construction
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Amit Birman and the business of letting go
After years of financing things that get built, Amit Birman took charge of Shikun & Binui. His next move was to ask which businesses the builder could afford to keep.
Timothy Boswell and the value of a temporary address
After years financing, combining and operating WillScot’s businesses, Timothy Boswell became CEO in January 2026. His next test is making a sprawling rental network work as precisely as the projects that depend on it.
Tamir Cohen and the price of a second act
He helped negotiate the purchase of Shikun & Binui, became its chairman and CEO, then left amid a dispute over its direction. Now Tamir Cohen has bought into YBOX, carrying a dealmaker’s experience into another Israeli property company.
Brice Neiman and the work behind the walls
He started in the field in Lincoln and became CEO of CDM Investment Group. Across that journey, Brice Neiman kept returning to the people who made the work possible.
Gary Smalley and the unfinished business of building
Before he became Tutor Perini’s CEO, Gary Smalley spent decades following the money through construction. Now he is responsible for turning billions of dollars of promised work into places people can use.
Jim Breuer and the long way to the top
Before he became Fluor’s CEO, Jim Breuer spent half his career on assignments outside the United States. His next assignment is to turn that accumulated experience into growth that survives contact with a construction site.
Dan Peyovich and the hands behind the cloud
He started as a carpenter. Now, as Dycom’s CEO, Dan Peyovich is expanding the business that builds digital infrastructure - and arguing that the future still needs people who know how to work with their hands.
LT Gibson’s very big bet on staying local
He started US LBM with 16 locations in 2009. As the business grew into a national network, LT Gibson kept returning to a deceptively difficult question: how much should a local company change when someone buys it?
Brian Lane and the art of leaving room
At Comfort Systems USA, Brian Lane has built a national business around local judgment. The next test is making room for a construction boom without promising more than his people can deliver.
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.
Andrew Hansen and the Business Hiding in Plain Sight
He knew the construction business from the inside. With SitePartners, Andrew Hansen turned that familiarity into a company devoted to helping industrial businesses explain what they do - and why people should care.
Douglas Cox and the business of giving people room
A salon suite is a small space with a large promise: a business of your own. Douglas Cox’s Tennessee family office brings that idea into a portfolio of builders, service businesses and an incubator designed to help other founders get started.
Rosser B. Edwards and the Architecture of a Handoff
A rejected promotion helped lead to Webcor. Rosser B. Edwards’s longer story is about passing a construction company, hard-earned knowledge and practical help into other hands.
David R. Boyd wanted to stay put. So he built a company.
After years of moving from one construction job to the next, David R. Boyd helped found Webcor in San Mateo in 1971. His second act was teaching younger builders how to understand the plans in their hands.
TJ Rinomato and the education of a late-starting rookie
He had spent decades in the family construction business before entering NASCAR’s Canadian series. For TJ Rinomato, becoming a rookie opened another chapter in a career that runs from Ontario property to a Sundance premiere.
Anthony Vigilante Built a Modern Business Around a 1927 Brooklyn Name
The Brooklyn operator inherited nearly a century of family history. His real work has been turning that inheritance into a system that can still answer when the boiler quits.
Jim Evans Built a Company for the Unflashy Work That Makes Everything Else Work
A West Point engineer moved from airborne operations to Wall Street, military housing and global retail programs. Then he built Sevan around a durable idea: complicated work gets easier when one team owns the handoffs.
Elaine Dimakos and the Quiet Work After the Alarm
At a restoration company, the hardest thing to rebuild is often confidence. Elaine Dimakos has made a career at the point where risk, communication and client care meet.
Erin Kuhlman Builds the Story Behind the Concrete
For more than 30 years she has done a quietly difficult job - making roads, bridges, and quarries mean something. As Granite Construction's marketing and communications chief, Erin Kuhlman turns dirt, gravel, and concrete into a story people want to tell.
Chris Wolf
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Joe Garcia
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
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.
Tom Sagi
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.
Andrew Anagnost
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.