Built 2 Scale

Built 2 Scale
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship

From bootstrapped chaos to VC-backed scale, Built 2 Scale is your backstage pass to building high-growth startups at the edge of business, tech, AI, and robotics. Hosted by founders Matt Perrott and Scott Wilcox, this podcast dives into the raw, unfiltered reality of turning big ideas into scalable companies. Each week, we unpack the messy middle—fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, and the growing role of automation and AI in modern business. No hype. No jargon. Just real stories, hard lessons, and sharp insights from founders who are actually in the trenches. Whether you’re building SaaS, hardware, or something the world’s never seen before—if you’re scaling, you’re in the right place.

  1. 4 days ago

    Building an AI-Native Construction Company | Scott Wilcox

    What does it take to build an AI-native construction company? This week, Matt takes the host’s chair to interview Scott Wilcox about the thinking, systems, and decisions behind W.—and his ambition to build in half the time at half the cost. Scott explains why becoming more efficient at managing construction only gets you so far. If you improve by 30% but control just 10% of the cost, the overall improvement is 3%. That thinking is driving a deeper look at vertical integration, manufacturing, and the entire supply chain. Fresh from visiting factories in China, Scott shares what he learned about where building products come from, how costs accumulate between manufacturers and job sites, and the opportunity to get closer to the source. Back inside the business, they explore how Scott uses AI agents, turns repeatable work into reusable skills, builds construction programmes through conversation, and decides which software to buy and which to build. They also discuss the human side: protecting time for judgment, relationships and craftsmanship, while keeping site teams focused on quality and safety. In this episode: What makes a construction business AI-native.The connection between AI and vertical integration.Lessons from Chinese factories and construction supply chains.Practical starting points for builders adopting AI.Turning business processes into reusable skills.Bringing technical capability in-house.Building a company that can scale beyond its founder.Why quality lives at the interfaces.Wearables, AI agents, and a future where technology works quietly in the background. Built to Scale is Scott Wilcox (W.) and Matt Perrott (BuildPass), building in public at the intersection of construction and AI.

  2. 10 Sept

    The Value of Human Cognition Is Going Negative. Build the Outcome Machine.

    What happens when intelligence becomes abundant, the cost of cognitive work trends towards zero, and humans themselves become the unpredictable variable inside increasingly autonomous systems? In Episode 6, Scott and Matt explore what this means for the future of work, company design and the products businesses should be building. The argument is not that humans have no value. It is that in some systems, unstructured human intervention can increasingly add cost, variance and risk. If machines can perform more of the work reliably, the question changes from “How do I make this person more productive?” to “How do I build the system that produces the outcome?” That leads to the idea of the outcome machine: instead of repeatedly hiring people to perform the same task, combine deep domain expertise with AI-native system builders and encode that knowledge into a machine that gets better every time it runs. They discuss why every company needs to put a harness around frontier technology and point it at its end product, why outputs are being commoditised while outcomes remain valuable, and why the real competitive advantage may sit between an increasingly powerful intelligence layer and the customer. For construction, that leads somewhere much bigger: architecture and engineering becoming dramatically cheaper to produce, fragmented disciplines beginning to converge, computational design replacing static drawings, and construction evolving towards software + manufacturing. Also covered: software factories, autonomous agents, AI spending disasters, Tesla and Cybercabs, self-maintaining physical products, the growing scarcity of skilled trades — and OnlyFans for electricians. The question underneath the whole episode: If the cost of intelligence keeps falling, what should your company actually become? Built to Scale is Scott Wilcox (W.) and Matt Perrott (BuildPass) building in public at the intersection of construction and AI. Follow Scott → / scott-wilcox-41bb2538 Follow Matt → / perrott

  3. 26 Aug

    B2S Operators — Structured AI | The 3D QA Agent

    Structured AI is building an AI-native quality layer for construction: agents that can read complex drawing sets and 3D models, find design and coordination issues, and increasingly act inside Revit to help fix them. Their thesis is simple: QA/QC is still too manual, too inconsistent and too dependent on people catching everything under time pressure. In this episode, Raymond Zhao and Ben Remy unpack how Structured AI is approaching that problem technically — combining software engineers with experienced architects and engineers, tightly managing agent context, and embedding domain knowledge so the system understands not just that something is wrong, but why it is wrong and how it should be resolved. The conversation then moves beyond QA. Structured AI is already giving its Revit agent permission to make isolated changes to models, and sees a path from identifying errors, to fixing larger sub-problems, to eventually generating more of the building itself. In that future, the QA layer becomes even more important: if agents are designing and building, another agent still needs to verify the output. A discussion about the evolution from fragmented construction documentation toward agent-generated, machine-checked buildings — and what it takes to make AI genuinely useful in the physical world. Chapters: 0:00 Welcome — Ben & Raymond from Structured.ai 0:26 The mission: an AI quality layer for construction 2:25 Raymond’s path — architecture to Oxford stats 3:14 The fighter-jet origin story 6:05 Inside Y Combinator — solving the right problem 9:05 What is a forward-deployed engineer? 10:45 One of the great problems in construction 12:37 Under the hood: the giant vector soup 14:28 Context management is everything 17:47 The write side — fixing designs from first principles 20:42 Outcome as a Service 22:05 Who goes first on AI-generated design? 23:17 Productizing a messy industry 24:08 Biggest bottlenecks: scaling and talent 27:51 Should software set the standard? 29:36 Winning over the 40-year veterans 31:58 Agents checking agents — hallucination management 34:47 Closing thoughts + who should reach out Structured.ai → https://getstructured.ai Built to Scale is Scott Wilcox (W.) and Matt Perrott (BuildPass) building in public at the intersection of construction and AI. Follow Scott → https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-wilcox-wilcoxbuilt/ Follow Matt → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattperrott/

  4. 3 Aug

    Live for Your Drive

    The first ever live Built 2 Scale, streaming at 6am for the Australian drive to work and 3pm for the Austin drive home. Scotty and Matt dig into open source models like Kimi closing the gap on the frontier labs and what that does to cost per token for every business downstream, then get into the coming HR nightmare of token spend as a staff member four months into a European summer ranks number two in company token usage. They cover the shift from token maxing to LLM routing, why work is now completely mobile and completely voice, Granola landing on the Apple Watch and BuildPass following with Superite, and the 45 minute hackathon that produced Tinder for Talent, a LinkedIn scraping recruitment app so creepy Scotty's wife told him to delete it. Plus: live audience questions on AI glasses for site defect walks, whether founders will spend more time talking than typing, and how James Hird could use AI to fix Essendon. Built 2 Scale | Season 2 Episode 5 TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 First Ever Live Built 2 Scale: Confirm or Deny the Bed in the Office 2:17 LeBron to the 76ers vs Jacinta Allan Leaving Victoria 4:00 Open Source Models Catch Up: Kimi, Fable Going Offline and Back 4:50 Good for Consumers and Businesses, Bad for the Frontier Labs 6:20 Token Maxing to Agent Architecture: Mapping Models to Your Org Chart 8:13 LLM Routing and the Uber Eats Milkrun Playbook for AI Pricing 11:46 The Token HR Problem: Staff Member in Italy Ranks Number Two on Spend 13:00 Do You Get Tokens on Annual Leave? Personal Use, Side Hustles and JD Perks 15:29 Tool of the Week: Scotty's Three Hour Voice Session Building the WOS 18:03 How to Frame It: Ask the AI to Interview You Until It Finds the Real Problem 19:35 Matt's 20 Minute Drive Home Debrief Built as a Claude Project 22:30 Whisper Flow and Why Typing Is the Dumbest Bandwidth You Own 23:30 Granola Hits the Apple Watch: The Passive Note Taker Moment 25:26 Breaking News: Superite Coming to the Apple Watch (Hit the Gong) 28:12 Site Diaries, Defect Walks and Pre Daily Briefings From Your Wrist 31:47 Building in Public: The 45 Minute Hackathon With an AI Engineer Per Team 36:03 Tinder for Talent: Swipe Right, Auto Message, Wife Says Delete It 39:11 Why Software Now Needs Tight Feedback Loops and Deep Verticals 40:34 Modular Software, MCP Servers and Why You Shouldn't Build Your Own CRM 43:44 Two Businesses Converging: The Builder Gets Technical, the Software Team Goes On Site 46:00 Outcomes as a Service: Coming for the Labour Bill, Not the Software Bill 47:31 Audience Q: How Far Away Are AI Glasses Capturing Defects on Site? 49:27 Scotty's Take: Instructions in the Glasses Beats Live Defect Detection 52:00 The World Model Layer: Live Site Data Rewriting the Schedule in the Background 53:12 Construction's Memory Problem: Everyone Goes Home and the IP Leaks Out 55:48 Audience Q: How Would James Hird Use AI to Fix Essendon? 56:54 Audience Q: Will Founders Talk More Than They Type? (Lovable Becomes Lava Bulb) 57:59 The VTT Hack: Flag Your Voice to Text So No One Judges Your Grammar 59:10 Tongue Controlled Mouse: The Weirdest Input Device Yet This Episode Covers: Open source models like Kimi closing on the frontier and what that means for cost per token across every businessWhy hardware getting better and models getting smaller were always going to cross over in the middleMoving from token maxing to real agent architecture: mapping models to roles in your org chart by task typeLLM routing and why not every request needs the most expensive model on earthThe coming HR fight over tokens: annual leave, personal use, side hustles and tokens as an employment perkVoice as the new interface: Scotty's three hour session across a run, a gym, a sauna and a car producing a real artifactFraming voice sessions properly by asking the AI to interview you until it finds the actual bottleneckMatt's Claude project that turns the 20 minute drive home into a daily debrief and to do listGranola launching on Apple Watch and BuildPass bringing Superite to the wrist for site managersThe 45 minute hackathon format: every team gets an AI engineer, lists ten pain points, ships a working prototypeTinder for Talent: the LinkedIn scraping recruitment prototype that replaced a $20K recruiter feeWhy software companies need modular products, MCP access and deep customer feedback loops instead of point solutionsAI glasses on construction sites: capture and processing are solved, the real time guidance layer is roughly six months outConstruction's memory and communication problem as the biggest leak in the industry KEY INSIGHTS: Open source is a consumer win and a frontier lab problem: Cheaper models plus better consumer hardware means prices have to come down. The only losers are the labs subsidising inferenceToken spend becomes a line item next to headcount: Finance teams already track salaries. Companies like RAMP are tracking AI spend. Expect role cost to mean salary plus agent costRoute the request, don't max the model: Sending a basic task to the most expensive model is the AI equivalent of Uber Eats VC subsidies. That era ends the moment margins matterWork is now mobile and voice first: A three hour session across a run, a gym and a car produced a foundational business artifact. The thumb to keyboard bandwidth is the bottleneck, not the thinkingThe Apple Watch finally has a real use case: Passive capture is less awkward than a phone on the table and frees your hands on site. Voice input is the killer feature, not health trackingHackathons are 80/20 machines: Forty five minutes gets you a working prototype and a real idea. The last 20% takes 80% of the time, but you can't invest in an idea nobody has proven yetDon't rebuild the wheel, build what makes you different: A construction business shouldn't build its own CRM or payroll. Build the workflows unique to you on top of infrastructure that already existsOutcomes as a service is the next software frontier: Safety paperwork is hard to sell, finance is easier, winning tenders sells itself. The pitch is converting labour bills into tokensInstructions in the glasses beat defects in the glasses: Training vision models to spot a 5mm tolerance issue is expensive. Scrolling the SOP into a tradesman's eyeline scales quality across a workforce todayThe site as a world model: Live capture doesn't just flag defects, it feeds a system that reruns the schedule, spots downstream clashes and reschedules deliveries in the backgroundConstruction's leaky bucket: Everything seen and heard on site walks home at 5pm and never reaches tomorrow's crew. Any observation not shared to the project brain is lost IPCurious beats credentialed: The people getting the most out of these tools aren't waiting to be told what AI can do, they're assuming it can and finding the edges the hard way About Built 2 Scale: Weekly analysis of artificial intelligence business strategy, robotics adoption, and technology market dynamics. Hosted by Scott Wilcox (Australia) and Matt Perrott (Austin), providing actionable insights for founders, investors, and technology executives navigating the AI transformation. Subscribe for AI business intelligence: /@built2scale Available on Spotify | Apple Podcasts #AI #OpenSource #Kimi #Claude #Fable #TokenSpend #LLMRouting #VoiceAI #Granola #AppleWatch #Hackathon #BuildPass #Superite #AIGlasses #Construction #Built2Scale #LiveStream #TechNews

  5. 25 Jun

    The Master Builder Revival | How humans + Tokens spark a lost-crafts renaissance

    How humans + tokens spark a lost-crafts renaissance For two hundred years the master builder got fragmented — one person who could read a site, command a trade and run a job split into site manager, contracts administrator, project coordinator, estimator, fifteen roles deep. That fragmentation wasn’t craft. It was admin: the tax you pay to run a build in the twenty-first century. This week Scott and Matt make the case that tokens are about to pay that tax for us — and what’s left when the admin burden lifts is the craft itself. They go deep on the operating system underneath it: BuildPass’s move to four product lines — Win, Pay, Build, Connect — absorbing the fragmentation so one builder can sit back in the cockpit and give the verdict that matters: approve, challenge, or deny. Then the human side — “human plus token,” hiring for agency over résumés, and why keeping real people in the building still matters. Plus the Traidy launch and raising the floor for 1.3 million trades, finishing your site admin by voice on the drive home, and a live demo of the open-source glasses that put a master’s guidance in your ear while you lay the brick. The robots aren’t coming to replace the bricklayer. They’re coming to make the bricklayer a master again.

  6. 25 May

    The Abundance Stack

    Scott and Matt are back after a month off — and a new daughter, a new W. hire from the podcast itself, and a 22-minute plan to solve Australia. Matt coins "knowledge debt," Scott coins "tradesmen are skills files with dexterity," and they propose a hackathon that pairs a bricklayer with a developer. Plus Codex Goals running for four days unattended, AI cameras landing in Austin, and Scott drops the full Scotty Algorithm (DMICSA) as a public skill file. The world model, on a site.

  7. 3 May

    Skills vs Agents — The Stack Everyone's Getting Wrong

    Scott Wilcox and Matt Perrott break down the two weeks that took W.Build's invoice processing from $5–$10 per invoice to half a cent — a thousand times reduction — and what it signals for every construction business trying to figure out where agents fit. In this episode: The clean definition of agents vs skills (and why most people are overcomplicating it) Why BuildPass is "declaring bankruptcy" on five years of company docs Scott's DMISA framework — Direction, Measure, Incentivize, Systemize, Automate — and why automation is the last step, not the first The $5-to-half-a-cent invoice story (and why construction finance has traumatised Scott for 15 years) Matt on why the moat is now velocity, not code Scott's pitch for WVC — the 12-week accelerator dragging 12-15 trade partners into W.'s operating stack Jevons paradox, abundance, and why AI makes each person more valuable, not less 2026 as the year you pick a side Chapters / Timestamps 00:00 — Intro 00:42 — Easter in construction, the $15K/day industry cost 03:36 — What's an agent? What's a skill? The clean definition 05:38 — Gary Tan's "thin harness, fat skills" 06:02 — Matt on declaring Notion bankruptcy 06:55 — Scott: your whole business is seven markdown files 10:23 — Hire specialists, not generalists (same for AI) 13:29 — "You have to drop the ego at the door" 14:00 — Top-down vs bottom-up skill governance 15:01 — The DMISA playbook begins 20:10 — Scott as the issues funnel 22:08 — Issue maturity — where your business actually is 25:26 — Incentives are a human problem 25:50 — Why construction finance is uniquely broken 26:57 — The headline: $5 → half a cent per invoice 28:15 — Finance department on agents by EOFY 29:04 — Matt: building for agents, not just users 31:25 — Claude connector, CLI, agent-first APIs 33:25 — 5-year roadmap → 2 quarters 34:09 — Hot take: the dinosaurs are dying 35:43 — Granola to glasses — capturing site context 37:22 — Context loss as the new opportunity cost 38:55 — Business as a data capture machine 40:32 — Alignment as the real flywheel 40:54 — Jevons paradox and abundance.inc 43:12 — We're still human 45:12 — Capitalism → compute → AI → abundance 46:12 — 10% vs 90% — why WVC exists 47:42 — Half price in five years 49:12 — Generational wealth for trades 50:58 — The work intensity behind all of it 52:54 — 2026 is the year you pick a side Mentioned / Referenced Gary Tan — "thin harness, fat skills" Granola (meeting notes) Claude, ChatGPT Premier CS (construction finance) Monday.com (scorecards / rocks) BuildPass — Claude/ChatGPT connector, CLI, SuperSight WVC — 12-week construction accelerator Hosts Scott Wilcox — Founder/CEO, W. Build · @scottjwilcox Matt Perrott — Co-founder, BuildPass · @mattperrott

  8. 31 Mar

    The Sims for Founders: What Agent-First Companies Actually Look Like

    Built2Scale is back — and everything's different. No more AI news roundups. From now on, every episode documents the real, messy, building-in-public journey of W. (luxury home builder, $30M+ revenue, ~20 people) and BuildPass (construction tech startup, 1,000+ customers across 4 countries) as they converge into one platform. This week: Scott onboarded his entire company onto Claude in a single live session — $30/person/month, every tool connected, nobody left behind. Within days, his team stopped asking him questions and started asking the AI instead. ("Imagine if I spoke that eloquently at work.") Matt discovered Paperclip — a tool that lets you run an agent-first company from your terminal. He hired a CEO agent, approved new hires through a board approval workflow, and watched autonomous agents start building a business. Then he left it running overnight and woke up to a rate limit error. The bill is TBD. Also in this episode: → How to map agents against your org chart (Scott built a 20-page architecture in one weekend) → Brian Armstrong's "reverse prompting" approach at Coinbase → Scott's attempt to build Palantir for construction in 4 hours on Replit → Jensen Huang's two-question test for deciding what's worth working on → The WVC announcement — a Y Combinator-style accelerator for trades Tools mentioned: Claude, Paperclip, OpenClaw, Replit, Monday.com, Granola, BuildPass, Notebook LM Hosts: Scott Wilcox (@scottjwilcox) and Matt Perrott (@mattperrott)

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From bootstrapped chaos to VC-backed scale, Built 2 Scale is your backstage pass to building high-growth startups at the edge of business, tech, AI, and robotics. Hosted by founders Matt Perrott and Scott Wilcox, this podcast dives into the raw, unfiltered reality of turning big ideas into scalable companies. Each week, we unpack the messy middle—fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, and the growing role of automation and AI in modern business. No hype. No jargon. Just real stories, hard lessons, and sharp insights from founders who are actually in the trenches. Whether you’re building SaaS, hardware, or something the world’s never seen before—if you’re scaling, you’re in the right place.

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  • Creator
    Built 2 Scale
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    49
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Built 2 Scale
  • Show Website
    Built 2 Scale