called Dealbreaker that was popular with second-year analysts at investment banks who paid for bottle service at nightclubs. The latter is not what made me equipped to write about things like how core inflation is calculated, but it made me appreciate the art of writing for people who have no attention spans whatsoever. Now Im a contributing writer for The New York Times opinion section, which means they give me space once or twice a month and I write mostly about politics, tech, and culture. (I also co-host a financial news podcast, Slate Money, so I have not stopped punditing about the economy entirely.) Ive also written columns for The Washington Post, The New Republic, the Financial Times, and others. The most obvious reason your pieces may not be working I say all of this to establish that Ive been writing opinion columns in large national outlets for over 20 years, and in what Dan Drezner calls the ideas industry, that gives me standing to give other people advice about how to write columns and get them published. The idea of standing is important here, and if youre reading this because your thought leadership isnt getting any traction, lets start with what you do have going for you: your area of expertise. Your expertise is why you have standing to opine on your topic of choice. You can choose to write and say things that are completely outside of your area of expertise, but if you are doing that, its probably part of the reason youre not getting traction. You may not have established that you know enough about the topic to be considered a credible source. This is not a dismissal of your ability or range. I am asking you to put yourself in the mind of the reader and ask, Why should I listen to this particular person on this particular topic? The biggest mistake inexperienced columnists make But thats not the only reason you may not be getting traction; its just an obvious one I wanted to get out of the way first. I also teach an online workshop about how to write op-eds, and most of the people who take it are academics who are looking to make their work accessible to a larger audience or executives who want to get their ideas into the marketplace. The biggest mistake my first-time students make is trying to cram every good idea they have into one column. It is very hard for people to resist doing this when they are looking to put their ideas in public, particularly in opinion column format. It comes from a place of insecurity. Somewhere in the back of their brains, would-be opinion writers become convinced that if the column theyre working on gets published, it will be the only column they ever get to write. So they need to get it all out thereall at once! The problem with this is that if you throw too many things at readers, it will overwhelm them, and they wont know what you really want them to take away from the column. For those of you writing (or speaking or blogging) about complex topics, theres sometimes a temptation to cast this behavior as necessary for the reader to truly understand what youre saying. But thats almost never the case. You can be nuanced and complex without overloading your argument. Newspaper and magazine columns generally run from around 750 to 1,500 words. Most of the stuff I write lands around 1,200. (If youre writing on a blog, length is less important, but print constraints tend to affect how long your pieces can be at big publications.) At those lengths, you can probably get one or maybe two major ideas across, especially if youre rigorous with your work and can back up your idea with evidence, knock down counterarguments, and include enough compelling narrative to keep the reader going. So the healthy way to think about what to include and what to leave out is to confidently tell yourself this will be one of many columns I write and to choose a single idea to start with. Put anything that is not about that single idea in another document titled Future Columns I Will Definitely Write and Publish and Am Not Going to Think About While Im Writing This One. Or, you know, something shorter. How to make your ideas spread It is extremely important to say what you want to say in a manner that makes it easy for the reader (viewer, listener, etc.) to absorb and relay your idea. That is a big part of how ideas spread, and thats what youre going for here. Again, this doesnt mean that you cant have nuance or complexity, or that your ideas should be reducible to a meme on TikTok. What it does mean is that your argument should be so clear and compelling that it travels easily through the ideas ecosystem and doesnt mutate too much as it spreads. One way I think about it is to imagine how the idea would be articulated on a cable news show. Sometimes I get asked to come on CNN or MSNBC to talk about the columns I write, and the appearances are very brief, sometimes three to five minutes a segment. That means I get maybe 30 seconds to answer a question (if that), so I need to know ahead of time what it is that I want to communicate in that tiny window. If someone asked you to explain your idea in less than a minute on national television, could you do it? Not your entire argument, but your thesis and maybe one supporting point? If you cant, you probably have too much crammed into your column. I plan to write more about how to get your ideas out there in this space, but Im at about 1,000 words and that feels like the right length for this column, which contained two core ideas I hope you can use: Make sure you establish standing, and dont try to cram everthing in your big, brilliant brain into one column.
Category:
E-Commerce
When Peter Drucker first met IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson in the 1930s, the legendary management thinker and journalist was somewhat baffled. He began talking about something called data processing, Drucker recalled, and it made absolutely no sense to me. I took it back and told my editor, and he said that Watson was a nut, and threw the interview away. Things that change the world always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. So we always struggle to see how things will look in the future. Visionaries compete for our attention, arguing for their theory of how things will fit together and impact our lives. Billions of dollars are bet on competing claims. This is especially true today, with artificial intelligence making head-spinning advances. But we also need to ask: What if the future looked exactly like the past? Certainly, theres been no lack of innovation since Drucker met Watson. How did those technologies impact the economy and shape our lives? If we want to know what to expect from the future, thats where we should start. The First Productivity Paradox Thomas J. Watson [Photo: IBM] Watson would, of course, build IBM into an industrial giant. But it was his son Thomas Watson Jr. who would transform the industry in 1964 with the $5 billion gamble (nearly $50 billion in todays dollars) on the System/360, a platform that would dominate the computing world for two decades. It was, essentially, the Apple iPhone and Microsoft Windows of its time, combined. Just as the elder Watson had foreseen, data processing became central to how industry functioned. In the 1970s and 80s, business investment in computer technology was increasing by more than 20% per year. Yet, strangely, productivity growth was falling. Economists coined the term “productivity paradox” to describe this strange contradiction. The productivity paradox dumbfounded economists because it violated a basic principle of how a free market economy is supposed to work. If profit-seeking businesses continue to make substantial investments, youd expect to see a return. Yet with IT investment in the 70s and 80s, firms continued to increase their investment with negligible measurable benefit. A paper by researchers at the University of Sheffield in England sheds some light on what happened. First, productivity measures were largely developed for an industrial economy, not an information economy. Second, the value of those investments, while substantial, was a small portion of total capital investment. Third, businesses werent necessarily investing to improve productivity, but to survive in a more demanding marketplace. By the late 1990s, however, that began to change. Increased computing power, combined with the rise of the internet, triggered a new productivity boom. Many economists hailed a new economy of increasing returns, in which the old rules no longer applied. The mystery of the productivity paradox, it seemed, had been solved. We just needed to wait for the technology to hit critical mass and deliver us to the promised land. The Second Productivity Paradox By the turn of the century, the digital economy was going full steam. While old industrial companies like Exxon Mobil, General Motors, and Walmart still topped the Fortune 500, new economy upstarts like Google, Apple, and Amazon were growing quickly and, after a brief dotcom bust, would challenge the incumbents for dominance. By 2004, things were humming again. Social media was ramping up, and Tim OReilly proclaimed the new era of Web 2.0. A few years later, Apple launched the iPhone and that, combined with the new 4G standard, ushered in the era of mobile internet. New cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure would make vast computing power available to anyone with a credit card. Yet as economist Robert Gordon has pointed out, by 2006 it had become clear that productivity was slumping again and, despite some blips here and there, it hasnt recovered since. For all of the hype coming out of Silicon Valley, weve spent the past 20 years in the midst of a second productivity paradox. Clearly, things have qualitatively changed over the past two decades. We are no longer tethered to our desks at work. A teenager with a smartphone in a developing country has more access to information today than a professional working at a major institution did back then. It is, to paraphrase Robert Solows famous quip, as if we can see the digital age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Searching For Utopia . . . And Finding So-So Technologies Business pundits claim that things have never moved faster, but the evidence shows exactly the opposite. In fact, weve been in a productivity slump for over half a century. Data also shows that industries have become more concentrated, not more competitive, over the past 25 years. U.S. corporate profits have roughly tripled as a percentage of GDP in that same time period. So what gives? The techno-optimists keep promising us some sort of utopia, with a hypercompetitive marketplace yielding productivity gains so vast that our lives will be utterly transformed for the better. But the data says otherwise. How do we reconcile the visions of the Silicon Valley crowd with the hard analysis of the economists? Some of the same factors behind the first productivity paradox are still at play. According to Statista, the digital economy makes up only about 9% of GDP. An analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank found that while AI is having a huge impact on some tasks, such as computing and math, its not having much of an effect at all on things like personal services, office and administration work, and blue-collar labor. Part of the answer may also lie in what economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo call so-so technologies, such as self-checkouts in supermarkets, screen ordering at airport bars, and automated customer service systems. These produce meager productivity gains and often put a greater burden on the consumer. The simple truth is that our economy is vast, and digital technology plays only a limited role in most of it. Next time youre checking your smartphone in traffic, ask yourself: Is your chatbot making your rent any cheaper? Is it getting you through traffic any faster? Or making your trip to the doctor any less expensive? Innovation Should Serve People, Not The Other Way Around In his 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” German philosopher Martin Heidegger described technology as akin to art, in that it reveals truths about the nature of the world, brings them forth, and puts them to some specific use. In the process, human nature and its capacity for good and evil are also revealed. He offers the example of a hydroelectric dam, which uncovers a rivers energy and channels it into electricity. In much the same sense, the breakthrough technologies of todaylike the large language models that power our AI chatbots, the forces of entanglement and superposition that drive quantum computing, as well as technologies like CRISPR and mRNA that fuel tomorrows miracle cureswere not built, so much as they were revealed. In another essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger explains that what we build for the world depends on how we interpret what it means to live in it. The relationship is, of course, reflexive. What we build depends on how we wish to dwell, and that act, in and of itself, shapes how we build further. As we go through yet another hype cycle, we need to keep in mind that were not just building for the future, but also for the present, which will look very much like the past. While it is, of course, possible that we are on the brink of some utopian age in which we unlock so much prosperity that drudgery, poverty, and pain become distant memories, the most likely scenario is that most people will continue to struggle. The truth is that innovation should serve people, not the other way around. To truly build for the world, you need to understand something about how people live in it. Breakthrough innovation happens when people who understand technical solutions are able to collaborate with people who understand real-world problems. Just like in the past, thats what we need more of now.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||