Coast is a New York-based fintech building modern payments and expense-management software for businesses that run vehicle fleets and field teams. Its Visa-backed fuel and fleet card pairs hardware-grade spend controls with software that auto-codes receipts, matches transactions to GPS and tank data, and kills the monthly expense report. Founded in 2020 by Bread co-founder Daniel Simon, Coast has raised nearly $100M in equity plus significant debt capital, and serves thousands of fleets across construction, HVAC, landscaping, transportation and other field-heavy trades.
California Drywall Co. is one of the largest wall-and-ceiling specialty contractors in the United States, building interiors and exteriors across Northern California since 1946. From its San Jose base it delivers drywall, lath and plaster, metal framing, cold-formed steel engineering, fireproofing, acoustical ceilings, rainscreens and prefabricated wall panels for landmark projects including Apple Park, Levi's Stadium, SFO Terminal 2 and major hospitals. In August 2023 it became a 100% employee-owned company through an ESOP, putting equity in the hands of its roughly 700 team members.
Hathaway Dinwiddie is a 100% employee-owned general contractor headquartered in San Francisco that has spent more than a century building the landmarks California works, lives, and heals in - from the Salesforce Tower to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and more than 10 million square feet of life-science space on the Peninsula. Built on planning, adaptation, and proactive partnership, the firm pairs century-old craft with advanced BIM workflows, LEED-driven sustainability, and an industry-leading safety record.
Legence is North America's largest pure-play building performance platform, providing integrated advisory, engineering, design, fabrication, installation, and maintenance services for high-performance and mission-critical facilities. Formerly Therma Holdings and backed by Blackstone, the company brands itself the world's first Energy Transition Accelerator, helping data centers, healthcare, education, biopharma, semiconductor, and commercial real estate clients cut carbon, lower utility costs, and run buildings more efficiently. Legence went public on Nasdaq under the ticker LGN in September 2025.
Rudolph and Sletten is a California-based general contractor that has built much of Silicon Valley's physical fabric - from Apple Park and Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch to hospitals, research labs and university campuses. Founded in 1959 in a Los Altos garage, the firm pioneered guaranteed-maximum-price, fast-track delivery and grew into one of the West Coast's largest builders of technically complex healthcare, life-sciences and education projects. Now a subsidiary of Tutor Perini, it employs roughly 740 people and reports about $307 million in annual revenue.
Webcor is a San Francisco-based commercial general contractor and one of California's largest builders, known for self-performed concrete, finish carpentry and millwork, deep preconstruction and BIM expertise, and a portfolio of landmark projects from the California Academy of Sciences to the Salesforce Transit Center. Founded in 1971 and owned by Japan's Obayashi Corporation since 2007, Webcor pairs craft-trade self-performance with virtual-building technology to deliver complex, sustainable buildings across the state.
Chris Wolf is the Chief Executive Officer of Walters & Wolf, one of the leading glass and glazing contractors in North America. Based in Fremont, California, he leads a 650-person employee-owned company that designs, engineers, fabricates, and installs architectural glazing, curtain wall systems, and door openings for clients including Google, Apple, Adobe, and Kaiser. Wolf rose through the company over 15 years as Vice President before taking the helm as CEO around 2022. Under his and prior leadership, Walters & Wolf has become widely recognized for its deep commitment to lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System, maintaining a library of over 6,000 improvement videos and earning recognition from lean manufacturing expert Paul Akers as 'the best lean company I know.'
Eric Foster spent 42 years at Swinerton - one of the largest 100% employee-owned construction companies in the US - rising from project engineer in 1982 to CEO in January 2020, the company's 12th chief executive in its 132-year history. A UC Berkeley civil engineering graduate, he led Swinerton through the COVID-19 pandemic, oversaw the launch of mass timber subsidiary Timberlab, and expanded the firm to $4.3 billion in revenue across 20 locations before retiring on January 11, 2024. His career touched landmark San Francisco structures including SFMOMA and the historic Monadnock Building.
Greg Cosko is the Executive Chairman (and longtime President & CEO) of Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Company, one of California's oldest builders. He led the Getty Center build, engineered the 1996 management buyout and merger that formed Hathaway Dinwiddie, and spent nearly three decades steering a 510-person, employee-oriented firm with roughly $300M in annual revenue.
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.
Kevin O'Riordan is President and CEO of Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Company, the 117-year-old, employee-owned San Francisco general contractor behind a generation of California's most photographed buildings. He took the top job on April 1, 2025 after four decades in the trade and five years running the Northern California region. In the same window he was elected 2025 President of the Construction Employers' Association.
Matt Rossie is the President and CEO of Webcor, the San Francisco-based general contractor behind some of California's most complicated buildings. He climbed the company over 22 years from the client side of construction into the COO seat, then the corner office, on January 1, 2023.
Paul Gutierrez is President and Chief Executive Officer of California Drywall Co., the San Jose-based specialty contractor that ranks among the largest wall-and-ceiling firms in the United States. In August 2023, he led the company's transition from third-generation family ownership to a 100% employee stock ownership plan, a structural rewrite of a 77-year-old business with roughly 700 employees.
Hourly is a Palo Alto-based fintech platform that combines payroll, workers' compensation insurance, and time tracking into a single mobile-first system built for small businesses with hourly workers. Its pay-as-you-go workers' comp model calculates premiums against actual wages in real time, eliminating year-end audits and helping employers avoid overpaying. Founded in 2018 by Tom Sagi, Shay Litvak, and Amir Faintuch, the company raised $39M+ and serves 500+ businesses across construction, manufacturing, transportation, and similar industries. In July 2025, Hourly was acquired by Israeli insurtech WeSure in a deal valued at approximately $168M.
Lumber is an AI-powered construction workforce management platform that unifies payroll, time tracking, HR, safety, compliance, and field productivity for contractors. Founded in 2023 by Shreesha Ramdas and Manish Kumar, the company is building autonomous AI agents for an industry where 41% of the workforce is set to retire in seven years.
Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb in 2008 out of a San Francisco living room - air mattresses, breakfast included - and turned a half-crazy idea into an $85B company. His current venture, Samara, builds factory-assembled, solar-ready backyard homes (ADUs) that go from permit to move-in in under seven months. In early 2025 he became America's first Chief Design Officer, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000 websites. A Rhode Island School of Design graduate with dual majors in graphic and industrial design, Gebbia approaches every problem - housing affordability, government UX, refugee shelter - through the lens of democratic, empathetic design.
Micah Rodman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kojo, the leading AI-powered construction procurement platform processing over $5 billion in annual materials orders for 600+ contractors across the US and Canada. A Yale alumnus who cut his teeth as a manager on Ray Dalio's team at Bridgewater Associates, Rodman co-founded Kojo in 2018 to digitize the paper-and-phone world of construction materials procurement. He transitioned from COO to CEO after founding CEO Maria Davidson stepped back, steering the company through a $94M fundraise and partnerships with industry giants like Wesco International.
Ottimate (formerly Plate IQ) is an AI-powered accounts payable automation platform that captures, codes, verifies, and pays invoices end-to-end. Founded in 2014 to fix the back-office mess inside restaurants, it now serves CFOs and AP teams across hospitality, healthcare, construction, retail, and grocery.
Tom Sagi is co-founder and CEO of Hourly, a Palo Alto-based fintech and insurtech platform that integrates payroll, time tracking, and workers' compensation insurance for small businesses with hourly employees. His frustration managing payroll manually at his family's construction business inspired him to build Hourly in 2018 alongside CTO Shay Litvak and Executive Chairman Amir Faintuch. The company has raised over $39 million in funding, forged partnerships with Great American Insurance and Nationwide, and grown to serve thousands of small businesses across construction, home services, and retail.
OpenSpace is a San Francisco-based construction technology company that turns 360-degree video walks of jobsites into AI-powered, navigable visual records pinned to floor plans. Its software stitches site captures into a Google Street View-style digital twin so general contractors can see every corner of a build, track progress, resolve disputes, and coordinate with BIM - without flying anyone to the site.
Andrew Anagnost is the President and CEO of Autodesk, the $41+ billion design and engineering software giant behind AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360. A PhD aeronautical engineer who once simulated Mars rovers at NASA Ames, he joined Autodesk as a product manager in 1997 and spent two decades reshaping it from the inside - architecting the company's landmark pivot from perpetual licenses to cloud subscriptions before taking the top job in 2017. Under his tenure, revenue has grown from ~$2B to over $6B and the company entered the Fortune 500. Off the clock, he is CSUN's largest-ever alumni donor, having committed $22.1 million to the public university that he credits with saving him from falling through the cracks.
Jason Chavez is the CEO and founder of Xyicon, a Napa, California-based SaaS company whose flagship platform SpaceRunner turns static PDF floor plans and spreadsheet data into interactive, visual asset management workspaces. Chavez started in technology as a field technician, built ComNet Technology in 2000 as an IT professional-services firm, and pivoted it into Xyicon in 2015 after growing frustrated with facility management software too complex for the people actually meant to use it. Under his leadership, Xyicon has grown to roughly 54 employees, landed major healthcare and construction clients, and built a platform claiming 95% productivity gains and 15% procurement cost reductions for its users.
Richy Nelson is the co-founder and CEO of Roofr, the cloud-based operating system for roofing contractors. A third-generation roofer who first climbed a roof at twelve years old, Nelson transformed decades of hands-on industry experience into a platform trusted by over 12,000 roofing companies across North America. After selling his house to fund the company, surviving Y Combinator in 2017, and raising a Series B from TCV and ABC Supply in January 2025, he leads a 150-person remote team on a mission to build the most trusted roofing platform in the world.
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.
Forest Flager is the CEO and co-founder of Parspec, an AI-native software platform modernizing the construction supply chain. A Stanford PhD in computational design optimization, Flager spent years in academia and at SoftBank-backed Katerra before launching Parspec in 2021 with co-founder Pratyush Havelia. The company has raised $31.5M (including a $20M Series A in July 2025 led by Threshold Ventures), grown revenue 4x in 12 months, and counts four of the five largest U.S. electrical distributors - representing $70 billion in global annual sales - among its customers. Parspec automates product selection, quoting, and submittal generation, cutting submittal creation time by 55-80%.
Kevin Albert is the Founder and CEO of Canvas, the world's first robotic drywall finishing company. A mechanical engineer with roots at Boston Dynamics - where he contributed to the legendary BigDog and LS3 quadruped robots - Kevin built Canvas to bring heavy-machinery-grade precision to the interior of buildings for the first time. With over 20 years of rugged robotics experience spanning Draper Lab, Otherlab, and his own inflatable-robot startup Pneubotics, he channeled a career's worth of know-how into solving one of construction's most stubborn productivity problems: drywall finishing hasn't changed in decades, and with two workers retiring for every one who enters the trades, Canvas's robots are becoming the industry's answer.
Brian Potter is a structural engineer turned writer who publishes Construction Physics, a Substack newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers covering industrial technology, manufacturing productivity, and why buildings still cost so much to build. A Senior Infrastructure Fellow at the Institute for Progress, he spent 15 years in construction - including a front-row seat to the $2B collapse of Katerra - before channeling his frustration into some of the most rigorously researched long-form writing on industrial systems published anywhere. His first book, The Origins of Efficiency, was published by Stripe Press in October 2025.