What is your role at OpenHouse.ai?
I’m the head of engineering at OpenHouse, as well as one of the co-founders. If I were to describe my role compared to the other members of the leadership team, I’m the people focused, operational excellence person. They are vision, sales, and revenue-focused, and I’m really the person who wants to make sure that the way that we’re treating our people—our clients, our team—makes people feel good and also creates really good outcomes. I’m process-focused. When people think of a co-founder they may think of big visions, but that’s not me as much as Will. I make sure that vision turns into reality.
What does that look like day to day?
My day-to-day has a couple of different components, but it’s mostly about making sure that the team as a whole, not just engineering, has the information, skill set, and direction necessary to create and experiment with what we need to do as efficiently as possible. It’s a lot of group meetings, one-on-one meetings, mentorship, coaching, including being mentored and coached myself. Making sure that people can get that experience and train up their skill sets, and hiring for skill sets if needed. I’m also a big fan of having a communication hub to document and express technical and product decisions, make sure we’re all pointed in the same direction, and ensuring that what we’re building matches what we want to build, which matches the value we’ll create in the market.
I also still develop myself. So, I spend probably 20 to 30% of my time doing technical work to keep my skills sharp.
Tell me about how you got started with OpenHouse.ai?
I was actually Will’s intern, almost a decade ago at this point. I was interning at Pason [Systems] with him, and he was very much a technical mentor for me there. I think we had a mutual pull, as I was hungry for the knowledge that he was very willing and able to share, and he appreciated that I was able to technically take on some of the stuff that, at a bit more of a legacy company, was harder to find resources for.
He had a lot of projects and aspirations that he wanted to complete, and he realized I was pretty good at doing the things he needed, even as an intern. That’s how we started, and then, as Will became a Founder, and things really began to change, the technical side didn’t become less interesting to him; it’s more that he had a bigger vision in terms of where he wanted to make an impact.
He originally thought of me as someone who could backfill himself, and he trusted my technical expertise. Now, I’m not just backfilling his technical expertise; we’re complementing each other. He’s very much a vision person, and I’m very much a people and operations person, which is a really good complement.
Why home building? How did you see this opportunity?
The way that my brain works, it wasn’t so much that I picked home building, it’s more like I picked the team that I wanted to build, which is a fun, different thing for me. For Will, it was about the why [why this industry], and for me, it was all about ‘Can I build the team and the relationships with clients?’ Now as I’ve been in home building for longer, that started to change. Canada really does have a housing supply problem, and the more I learn about building, the more I realize it’s made so much worse by logistical and cost issues, whether it’s the supply chain, whether it’s policies, whether it’s builders’ inefficiencies themselves, which is hard to admit, but can be part of the problem.
Making building more efficient will ultimately lead to more homes being built. If it’s profitable, people will build more. And if it’s not profitable, people will build less.
How do we make it profitable without raising prices? We need to decrease costs and inefficiencies, and that’s where OpenHouse comes in.
I bought my first home a few months ago, and it was so difficult for me to get the information for it, and it was an overwhelming process. I can really empathize with that and also just how expensive these homes are. Making buying a home easier and more affordable is important.
The fact is, more houses being built is solving the housing gap or the housing crisis. That’s ultimately a very positive thing.
I talk a lot about being very people-oriented, which is definitely true; that’s what helps me sleep at night at the end of the day. But I’m also a competitive person, especially when I was younger, and if we can help the builders that we work with compete on cost and win, then they can build better homes for cheaper, which means they will be more profitable. More people will also buy with them because they’re offering a strictly better product at a similar or slightly lower price point.
Ultimately, building more efficiency is a way to better profitability, and we’ve seen that with some of our clients, which is awesome.
What is one thing you wish people knew or understood about AI?
I am a strong AI believer, but I do not have AI on a pedestal.
To me, AI is a tool, and its flashiest implementations are not really its most important. I’ll compare it to another technology, cloud computing, which has completely changed the way that we do business, but it’s invisible to most people. AI has a lot of public-facing tools that do really cool, sometimes very gimmicky things. I think it’s actually almost twisted the public perception of it, that it’s both more powerful and more gimmicky than what it actually can do.
In reality, the overall value it’s creating is ten times greater behind the scenes than the flashy implementation that people are seeing or even can imagine.
AI for medical imaging, for example, it’s a great example, but it’s not the first thing people think of. They may think of ChatGPT in terms of organization or content, but there’s so much more value it can unlock than just efficiency optimizations and generating content.
It’s a powerful tool. I don’t think it’s going away, and I don’t think it’s temporary. However, I don’t think the generation craze will continue for the next 20 years, either.
Speaking of tools, are there any that you use to make your life easier?
I’m a big communication person. I believe that less is more, and generative AI tends to be very elaborate. But I do use Notion to keep track of all my favorite restaurants. I’m definitely a bit of a foodie, so I organize it by city type and use AI to keep things organized. I am also a big Figma lover.
What’s taking up most of your attention these days?
If we’re trying to aim for operational excellence and treating people right, we need to stay focused. What’s taking up a lot of my time is keeping our company not lean but the right size, the right amount of work, and the right amount of focus. Being exploratory, making sure we have room to develop new ideas, making sure that we’re keeping the core steady, and the revenue generation steady. That balance is what’s taking up most of my time right now.
And as you look to the horizon, what do you think is next for OpenHouse.ai?
That depends on how far out we look. The first step is continuing to grow the current products in a few new markets.
Once we have a winning product in a market, people have a kind of FOMO. They get jealous of that builder who’s being successful. They ask, ‘What’s the secret sauce?’ So what’s next is establishing that and growing. This is probably why I’m a day-to-day person. I’m thinking about what’s next in six months, but if you go larger than that, like three to five years, I really do think it’s looking at the home market more holistically. We always tell our builders, and they know this. but new home construction doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your biggest competition is the resale market. So we’ve looked at rentals and new homes and resale and things like that. And I think that’s likely where we’ll utilize our expertise.
What are you listening to or reading at this moment that you recommend?
Over the last five years, I’ve had a fascination with storytelling as a concept that appears over and over and over and is extremely powerful for the way that I like to communicate. People say life is sales, but for me, I’m not very sales-oriented. I think life is storytelling. This is a long-winded way to say I’ve been reading Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman, who wrote the His Dark Materials trilogy. He’s probably most famous as a children’s author, but it’s a series of essays that he’s written about storytelling and lectures he’s delivered and things like that which is excellent. I’ve also read The Golden Thread by Bruce Meyer, and watched Brandon Sanderson’s video lectures on writing recently.
These things have helped me understand how to better communicate as well as understand why some things grab you and some things don’t, and that’s such a fascinating thing to see similar in terms of how our brains work. I also love Thinking Fast and Slow. I think it’s probably my single most quoted book.
