architecture
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Qi Su and the trouble with a beautiful picture
Qi Su trained to design buildings. The awkward business of explaining them led him to co-found Modelo, where a 3D model could become a place to meet.
Jim Dooling and the art of keeping things running
He started Align moving Wall Street’s technology in 1986. Forty years later, Jim Dooling is still working on the same problem: how to change the machinery without interrupting the business.
Shagufta Anurag and the office that never stops changing
She built a design firm from a small Singapore office, then helped take home interiors online. With Saltmine, Shagufta Anurag is tackling the decisions that happen before anyone moves a chair.
Talenia Phua Gajardo and the art of finding a place
An architect looking for Asian art built The Artling in 2013. Her next education came in getting the work off the screen and into the room.
Christie Porter Left Room for Someone Else
A request to design a campus in Mexico helped Christie Porter decide to start ONE NINE Architecture. She built the practice around a question that still shapes its work: who else could this help?
David Galullo and the art of leaving a room unfinished
The founder of Rapt Studio grew up in a house that was always being changed. His work for Dropbox, Duolingo and a roomful of strangers in Milan keeps returning to the same question: what will people bring to it?
Mary Jo Fasan’s Second Education
After a career in brand marketing, Mary Jo Fasan studied interior architecture and spotted a need among designers. The founder of Jo Communications has spent more than two decades helping their ideas find an audience.
Mostafa ElSayed and the problem between the machines
He left architecture to build a robot arm. Running Automata taught Mostafa ElSayed to look beyond the machine - at the people, spaces and unfinished work around it.
David Adkin and the trouble with a convincing mockup
His designs looked real enough to fool his colleagues. David Adkin co-founded Adalo to close the distance between drawing an app and making one work.
Zain Mustafa Went Home. The Classroom Got Bigger.
After a career across New York, Dubai and Karachi, Zain Mustafa began taking people into Pakistan’s architectural past. His work now follows the knowledge that survives in buildings, boats and the people who know how to make them.
Michael McKelvy and the distance between a drawing and a building
An architect by training, McDermott’s chairman and CEO has spent his career crossing the line between design and construction. His recurring concern is what happens when the people on either side start talking.
Garry Vermaas and the Work Before the Building
Before a hotel rises, someone has to make its many parts agree. Garry Vermaas has spent his career on that problem - from bridge cables to global design teams, factory-built rooms, and a construction college.
Angelo Yu and the room that learned to move
An architect’s question took Angelo Yu from small drones to autonomous spaces. At PIX Moving, he is testing what happens when a city’s rooms can come to its people.
Robert Yuen and the cost of invisible work
A young architectural designer kept working harder and still lost his job. Robert Yuen’s answer became Monograph: software that helps architects see the business behind the buildings.
Federico Negro and the chair that wouldn’t stay put
After helping WeWork expand across 30 countries, Federico Negro found a familiar chair beside a Los Angeles road. His next company, Canoa, began with the questions that chair left behind.
Jose Luis Cruz Jr. and the trouble with a perfect floor plan
An architect discovers that a drawing can be persuasive and wrong. With Integrated Projects, Jose Luis Cruz Jr. is turning that expensive lesson into a business built on measuring what is really there.
Michael Hein and the architecture of keeping your name
After struggling to grow his own one-person architecture practice, Michael Hein helped build HFW around a different kind of expansion: local design firms keeping their identities while gaining a national network.
Avi Jacoby and the art of making room
An Air Force veteran with an architecture degree and an oil-painting practice, Avi “Jack” Jacoby brings an unusual range of experience to Fabric. His work in robotic fulfillment turns on a practical question: how much can fit into the space you already have?
Tiffany Rafii and the Business of Going First
She started UpSpring with a childhood friend in the uncertain spring of 2009. Seventeen years later, Tiffany Rafii is still asking what a business could become - and who needs room to grow with it.
The Trader Who Put Marble on a Midnight Deadline
Farshid Tafazzoli learned markets before he learned patience. Decades later, he is applying the same appetite for speed to a stubbornly physical corner of design - one sample, one box and one midnight deadline at a time.
Jason Ballard Is Selling Builders a Different Way to Build
A conservation biologist followed the environmental problem into the walls of the American home. Now ICON’s co-founder is moving robotic construction from company showcase to builder-owned tool.
John Manoochehri
John Manoochehri is the Founder and CEO of Treasury, a San Francisco-based registry and discovery system for the world's most valuable spatial assets - from architectural designs and film sets to real estate and world monuments. An architect and environmental scientist with an Oxford degree in ancient languages, he co-founded Treasury with Zaha Hadid Architects and Spaceform in 2022, securing backing from Google's AI fund Gradient Ventures. Before Treasury, he wrote policy frameworks for UNEP and WWF, ran a sustainable design firm working on Sweden's Kiruna city relocation, and launched Last Meter - an architectural tech company integrating circular consumption into real estate. He hosts two podcasts: Resource Talks and Futureperfect Talks (Epic Games-sponsored), and has taught architecture at KTH Stockholm.
Jose Cruz Jr.
Jose Cruz Jr. is the founder and CEO of Integrated Projects (IPX), a New York spatial intelligence company that digitizes the built environment with 3D laser scanning and AI-assisted BIM conversion. A Columbia-trained architect who started by reselling sneakers and helping at his parents' Florida pizza shop, he now runs a 45-person team that has scanned over 7,000 buildings and 52+ million square feet across six continents. He also hosts the Buildings 2.0 podcast.
Gil Akos
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Ari Baranian
Ari Baranian is the co-founder and CEO of Pirros (YC W23), a Los Angeles startup building a detail management platform for architects and structural engineers. A structural engineer turned software builder, he created Pirros to solve a problem he lived daily at his old firm: engineers constantly recreating the same construction details from scratch. Pirros integrates with Revit, automatically extracts and catalogs details with their metadata, and makes a firm's institutional knowledge searchable and reusable. The company is profitable, reached roughly $6M ARR with 300+ firms on the platform, and closed a Series A reported around $15-17M in 2025.
Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British philosopher, author, and entrepreneur who has written 15+ books translated into 30+ languages, co-founded The School of Life in 2008, and built a global movement dedicated to making philosophy practically useful for everyday life - covering love, work, anxiety, and what it means to live wisely.
Amar Hanspal
Amar Hanspal is the co-founder and CEO of Motif, a cloud-native AI-first design collaboration platform challenging Autodesk's Revit dominance in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry. A veteran of three decades in design software, he previously served as Co-CEO of Autodesk - where he helped triple the company's market cap from $8B to $24B - and as founding CEO of robotics startup Bright Machines. With Motif, backed by $46M from CapitalG and Redpoint Ventures and named to Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups list for 2025, Hanspal is building what he describes as 'Figma for architects': a browser-based, real-time collaborative workspace for the world's built environment.
Elliott Spelman
Elliott Spelman is the co-founder and CEO of Polycam, the world's most-used 3D imaging app with over 10 million downloads and nearly 100,000 paying customers. A Stanford-trained designer and creative technologist, Spelman built Polycam to make 3D capture as accessible as photography - describing it as the Kodak Brownie of spatial computing. After meeting co-founder Chris Heinrich at Ubiquity6, they launched Polycam in 2020, raising an $18M Series A in early 2024 backed by Left Lane Capital, Adobe Ventures, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Today Polycam serves individuals across more than half the Fortune 500 and is pushing hard into AI-powered floor plans, generative 3D, and enterprise spatial workflows.
Pat Flynn
Pat Flynn is an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster best known for founding Smart Passive Income (SPI), a platform where he openly documents the strategies - and the income numbers behind them - that power his online businesses. Laid off from his architecture job in 2008, he turned an e-book about the LEED exam into a career-defining pivot, eventually building a media company with 60 million+ podcast downloads, multiple Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestselling books, a Kickstarter-funded tripod product, and a Pokémon card YouTube channel that became its own standalone business. His signature move: publishing every dollar earned and spent, monthly, in public.
Michael Feathers
Michael Feathers is a software consultant, author, and Chief Architect at Globant whose 2004 book 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' redefined how developers think about untested code - coining the now-universal definition that legacy code is simply code without tests. With over 25 years consulting hundreds of organizations, he pioneered dependency-breaking techniques that gave teams a way into codebases they feared. Today he explores how AI reshapes programming, writes the 'mechanisms' newsletter on Substack, and continues speaking at conferences worldwide.