building-materials
(14)
Brad Crawford and the future that has to fit through the factory door
The Rival CEO buys established building businesses and backs construction robots. In Indiana, he is putting the two to work together - with people, production and a very ordinary nail at the center of the experiment.
Geoff Bennett and the distance between a factory and a finished home
Before becoming CEO of Trajus, Geoff Bennett led Cascade Windows through an acquisition and a $245 million sale. His next chapter moves inside the home, where cabinets, countertops, and construction schedules have to meet.
Susan Selle Built a Career Making Everyday Products Mean More
From Crock-Pot and Mr. Coffee to windows, siding and a newly merged company, Susan Selle has spent more than three decades finding the human story inside practical products.
Loren Burnett Is Teaching Concrete to Borrow a Trick From the Sea
After five exits, the Colorado founder chose a harder material problem: turning microalgae, mineral chemistry and patient commercialization into concrete with a smaller carbon bill.
Sean Petterson Wants Plywood to Meet Its Replacement
After turning a student invention into an acquired industrial-safety company, Sean Petterson chose an older adversary: plywood. His second act is a lesson in selling change to factories that have no patience for disruption.
Christian MacDonald Built a Marketing Career From the Moulding Aisle Out
After 25 years across branches, products, customer experience, retail and marketing, Metrie's CMO has learned that trust is built where strategy meets the moulding aisle.
Émilie Gagné-Prud'homme Makes the Technical Feel Human
Before she marketed membranes and insulation, Émilie Gagné-Prud'homme worked behind the scenes in theatre and photography. Her career shows how creative production, customer empathy and technical fluency can meet inside one of Canada's most material businesses.
Philip Odelfelt
He walked away from hedge fund money to help old-line manufacturers see what is really happening on the shelf. Now Philip Odelfelt is turning messy retail data into a $27 million bet on the building materials industry.
Leise Sandeman
Leise Sandeman is the CEO and co-founder of Pathways, a climate-tech startup building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. Pathways uses AI to automate the creation of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building-material makers - concrete, steel, cement, glass - turning a months-long consultant slog into a process that takes weeks. A Copenhagen native and former McKinsey sustainability consultant who scaled a recycling venture before studying at Harvard and MIT, Leise co-founded Pathways in 2022 with Alex Cooper after meeting in an MIT entrepreneurship class. The company raised an oversubscribed $2.5M seed round in February 2024 and now serves manufacturers across hundreds of plants.
Alex Cooper
Alex Cooper is the co-founder and co-CEO of Pathways, a New York climate-AI company building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. Pathways automates the creation of real-time Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building-material producers - turning a slow, costly, manual six-to-twelve-month process into something that takes weeks. A decade scaling consumer and data startups (Uber, Clutter, Two Chairs) left Cooper convinced that the manufacturers responsible for roughly 40% of global CO2 deserved software as good as the apps on everyone's phone. He teamed up with Harvard classmate Leise Sandeman in 2022 to prove it.
Anneli Tostar
Anneli Tostar is the CEO and co-founder of Tangible, a San Francisco software company that helps real estate developers measure, manage, and cut the embodied carbon locked inside the materials they build with. An Oregon-born, Swedish-heritage urbanist who studied anthropology and environmental policy at Harvard and sustainable urban planning at KTH Stockholm, she spent years inside the commercial real estate sustainability world in the UK and US before deciding the industry's spreadsheet-and-Google-search approach to low-carbon materials needed a real platform. She co-founded Tangible with Nicole Granath in late 2021, raised $8.8M, and is on a mission to make choosing low-carbon materials, in her words, stupidly easy.
Sami Rahman
Sami Rahman is the CEO of CleanFiber, the Buffalo-based maker of high-performance cellulose insulation spun from recycled corrugated cardboard. A chemical and environmental engineer turned building-materials operator with 20+ years across James Hardie and ICP Group, he joined CleanFiber in January 2025 as President and General Manager and was elevated to CEO after sharpening its sales and operations. He is steering a company that ranked #1 in manufacturing on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list through a Series C raise and the ramp of a plant built to ship over three million bags a year.
Vardhan Mehta
Vardhan Mehta is the co-founder and CEO of Acelab, the company behind Material Hub, an AI platform that helps architects discover, evaluate, and specify building products. A former architect who worked on U.S. embassy envelopes and projects at MIT and Yale, he traded the drafting table for a database after watching designers burn hours hunting through PDFs and spec sheets. Acelab now serves more than 20,000 architecture and design firms in North America, raised a $13.5M Series A in October 2025 led by Navitas Capital, and landed Mehta on Forbes 30 Under 30. His bet: AI can finally absorb the complexity of every material decision in the built environment.
Barry Friedman
Barry Friedman is the President and CEO of Friedman's Home Improvement, a third-generation family-owned hardware and home improvement retailer based in Petaluma, California. Named CEO in 2013 by his father Bill Friedman, Barry has led the company through digital transformation, e-commerce expansion, and a new 72,000-square-foot distribution center, all while steering the business toward its 80th anniversary in 2026. Under his leadership, Friedman's operates four locations across Sonoma County with approximately 600 employees, and remains deeply embedded in the North Bay community through philanthropy and civic engagement.