The ConTech Exec

Robert Zimmerman
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Real people. Real work. Real talk. The ConTech Exec features conversations with the executives, founders and operators who build and power the projects behind AI, manufacturing and construction. Every week we go inside the whole chain that gets a big project built: the demand for AI, the energy and power connections, the sites and infrastructure, the construction trades, the technology, the manufacturing of the equipment, and the capital behind it all. No hype and no jargon, just straight answers from people doing the work. Your host is Robert Zimmerman, who has 35 years in commercial construction as a contractor, general contractor and subcontractor. He is the author of Critical Path and runs Stentorian Research, which tracks whether large capital projects can be delivered. New conversations every week. Website: https://contech-exec.com Stentorian Research: https://www.stentorianresearch.com Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBCjFumYpr3f1X1wry8rO_A

  1. Oct 23

    Who Is On Firewatch?

    A construction site is the most dangerous version of a building, and it's the one with the least fire protection. I sat down with James Pecz, VP of North America at Ramtech. The Nottingham, UK company has been building wireless site-safety systems since 1990 and now runs its North American business out of Charlotte. James spent 15 years at a UK general contractor before he crossed over, so he knows what an alarm on a half-built job has to survive. The numbers stopped me cold. NFPA counts about 4,400 construction-site fires a year in the US. They're about 1% of structure fires but nearly 4% of property damage. We talk about: How a mesh radio network keeps alarms talking on sites with no Wi-Fi, no cell signal and no single point of failureWhy the UK made temporary fire detection standard practice, and what the US is borrowingNFPA 241, the Fire Prevention Program Manager, and the new NFPA 72 Chapter 28 James helped writeWhether wireless detection can stand in for a human fire watchThe medical-alert button that saved a worker having a heart attackData centers, where a fire is a schedule risk nobody can affordSafety we take for granted is safety nobody planned for. Guest: James Pecz, VP North America, Ramtech Real People, Real Work, Real Talk. Chapters: 00:00 Welcome · 00:44 Ramtech's backstory · 03:42 UK code & US adoption · 05:57 Mesh networks · 09:39 Evacuation & medical alerts · 13:37 Mining & tunnels · 14:17 Fire statistics · 17:01 The phone call that started it · 18:47 Reactive vs. proactive safety · 20:24 NFPA 241 · 21:48 NFPA 72 Ch. 28 · 23:25 Replacing fire watch · 25:33 Small contractors · 28:57 Leasing vs. purchase · 32:28 Modular builds · 34:41 Success stories · 37:18 Safety we take for granted · 40:02 AI & data centers · 42:01 Data center schedule risk · 45:22 Wrap-up

  2. Oct 19

    Bootstrapped with Zebel

    Every estimator is a walking database, and some day that database retires. I sat down with Hamid Hajian, founder of Zebel, who grew up on job sites with his dad, a developer and GC. He saw a problem in precon at a big Bay Area multifamily builder and fixed it with a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet turned into a company. He never took VC money. When COVID shut the checkbook, he cashed out his 401k and bet on himself. We talk about: Why a “2020 project” is really a 2018 project (the date you bought out the trades is the date that matters)Why most companies use about 5% of their historical dataWhy the estimate and the budget never seem to line upThe AI estimating tool that shut down because nobody could explain its numbersWhy investors kept asking “where’s the AI?” and customers kept saying that’s the reason they buyHow much time precon deserves before the cost of capital starts eating you aliveWhy only a small slice of every AI dollar goes into construction, and why you still can’t make toast without the electricianBuilding the estimate is half the job. Defending it is the other half. Real talk with real people about real work.

  3. Oct 10

    Never Design Around a Generator You Can't Buy

    Data center equipment lead times are stretching construction schedules, and generators, switchgear, and transformers are where it hurts most. Mike Powers, Co-Founder and CEO of BuildVision, walks me through a data center from the grid to the chip and shows why every piece has its own supply chain and its own waiting line. Then he tells a story I can't shake. At a data center conference in January, everybody was designing around a 2 megawatt generator. By summer, the factory had a pile of 1.5 megawatt units sitting on its line, unsold. When lead times run 30 to 60 weeks, a miss like that stays missed. What we get into: Why construction buys equipment one job at a time, while farming and car makers buy aheadWhy a brand-new type of transformer is like buying a first-year car when the building can't go downWhy hospital backup generators are stuck in the same lineMike's argument that AI will be the price of staying in the game for contractors, just like BIM, and the money will land with the ownerThis is the biggest build of our time, and construction is standing in the crosshairs. Guest: Mike Powers, Co-Founder & CEO, BuildVision Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikerpowers/ BuildVision: https://www.buildvision.io/ BuildVision on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/trybuildvision/ Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

  4. Oct 3

    Data Centers: Think Small

    Everybody's building data centers the size of a small city. What if the better answer is a lot smaller? This week I sat down with Meltem Ballan, CEO and co-founder of Concrete Engine. She started her career as a pattern recognition engineer, worked on NATO projects, studied the brain, and spent time at General Motors. Now she's building distributed AI "factories" that are small, modular, and placed where the power and land already exist. This one is about where AI and construction meet. I want my construction folks to see a different model than the giant mission-critical build. What we get into: Why the big cloud companies have used up most of the computing power, and what that means for researchers and startupsDistributed AI factories: data centers of 10 megawatts or less, linked togetherEmpty office floors, grain elevators, and farmland as places for data centersCutting build costs with containers, insulation, and older generatorsWhy power price isn't the only bottleneck, and why construction cost matters just as muchWhat construction workers and local communities get out of it, beyond a few jobsFarmers owning their own dataMeltem's take on open-source AI tools going closedSmaller, local, and built with the community instead of dropped on top of it. Find Concrete Engine at concreteengine.com Connect with Meltem on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meltemballan/ Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

  5. Sep 30

    Nobody Reads Your Gantt Chart

    Projects don't blow up in one big moment. They drift. The master schedule says one thing, the job site is doing another, and nobody finds out until somebody walks into the Monday meeting and starts shouting. This week I sat down with Carlos Carvalho of Aphex, calling in from London. Carlos started out with Costain on Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) and HS2. He found the same old spreadsheets running some of the biggest jobs in the world. So he and his founding team built a planning tool for the people actually building the job, not the people reporting on it. We get into: Why a spreadsheet is where a plan goes to dieKeeping the master schedule and the daily field plan from drifting apartCatching delays the next day instead of weeks laterTalking into your phone instead of typing up a daily report at the end of a long shiftLanding a $6 billion job as your third customer, and the hair it cost himWhy data won't replace experience, and why no decision is sometimes worse than a bad oneCarlos is moving his family to Toronto in January to build out Aphex in North America. He showed his wife the city in July at 35 degrees. January is looking more like minus 25. Good luck, brother. Texas is always an option. Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

  6. Sep 21

    The New Age of Power

    Everybody thinks you plug these AI chips in like a toaster, flip the switch, and off it goes. It doesn't work that way. The new AI chips don't pull steady power. They spike and drop many times a second. Michael Wood III of DG Matrix tells me that at big-campus scale, those swings are cracking turbines, shearing generator shafts, and frying backup power gear in days to weeks. He says that problem has gone from theory to reality. This one's a bit of a shift for me. I usually sit down with software founders. But the AI buildout is running into a physical wall, and I want my AEC folks to see the hardware that's out there, not just the same system that gets drawn the same way on every job. DG Matrix builds what's called a solid state transformer. A regular transformer is a big hunk of iron, copper, and steel: one voltage in, one voltage out, about the same thing Tesla and Edison were putting in the ground. Their version uses power electronics instead, and it takes power from several sources at once (the grid, batteries, on-site generators, backup gensets) and sends it out to several loads. Michael says one unit does the work of 10 to 15 separate pieces of gear. What we get into: Why the big data center builders aren't waiting on the grid. They're making their own power on site and leaving room for the utility to tie in later.Same hardware on every job. The differences get set up in the software, not rebuilt in the field.Permitting and certification on gear the permit office has never seen before. Michael also breaks a little news about their testing lab.Lead times. Michael says they're typically delivering in five to six months.Skilled labor. He says 80 to 90 percent of the system gets built in the factory, so the site work comes down to cable terminations and commissioning.Texas, ERCOT, Senate Bill 6, and whether a data center can be a good neighbor to the grid instead of a risk to it.What these projects owe the ratepayer and the town they land in.Small modular data centers, and the substations around the country that still have power available. You can throw $700 billion at a problem, but somebody still has to make it, ship it, set it, connect it, commission it, and service it for the next 20 to 30 years. Electricians coming up right now, pay attention to this one. Find DG Matrix at dgmatrix.com. Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

  7. Sep 21

    Nuclear Visibility

    Every project management software out there promises "real-time visibility." Hussain Arwani was managing 15 to 20 nuclear construction projects at once, and he'll tell you straight: he didn't have it. When the boss asked for a status, the honest answer was "let me get back to you." So he built Masaro. Here's the idea. Superintendents and foremen already talk their updates all day, in phone calls, schedule meetings, and end-of-shift reports. The supers Hussain interviewed told him it eats hours of their day. Masaro lets them say it once, into their phone. The update is written out as they speak, lands on a dashboard, and moves the schedule in P6 or Microsoft Project. Anything that pushes the critical path gets flagged for the project team to approve first. The schedule doesn't get to run off on its own. In this episode we get into: Why most construction software gets built for the office (hint: the field doesn't hold the budget)Whether the contract schedule is a plan or a piece of leverage. I've called it fiction. Hussain was more polite.Why everybody wants the real-time truth from the jobsite, right up until they get itThe number I think matters most: how long it takes to get from "we have a problem" to somebody actually doing something about itWho owns the project data, and why in nuclear the answer is short: the owner owns all of itWhy a pen and a notebook on the dash of my truck is still the best cybersecurity out there The truth will set you free. It'll piss you off first. Masaro.io is now out of stealth, If you back construction tech that starts in the field instead of the corner office, he's worth a call. Find Hussain: masaro.io | Hussain Arwani on LinkedIn Real People. Real Work. Real Talk.

  8. Sep 21

    Robots? Really? ReFrame Opened My Eyes

    Thirty-five years in this business and I've never seen this career path: DARPA robotics, then years leading Amazon's robot arms that pick and pack everything you order, then… go build houses. Felipe Polido, co-founder and head of technology at Reframe Systems, did exactly that. The plans an architect hands you are a rough recipe. Where the outlet goes, sure. How the wire runs, where the staples land, what gets drilled first — that's left to the trades to figure out in the field, on every single house, every single time. Reframe's answer isn't a magic wall panel that clicks together. It's software that generates the actual build instructions, then prints them right on the lumber and the sheet goods. The stud tells you what it is. The subfloor shows you where the light goes. The electrician looks up and there's one hole, already drilled, right where the wire runs. We get into what the robots do and don't do (the dull, dirty, dangerous framing work — not the finish carpentry), how a machine deals with twisted grade-two lumber (a real carpenter still sorts the pile first, and I had opinions about that), why they build with the same materials as everybody else instead of chasing a venture-backed miracle product, and how a three-story triple-decker went from crane on Tuesday to a building on Friday. And then the honest part. Even with a factory that keeps getting faster, Felipe says the things that could stop them cold are the same things that have stopped all of us: permitting, foundations, and inspectors who read the code a little differently in every town. Fire, apparently, spreads differently from municipality to municipality. Felipe's team is moving out of a 17,000-square-foot pilot facility into a building roughly seven times that size, and they're going from signed lease to operational in about seventy days. Ask a factory owner how easy that is. Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

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About

Real people. Real work. Real talk. The ConTech Exec features conversations with the executives, founders and operators who build and power the projects behind AI, manufacturing and construction. Every week we go inside the whole chain that gets a big project built: the demand for AI, the energy and power connections, the sites and infrastructure, the construction trades, the technology, the manufacturing of the equipment, and the capital behind it all. No hype and no jargon, just straight answers from people doing the work. Your host is Robert Zimmerman, who has 35 years in commercial construction as a contractor, general contractor and subcontractor. He is the author of Critical Path and runs Stentorian Research, which tracks whether large capital projects can be delivered. New conversations every week. Website: https://contech-exec.com Stentorian Research: https://www.stentorianresearch.com Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBCjFumYpr3f1X1wry8rO_A

Information

  • Creator
    Robert Zimmerman
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    86
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Robert Zimmerman
  • Show Website
    The ConTech Exec