I have the flexibility and the opportunity to start my own company rather than I need to wait 10, 15, 20 years to get that experience. And I think that is a trend that we're seeing a lot these days.
I mean, even you mentioned the Y Combinator accelerator, startup accelerator program that we went through, the size of that program has, especially the number of applicants has grown exponentially in recent years. And being a startup founder now is so much more mainstream than it was ten years ago, even five years ago, I'd say. It's certainly a trend that we're seeing, and I think that definitely contributed to us seeing that this was a realistic opportunity and not just a pipe dream for us at this current time.
Randy Wilburn 00:10:26.468 - 00:11:07.294 Yeah, I love that.
What I hear you saying is that, and maybe this would have been the case, that certainly as a 20- something, opening up your own structural engineering firm would seem like a daunting task compared to starting a software company and maybe following a road less traveled as far as that's concerned. I'm curious to know, when you were in Y Combinator and there were a lot of different companies serving different verticals and different industries, were there any other companies that had ideas like you had to serve the design industry or were you one of one? Peter Johann 00:11:07.422 - 00:12:42.368 Yeah, very, very few. With a Y Combinator, it is one of the biggest accelerator programs. They have two batches a year; they call it batches.
And within our batch, there were probably 250 companies. I want to say we were either the only one or maybe one of two that were focusing on the design space.
I think there were a few other construction tech companies, but 80% of the companies right now are AI for this, AI for that, for sales, for Fintech, for developer tools. Very few are focused on the design industry. And that was also going back to your first question, which was part of what we noticed and why we were motivated to do this. We saw a lack of new software being developed for the design industry specifically, and therefore there were a lot of easy opportunities. And it's part of the reason why we wanted to do this in the first place. It was surprising to us that this solution didn't already exist.
And it makes a little bit more sense to us now.
It's not a sexy industry for the technology industry to produce solutions. I think a lot of these solutions require an in-depth understanding of the workflows within these firms, and therefore it requires the expertise of someone who has worked in the industry before. And again, not a lot of people that go into the industry end up going into tech.
So there are a bunch of different reasons why there are not a lot of startups and not a lot of new technology companies that are catering to the AEC industry.
Randy Wilburn
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