built-environment
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Bart Dickson Builds the Places Between Home and Work
A paperboy became a construction manager, went to law school at night, ran an electrical contractor and founded Cobalt. His latest bet is that a former warehouse can help give suburban Tualatin a little more soul.
The Customer Is Already Talking: Meg Swanson’s Job Is to Make Software Listen
After two decades translating technical products into human choices, Eptura’s Chief Market Officer now runs product, marketing, and user experience together. Her thesis is disarmingly practical: listen closely, connect the data, and remove the friction people have learned to tolerate.
Hantz Févry
Hantz Févry is the founder and CEO of Geolava, a San Francisco spatial-intelligence startup that turns satellite, LiDAR, aerial, street-level and government data into searchable answers about buildings and infrastructure. A Haitian immigrant who built an earthquake early-warning system at age 20, he went on to lead AI research for Google Assistant's hotword (a team that became part of DeepMind), then founded the gig-economy mapping company Stoovo - which mapped 130 million U.S. buildings and was acquired in 2024. In July 2025 he raised a $4.3M seed round for Geolava, betting that spatial intelligence will reshape real estate and infrastructure.
Jeffrey Sprau
Jeffrey Sprau is the CEO of Legence, the building-performance platform that went public on Nasdaq (LGN) in September 2025. An industrial engineer by training, he runs a 6,300-person operation that designs, builds, and tunes the mechanical guts of the buildings most people never think about - data centers, hospitals, semiconductor fabs - with the explicit goal of cutting their carbon and energy use.
David Marks
David Marks is the founder, President, and CEO of TEECOM, a California-based technology design and engineering firm he built from a one-man operation into a 200+ person global consultancy over nearly three decades. Starting at the Moscone Convention Center expansion in San Francisco, he has since shaped the technology infrastructure of hospitals, Fortune 500 offices, universities, and civic institutions across the U.S., EMEA, and APAC. A licensed Professional Engineer with credentials in communications distribution, design technology, and LEED, Marks is known for his belief that buildings should work as hard as the people inside them - and that the best technology is the kind you never notice.