244 - TZL - Peter Johann

00:02:25.838 - 00:02:26.518 Absolutely.

Randy Wilburn 00:02:26.574 - 00:02:26.742 Yeah.

Peter Johann 00:02:26.766 - 00:03:25.006 Thanks for having me on, Randy. I was a structural engineer by trade.

I worked at a structural engineering firm called KPFF, which is a big structural engineering firm up the West Coast. They have offices countrywide now.

I worked there for a while in Laden before starting a company with one of my colleagues, Pirros, which is a software solution for design professionals, specifically for structural engineers and architects. And so we noticed an issue that we were having within our company at KPFF. I was working on this technology design group with one of my colleagues who I had gone to college with as well. And we noticed that there wasn't really a solution to this problem across the industry, so we started our own company to address this problem.

We started it about two years ago and went through Y combinator about a year and a half ago, and it has been off to the races since then. So that is a little background on myself.

Randy Wilburn 00:03:25.158 - 00:03:45.360 I love that. And I love the fact that you had an itch and you scratched it with your solution.

Can you maybe walk us through the problem that you recognized and how you have created Pirros to solve that problem?

Peter Johann 00:03:45.780 - 00:04:52.710 Absolutely. So Pirros is a detail management platform. What we do is create detailed libraries and a detailed database for these firms. So details, which I'm sure people in the design industry are very familiar with, a beam to call connection, a wall assembly. There are hundreds of them on projects. A lot of them can be reused from project to project.

We don't need to redesign the same beam to column connection for every project.

What we noticed is that what ended up happening with a lot at these firms was that there was no good way to manage these hundreds of details across all the different projects that were being produced. So people had to spend a lot of time looking through previous projects to find the right details to reuse on their current projects. And a lot of times they were redesigning the same detail over and over because they didnt know where to look. They hadn't worked on a project with that same detail. But one of their colleagues across the office had done it two years ago.

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