Build Software For The Field
Florian Biller — CEO @ Capmo
About this masterclass
Florian Biller is the CEO and co-founder of Capmo, an AI-driven construction project management platform for general contractors, planners, and site teams. Florian built Capmo at the intersection of two worlds: exposure to Silicon Valley's tech ecosystem and a deep family connection to the construction industry.
What This Masterclass Covers
Construction customers don't want to explain their world from zero to a software vendor. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to understand their workflows, pain points, and context before you walk in the door. That belief shaped everything about how Capmo was built, from the first prototype to how new hires are onboarded today. In this masterclass, Florian walks through what it actually takes to build a construction software company by staying obsessively close to the end user:
- How both founders spent the early days doing call after call with project managers and site leaders, and why that rigor gave them conviction before writing a single line of code
- Why starting with smaller companies and the Bauleiter on the ground was the fastest path to product-market fit, not the enterprise org chart
- The hiring mistake Capmo made early on: bringing in customer-facing people without enough construction understanding, and how that led to structured boot camps and mandatory site visits for every new hire
- Why there are no shortcuts in vertical SaaS domain learning, and why "understanding the customer" is not a checkbox but a permanent operating principle
- How Capmo built voice input for daily reporting because site managers are walking around and can't type, including automatic translation and formatting
- Why purpose matters more than press coverage: Florian's view that building the best product for the customer beats being on magazine covers or talking about fundraises
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Transcript
Introduction
Hello, I'm Florian, co-founder and CEO of Capmo. What we do is tackle the biggest industry out there — construction — by providing an intuitive, AI-based project management solution to help the industry build better places together.
We've been at this not since yesterday but for seven years now, and have since grown to more than 100 people, more than 100,000 construction sites digitized, more than 1,000 customers, and more than €50 million in venture capital funding from globally leading investors. But one thing hasn't changed: our purpose — to build better places together. And I'm really proud to work with my great team on this every single day.
Background & Growing Up
I grew up in Munich, was born and raised here, and did my first bachelor's degree at LMU Munich — a business degree. I really used my time studying to the fullest. I had the privilege, through a university program called CDTM, to go abroad — spend time in Hong Kong, spend time in Berkeley in California — and get to see the most vibrant tech ecosystems in the world. Seeing what's possible with technology, and then coming home and seeing the state of technology in construction — my grandpa had started a construction business in the late 50s — that gap wasn't something I wanted to accept. I wanted to bring these two worlds together: technology to the biggest, oldest, but also least digital industry out there. That combination is what became Capmo.
First Memory of Construction
My first memories of construction aren't really of being taken to a construction site. They're of the renovation of my parents' house. I think my first real memories are from when I was 3 or 4 years old — just when my sister and brother were born, and I had to give up my room because we were extending the house. I remember my dad saying: this is going to be your room. And I was crying, because there was no roof yet, just a little wall, and I couldn't really imagine, at a few years old, what construction was — or that this construction site would become my room from age 4 until I moved out at 18 or 20. That's really my first memory of construction.
Berkeley & the Startup Mindset
While studying, I had the privilege of spending half a year at the University of California, Berkeley. I think that really shaped how I think about entrepreneurship. It wasn't like a German business school where you have 700 people learning theoretical concepts. Instead, successful entrepreneurs came into the classroom and talked about their experiences. Venture capitalists came by — experienced people from San Francisco who told you their stories. What really stuck with me was the drive, the belief in what's possible with technology, and the understanding that it's not just the idea — it's very much how you execute it, and how deeply you understand the environment you're working in.
If you're in construction, you really need to understand construction inside out. That might be different if you're building a consumer product where you are potentially your own customer. But in construction — and this was a key lesson from Berkeley — when you're targeting a specific domain or industry, get to know it inside out before you start something, rather than just starting and hoping the context doesn't matter.
Why Found a Company?
A lot of people ask me whether founding my own company was always the big dream. Not exactly. I had the privilege of being part of CDTM, a study program where a lot of great founders have been mentored, and exchanging with them and seeing their drive, their motivation, what you can achieve when you start your own company — that was always motivating. But it wasn't that I told myself: I want to be a founder. Rather, I saw this great problem in construction, I had the family background, I saw what was possible with technology, and I thought: combining these two worlds is just such a great opportunity. And that's how we got started.
Finding the Right Co-Founder
Probably one of the most important decisions when starting a business is who you start it with. I started Capmo with Bastian, my co-founder. We got to know each other over years — we studied together in a program that brings together technical and business-oriented people and teaches the tech people just enough business, and the business people just enough tech, so they can speak the same language. We did projects together over two or three years, then each started our master's degrees but kept in touch, and said: once we're done with our degrees, let's come together — we've been working so well over the past years, let's see what we want to build. And I couldn't be happier that we started Capmo together.
Starting with Purpose
When you start a business, you start reading a lot of materials online — and luckily, in Europe now the startup and tech ecosystems are much more mature, so you have people who can help and guide you. What a lot of them told us: start with your purpose. Figure out what you want to do. For us, this was pretty clear from the very beginning. We said: we are in construction, we're using tech to improve it. Our purpose was set right at the start: build better places together. Today this is much clearer for everyone in the company because we measure our progress — how many projects have we digitized, how many live projects is our product used on. Seeing those numbers grow is what brings us closer to building better places together.
The Early Days: Talking to Customers
The company is now seven years old, but when I look back at 2018, the construction industry was still quite different — less digital, less aware of what's possible with technology. Our approach from the start was also a bit different: we said we're not a business co-founder and a tech co-founder where one does sales and one does engineering. We both had to be out in the field. So at the very beginning, we reached out to potential customers, cold-called them, and talked about their problems. We did 20, 30, 40 of these calls each, then came back together and synthesized: what did they tell us? What is bugging them most in their day to day?
We started with end users. In construction, we focused on the project manager — or the Bauleiter, which is a very specific German term. And what they told us was that they didn't have enough time on the construction site because they were bogged down by inefficiencies: documenting, trying to project-manage without having all the information they needed. We took that insight, flipped it around, called another 30 or 40 people, and pitched our idea: if we solve your problem like this, how would you feel? The resonance was big — really positive.
So we built the first prototype — which at the time wasn't even a real product. It was a PowerPoint presentation. We showed it to customers. I still remember: with our first customer, we went into their office, put up the screen, and told them: this is our product. The honest truth is, it was a PowerPoint and we knew exactly where to click so the next slide would look like it was the software. The first customer bought it. And that was our validation to build a real tech product from it. We never stopped and never looked back. Seven years later, we're a 100-person construction tech company.
Managing the Roller Coaster
Starting a company, we said from the very beginning: the highs are not that high and the lows are not that low — because it's a roller coaster, and that's just the reality.
What we also realized: let's start by being as close to the end user as possible. Although we ultimately wanted to digitize and help the biggest construction companies, we started with small firms, because with those you get feedback much quicker. That's the most important thing in the early days: build a product based on rapid customer feedback — experiment, ship, get feedback, productize. With small companies, you also have the luxury of always optimizing for the end user. When you go bigger, it starts to have a more corporate dimension — security requirements and all that, which is important but slows you down a bit.
Co-Founder Dynamics
One of the big challenges in the early days: you started a business together, so your co-founder is not just a colleague — it's someone you fight with all the time, because everyone wants progress. And when you push things hard, disagreements are actually really helpful. The way we solved this was to commit to what we call intellectual honesty. Take out the emotions and really boil it down: what is the actual disagreement? Why are we having it? What is the best outcome for the company? And sometimes the way to solve it is simply to say: let's not fix this today, but tomorrow when emotions have settled and we can look at it with fresh eyes. This has always worked really well for Bastian and me over seven years together, and I think it's one of the reasons we're succeeding.
Humility Over Vanity
One more thing I think is really important: in the startup world, you can chase magazine covers or talk about your latest fundraise. But I think very strongly that this will only take you so far. Construction is not an industry that cares whether you're in the Handelsblatt or on the Forbes cover. They care whether you're building the best product. For an industry like construction, try to be humble — work with your customers rather than chasing the vanity metrics that a lot of people in the startup world become obsessed with.
The Gap Between Startup World and Construction World
Starting a company in the construction industry also means that the people you're selling to are probably as far apart as possible from the people you work with on your own side — digital natives building a tech company, venture capital investors, and so on. There is a huge gap between what your customers talk about and understand, and what your employees and investors talk about.
This led to a very funny situation early on. We were already funded after our seed round and approaching customers. Those customers didn't know much about venture capital or tech startups, so they'd come to us and say: wouldn't it be a big deal for you if we gave you €50,000 and got half the company? Or: could we give you €200,000 and have you work exclusively for us next year? At the very beginning, it was a real challenge that customers didn't see you as a software partner but as a few tech people they might want to bring in-house to do things exclusively. Luckily that's changed as we've grown bigger and people now see us as partners in doing construction better.
What Capmo Does
Capmo is a construction project management solution that targets general contractors and planners — everyone who has to manage a project on site. Imagine an average project: you're building a new school. You have planners — several of them — plus a general contractor coordinating everything. And it's not just one company building everything: there's the electrician, the flooring crew, the ceiling crew, everything. You have 40 or 50 companies with a lot of people each, who may have never worked together before, and they have to finish a project in very limited time. That's the big challenge our customers face.
As an AI-driven project management solution, we make that easier. We help people schedule their construction project, give them everything at their fingertips — all the data, all the documents, all the specifications, all the change orders — all managed within Capmo. And one important aspect: this could theoretically have been done in the past too, but AI makes it easier and automates it. The other critical component is mobile. Construction managers work with our mobile app, gather data, and do their documentation. Why is this so important? In the past, a construction project manager was doing their best to steer the project, but they were leaving half the data on the table because all the information from the field simply wasn't captured.
That changed when we combined the field productivity aspect — documenting things, being the tool for the people on the ground — with the full project management solution. Having all that data, understanding all the construction-specific processes, we now use this massive data treasure to automate processes with AI. Because what most people don't realize: construction is the industry that, after finance, produces the most data in the world. And up until now, almost none of it was being used. With Capmo, customers can finally leverage it. We always push the claim: let the software do that for you. Not software you have to fill and manage, but software that helps you run the project — do the scheduling for you, run the meetings for you, check the change orders for you.
The Name "Capmo"
Probably the question I get the most at the beginning and still today: what does Capmo stand for? The honest answer: it doesn't have a meaning. We sat down at the beginning and knew that construction is the second least digital industry — after hunting and fishing. So we didn't want to use a name that was already tired in construction. We wanted a blank canvas that we could fill with a brand. We chose something short, easy to remember, that works across languages — because in construction you don't only speak German or English — and something we could build a brand around. Today, Capmo stands for Modern Project Management Solution that does the work for you. That's why we chose the name.
Hiring for Domain Understanding
Founders start a company. But it's the team that grows the company, builds the product, and sells the first copies to the market. What we understood early is that if you want to be successful in construction, you need genuine domain understanding.
Imagine a super successful sales rep from a company like Zoom — amazing sales skills. But understanding the customer's problem deeply wasn't necessarily critical there, or the problem was just very easy to explain. In construction, it's completely different. Your counterparts — who often studied civil engineering for years and have ten years of construction experience — don't want to feel like they're in kindergarten, having to explain their problems from scratch. You need to earn the right to sit at the table.
We think about this in two ways. For some roles, you really need inside-out understanding: ideally you've worked in the industry, studied construction management, or similar. For other roles, what matters is that we teach just the right amount of understanding so they can have a real conversation. For more product-oriented or customer success roles, we want deep understanding. For other roles like sales, we've built up what we call a Construction Bootcamp — educating everyone across multiple sessions on what the problems are and what the challenges look like. And it starts simple: when you want to build a mobile app for construction, you need to account for using it in the rain. That's a very different setup from a smartphone app used at a desk. It goes all the way to understanding the business model of a general contractor depending on how many people they have in-house versus subcontracted.
Everyone at the company must be on a construction site within their first two weeks. This is really helpful because you understand the context. It's something we learned the hard way when we tried to take shortcuts. Our first five to ten hires in customer-facing roles — we were less strict about this because it's genuinely hard to find someone who already has a passion for construction and wants to work at a tech company. We thought: let's take a shortcut. That was not the most successful approach. We ended up with people frustrated because they weren't being taken seriously by construction professionals — whether running onboarding or creating marketing content. And on the other side, potential customers always asking to speak with someone more senior or with more experience. We changed that: both in hiring and in investing heavily in educating the whole team.
The big takeaway: when you sell into a vertical as domain-specific as construction, you don't only need to understand construction in general — you need to understand in detail what the pains of a planner are versus a general contractor, what the difference is between a large and a small general contractor, and so on. It goes very deep.
Hiring Gems & Learning Examples
Finding someone who puts "B2B SaaS construction AI" on their resume is very hard. But there are those little gems. We just hired someone who is a trained construction project manager and taught himself to code over the past five years — and is now a product engineer at Capmo. That's the dream: no education needed on the domain, they already know the technology, they know the domain, and they're passionate about both.
For roles where we need domain knowledge, we hire on domain-specific platforms or put it explicitly in the job title. For roles where we need to educate on construction, we're very clear from the first recruiting call: this is not the average job — you need to study, experience, and learn a bit.
Two product examples that show why this matters. Our product manager in charge of daily reporting — construction managers have to log what's happening on site every day to keep track. It's very tedious if you're filling out forms while walking around a site without your hands free, with ten people following you. With that domain understanding, our PM pushed very early on for voice input. Now most construction project managers fill in their daily site diary using voice in any language, and it gets auto-translated and formatted correctly. Without knowing that you're on a construction site without your hands free, you'd never push for that feature.
Second example from customer success: we had a customer who initially only did residential construction — building flats — and had really optimized their entire Capmo setup for that. They opened a new business line and moved into commercial construction. Our customer success manager, understanding the domain, proactively reached out to say: you need separate templates for residential and commercial projects, because the workflows are genuinely different. That saved the customer a lot of time and led to a better product setup. That only happens when your team understands construction deeply enough to spot that from a conversation.
The Construction Bootcamp & Leadership Internship
Training people to understand construction is not easy, but it has to be done. We have a Construction Bootcamp that every team member goes through — and it's tailored: if you work with general contractors, it's the general contractor bootcamp; for others, the specialty contractors bootcamp. You go deep, understanding all the pains and every persona, so you know exactly what a foreman's job is versus a senior foreman. Slight nuance, but important. We do a certification at the end to test whether you've really gone through it.
For leadership, we go one step further. Domain understanding is most important at the leadership level. We found a great way, together with our customers who actually enjoy it — finally there's a software vendor that wants to understand their domain. What our leadership people have to do once they join is a short internship: three to five days with a customer. Two days in the office, two days on the construction site, maybe one day with management. It's game-changing because it opens up the domain for them and, even more importantly, it opens up the environment our customers work in. It's not a fancy startup ecosystem where everyone mixes German and English and uses Slack. You see what the day-to-day of a construction company actually looks like.
Culture Camp & Team Rituals
To get the best people, I believe location should not dictate everything. So we have an office in Munich, an office in Berlin, and for some of the best team members we allow full remote. But it's still super important that everyone comes together. We call it the Capmo Culture Camp: we bring everyone to our big Munich office for four days of team activities — and these are not just "let's play a game." One thing we did was simulate a construction site. Everyone gets assigned a role — you're the owner, you're the project manager, you're the architect — and you have to build a small prototype. To make it realistic, there's a loudspeaker at 90 to 120 decibels to simulate what it's actually like on site. That brings together the engineers with the product, sales, marketing, and finance people in a really meaningful way.
The culture camp has both a learning component and a social one — we party and celebrate together, build trust, get to know each other. It's not all work. Those three or four days in the summer are something everyone in the company looks forward to.
Lessons Learned: Vertical vs. Horizontal SaaS
Now a seven-year-old company — if I could flip back in time to year two or three, what would I advise my younger self? Not one single advice, but: choose wisely where you look for advice. I spent a lot of time consuming content from successful founders, venture capitalists, and programs. And I didn't realize back then that the vast majority of tips, benchmarks, and best practices were designed for horizontal SaaS companies — HR tools and the like. It's just very different when you have a vertical versus a horizontal SaaS business.
I really started to understand this when we brought on Bessemer Venture Partners, a vertically oriented venture capitalist who understood the dynamics of a vertical industry like construction. If I could jump back in time, I'd tell my younger self: choose wisely which benchmarks and expert advice you apply, and don't neglect the difference between a horizontal and a vertical startup.
Explaining the Market to Investors
When you go out and talk to venture capitalists about a construction tech company, one of the first questions you always get is: is the market big enough? And nearly everyone underestimates the sheer size of the construction industry. Quick reference: construction is roughly 10% of GDP. You won't find many industries that big. And what that means is that the sub-segments, or the sub-sub-segments, of the construction industry are often larger than entire industries you might try to compare them to.
Here in Munich, there's a company called BMW — a huge car manufacturer. But if you look at how much they put into construction, it's around 2 billion euros annually. A car manufacturer running construction projects of that scale won't show up in any "how big is the construction industry" statistic. And that's just one example. Housing companies that own 150,000 flats have 200-person construction departments. Understanding this hidden depth of the construction market is super important — because once you do, you'll never get the question: is the market big enough?
When we went out for our first fundraise seven years ago, software for very specific verticals like construction wasn't yet well understood by investors, because many were still focused on digitizing HR or finance first. I quite vividly remember how much work it took to pull up the data and show them: yes, there are this many construction companies, but you also need to factor in these types of companies who do construction even though they don't label themselves as construction firms. It often took a second or third meeting. What helped most was reaching the reference stage, where investors could call actual customers or industry experts — then the question disappeared entirely.
Why Is Construction So Undigital?
Construction is the second least digital industry in Europe. Only hunting and fishing is less digital — at least according to McKinsey. Why is that?
Fragmentation is often cited. But I don't believe fragmentation is the only or even the biggest reason, because if it were, then the bigger firms would all be very digital — and that's not what you see. A lot of the bigger ones are also lagging behind. So yes, fragmentation has a point, but I think one big factor is the homogeneity of backgrounds in the industry. The people who work in construction, and the people who do the hiring in construction, strongly prefer people with construction backgrounds. So the workforce is very homogeneous: tradespeople, trained civil engineers, architects. You almost never see a board of directors that includes a computer science person alongside a civil engineer and a business person. That kind of diversity is very rare in construction.
And I think that's one of the key reasons why construction lags behind in digitization. If the same group of people tries to change something and bring innovation to a field that the same group has worked on for 5,000 years — that's always hard. That's why I find it very encouraging that some larger players are now explicitly looking for people from different backgrounds. That has the chance to give digitization in construction a huge push.
Cracking the "We've Always Done It This Way" Mindset
Imagine a construction site. The construction manager is the king on site. They decide how it runs, what gets done and when. They've done this many, many times — they started their career ten, twenty years ago. Now you come in wanting to talk about their processes and how things can be improved. If you bring real domain understanding to the table, they'll trust you, look at the product, try it, and hopefully see that it's valuable. But very often the first thing you have to crack through is: I know we've done this that way for 50 years. My grandpa worked at this company 30 years ago. We don't change this. It works.
Seven or eight years ago, cracking through that resistance was harder than it is today. Today there's real labor pressure in construction. The people running construction sites and managing teams — foremen, construction managers — are increasingly difficult to find. Companies that are going to lose 20-30% of their workforce to retirement in the next five years can no longer just throw people at problems. So now we have far more conversations that start with: how can we make the life of our construction managers easier? How can we save them time? How can we prevent mistakes? How can we retain institutional knowledge when people leave? They are much more open to software and digital technology because the old answer — more headcount — is no longer available.
Making Complex Software Feel Simple
Making the hard things in construction feel easy is easier said than done, but it's something everyone should focus on constantly. On a construction site — busy, loud, lots of people, unstable Wi-Fi, five people eating lunch next to you while you're trying to concentrate — the environment is not forgiving. You need to navigate the software super fast. So it needs to feel easy. Entering things needs to be easy. Finding things needs to be very easy.
The challenge is that you're selling to civil engineers, and if something doesn't look complex, they assume it can't be powerful. So making something as technically rich as Capmo look very simple — that is the hardest product challenge. And that's what our design and product team works on every day: reducing the number of clicks, making search lightning fast, using voice interaction and speech-to-text to make handling the software easier. Construction needs a complex product to solve complex project problems. But it always has to feel simple. That's the trade-off you have to nail.
Simplicity in the product is a real differentiating factor in construction. Some blogs will tell you ease of use isn't a differentiator — I disagree. If the product is not used, you won't have the data in the product to properly manage the construction site. So UX is critical. And what's really cool is when the customer feedback confirms it. A year ago we launched our AI capabilities. The simplest UX we built is what we call AI Search — you just ask the product for the information you need. Imagine a construction project: if you printed out all the paper, documents, and emails for an average project and stacked it, it would be ten times the height of the building being built. Construction people spend roughly 20-30% of their time searching for information they know they have somewhere but can't find. With AI Search, you just type your question and get the answer instantly — powered by a lot of technology in the background indexing everything: pictures, text, video, speech, multimodal. But for the user, it's just a search bar. Hearing from customers that they cut their search time from 20-30% of their day to around 5% — that was something we really celebrated as a whole team.
Offline Functionality: A Hard Lesson
A good lesson from building the product was how important offline functionality is — and how technically complex. Having a mobile app and a web app is already more complicated than just a web application. Having a mobile app that must work offline-first and a web app together — that's a big complication, because you have to handle a lot of data sync conflicts. But in construction, offline functionality is non-negotiable. And not nailing it early cost us dearly in customer trust.
One example: a customer was doing the handover and final walkthrough of a production plant with the owner — a two-to-three day process of documenting everything. The plant was in a rural area with no internet reception. They ran it offline, did everything in Capmo. And we had a bug — offline sync didn't work. All the data from two days of work was gone. Luckily that was a few years back and we haven't had that happen since. But ever since, there is laser focus: whenever anything with sync is not working, it's all hands on deck.
AI: Don't Label It, Show the Results
The question I get every day now: what are you doing with AI? Will AI change your business? Yes, it's changing everything. But we don't label it "AI" to our customers, because in construction nobody cares about the word AI or artificial intelligence. They care about results.
Construction creates the second most data of any industry. For AI, this is an enormous treasure to work with: construction contracts with hundreds or thousands of pages, tons of specifications, plans, photos, video, voice — every modality you can imagine is there. We have this data because we run pretty much everything in a construction project — from plans to document approvals to defect management and more. And what we don't run ourselves, we integrate: SharePoint, email, and so on.
We have both the data and the domain understanding, because over seven years we've built a product specifically for construction workflows that we know deeply. To use AI well, you need both. We have them. And so we're not talking about it — we're just showing the effects. You no longer need to learn how to fill out a form in Capmo: you use voice to text. You don't have to manually pull together information from different parts of the product: you ask it. You can have the product check a change order or approve a plan against what's defined in the specification. That's what "let the software do that for you" really means. And I'm very excited about what our product and engineering team is building in the quarters ahead.
Building an AI Product vs. an AI Prototype
Building an AI product is genuinely different from building an AI prototype. In the days of tools like Lovable, Cursor, and all those AI coding support tools, you can build an AI prototype in minutes or hours. It's easy to show in a sales demo. It convinces people. The problem is the gap from prototype to product — that's a huge step.
We always built with a product mindset first. Our CTO Bastian built the AI infrastructure. It's there now, so the whole team can work on a modern, AI-enabled tech stack. That's crucial, because with it you can build a product and not a prototype. What do I mean? If you want to process 2,000 documents, maybe a prototype handles it. If you want to process 200 million documents and trillions of emails, you need a deep, deep foundation that actually works at scale. That's the big myth: the gap is not in building the initial AI setup — that's easy. The hard part is making it scalable. And I'm very happy that we rolled out all our AI functionality to more than 2,000 customers, with a high five-digit number of users who can use it every day. Scalability is the real challenge, and I'm proud of how our engineering team tackled it.
The Future of Construction Tech
The construction industry is lagging behind, and part of the reason is that over the past boom years there was less pressure to innovate — there were plenty of contracts and good margins. That's changing now. Interest rates are different, the market environment is tough, and construction companies are under real pressure. And in my opinion, that pressure is a good thing for change — because suddenly everyone needs to ask: how do we become more efficient? How do we build better?
This pressure, combined with the technology advancement from SaaS to vertical AI, is a real gift for the industry. Looking five to ten years ahead, it's very much about what the software can automate, what the software can do for a construction company, rather than just what the software can help an individual do better. The shift is from "how can the software help someone do their job" to "the software does the job." If I look five years ahead, an average construction manager today might run €7 million of construction volume a year. I expect they'll be able to run €15 or €20 million in parallel with the tools they'll have. I'm confident in this because I look at what's happened with our own software engineers using AI coding tools — their productivity went up enormously. We kept the same headcount and want to hire more, but the output per person has increased dramatically. I expect the same to happen in construction.
Evolving as a Leader
If I look back at how I ran the company at the very beginning versus today: yes, there are differences. But before getting into that, one thing is super important to me personally throughout all the highs and lows of running a company: having constants somewhere else. Since I was a little kid, I've played handball. I did that the first day I started at the company, and I still have matches and training today. That's really important — you can step out of the business and do your thing. The same is true for family and friends. These anchors matter.
In terms of how I approach running things: at the very beginning I was very driven by short-term goals — how do we do next month, can we hit this number this month, everything was urgency. What's changed is that I now juggle long-term perspective and urgency much better. In the past, urgency was everything: get this done now, finish yesterday. Today I question much more: what actually has to be done right now and what can wait? Construction tech is not something where you start something and are super successful the next day. It's ten to fifteen years in the making. And then for many people outside, it looks like an overnight success. Balancing that urgency with a mid-to-long-term perspective is one of the biggest shifts I've made.
What Makes Me Proud
What makes me really proud, looking back on seven years of running Capmo, is not just the product successes or the great team we've built — though both of those matter enormously. What is personally most rewarding is this: in the first months and the first year, Bastian and I went onto construction sites, went to industry events, called managing directors and construction managers, and a lot of people smiled and said: we're construction folks, we don't need tech people telling us how to work. Fast forward seven years: we are now proactively invited to discussion rounds. Managing directors call us wanting to talk about how construction and construction tech can work together. The industry values us as partners.
Seven years ago, the construction industry didn't really see value in working with construction tech companies. Today that partnership is genuinely valued. And I think our purpose — build better places together — has never felt more real. We always wanted the "build better places" part. The "together" part is what's really changed. And that's what makes me most proud.
Would I Do It Again?
Recently I had the ten-year anniversary reunion of my CDTM cohort and met a lot of people I hadn't seen in ten years. The question came up: would you do it again if you could decide now? Absolutely. Probably slightly differently here and there. But without question — building better places together, we've come much further to our purpose and managed to build a great team that is in the process of changing an entire industry. For me, that's the most motivating thing there is.
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