He spent four years making Instagram feel faster. Now he makes fiber crews move faster.
Most product managers who leave Meta go build another app. Jason Rudin went the other direction, straight into the mud. In 2022 he founded Clad, project management and billing software for the companies that dig trenches, pull fiber, and rebuild the power and internet networks the rest of us take for granted. He calls it the operating system for telecom construction. It is a market where the marquee document is an 811 utility locate ticket, and Rudin talks about that ticket the way other founders talk about growth curves.
The pitch is simple and unglamorous, which is exactly the point. Contractors run on cash flow and chaos. Operators pour money into projects and then lose visibility the moment a shovel hits dirt. Clad sits in the middle, unifying operations and finance so both sides can bid, manage, permit, track, and get paid without a spreadsheet graveyard. Rudin's bet is that the boring plumbing of infrastructure is a software goldmine that consumer-tech alumni have been trained to walk right past.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
Clad helps operators bid out work, manage subcontractors, and keep real-time eyes on projects that used to vanish into email the moment they started.
By fusing project operations with finance, Clad automates tracking and payments so cash-strapped contractors can grow faster and protect their margins.
An AI-assisted tool for 811 utility locate requests: AI-written narratives, bulk submission, automated tracking, and expiration alerts so nobody's crew stalls at the curb.
Rudin's path reads like a greatest-hits of ambitious young talent, right up until the plot twist. He came out of the University of Pennsylvania through the Jerome Fisher Management & Technology program, the selective dual-degree track that produces engineers who can read a balance sheet. He graduated from Wharton in 2014 with a degree in finance and management.
Then came the establishment tour: four years as a business analyst at McKinsey, a strategy stint at Google[X], and four years as a product manager at Meta, where he worked on Instagram, one of the most competitive product organizations on Earth. He is, by his own description, a New York-San Francisco boomerang, comfortable at a Broadway show one week and a trailhead the next.
He could have kept optimizing the feed. Instead, in 2022, he walked toward the physical world that had always fascinated him and started Clad. A year later it was in Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, pitching trenching software in a room full of AI startups. The contrarian's edge: while everyone crowded the obvious markets, Rudin found a giant one hiding in plain sight, funded by billions flowing into broadband and grid rebuilds and served by almost nobody.
There is a tell in Rudin's hobbies. He makes visual art. He keeps a public reading list. And he built his own dining room table, sanding and joining the thing by hand. For a founder whose whole thesis is how physical things get made, that is not a quirk. It is the operating system underneath the operating system.
One of three brothers, he cites Churchill's line about buildings shaping the people inside them as a personal touchstone, which is a fittingly literal creed for someone who sells software to the trades that pour the foundations. The consumer-product instincts he sharpened at Instagram now get pointed at the least glamorous screens in America: a contractor's billing queue, a permit inbox, a locate ticket about to expire.
He went from ranking the feed to routing the cable. Same instinct, harder hat.
The 811 locate ticket is one of the least glamorous documents in construction. Rudin turned it into a marquee AI feature.
He built his own dining room table. The founder who sells software to builders is, himself, a builder.
A self-described New York-San Francisco boomerang: Broadway one week, backcountry the next.
He keeps a public books list and creates visual art alongside running a startup.
Clad runs on TypeScript, React, Remix, and Docker, built by a small, remote-friendly team.
One of three brothers, with a Churchill quote about architecture pinned to his personal philosophy.
Profile compiled from public sources: Clad, Y Combinator, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and industry interviews. Facts only; no guesses.