Match Product And Reality
Jeevan Kalanithi — CEO @ OpenSpace
About this masterclass
Jeevan Kalanithi is the CEO and co-founder of OpenSpace, a reality capture platform that is changing how construction teams document, track, and make decisions on the jobsite. Before OpenSpace, Jeevan spent years working in drones and hardware, building technology for physical-world industries.
What This Masterclass Covers
In construction, a picture is worth more than any report. That's not a slogan, it's the conviction behind everything Jeevan has built. His masterclass is about what it takes to build technology for an industry that doesn't work behind screens, and why most construction tech fails because it adds work instead of removing it. In this masterclass, Jeevan walks through his journey from drones to OpenSpace, and shares what he's learned about building products that respect the reality of the jobsite:
- Why drones were useful but ultimately "technology looking for a problem," and how that realization led to a completely different approach with OpenSpace
- The core product principle: remove work instead of adding it. Construction users are busy and in the field, any solution that creates extra burden will fail
- Why shared visual context changes everything in physical-world industries, and how "a picture is truth" became the foundation of OpenSpace
- The early moment that proved everything: a superintendent used OpenSpace to settle a dispute and avoid a $50K change order in about ten minutes
- Why proving value early matters more than perfecting the product, and how a barely-working prototype was enough to demonstrate real economic impact
- The difference between building for screen-native workflows and building for industries where the work happens on the ground
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Transcript
Introduction
Hey, my name is Jeevan Kalanithi. I am the CEO of OpenSpace. We started this company around eight years ago. It's not the first company I started. If I go way back, I was always interested in intelligent systems — what makes things smart, and things that operate in real physical reality. As a student in undergrad, I did this unusual major called Symbolic Systems, which was really about cognitive science with a technical twist. I studied AI and philosophy back then. I moved to New York, did a bunch of random things, and then I met my co-founders of OpenSpace at a program called the Media Lab at MIT. We went off and started other companies after that. We were fortunate — those companies did well — and we reconnected to start OpenSpace. It's been a really exciting journey ever since.
The Founding Team
Mike Fleischmann, Philip DeCamp, and I are the founders of OpenSpace. We've known each other for a really long time — we got to know each other in graduate school. At the time, we were doing different projects and were just friends. The program we were in was a pretty cool one. The MIT Media Lab brings together a bunch of different technical and creative people to try to solve problems that aren't purely academic — things that seem like they would genuinely move the needle for some human experience. It was a really good time, and we liked each other.
Another friend from that program — someone I was also friends with in undergrad — became my co-founder for my first company. His name was Dave Merrill, and we're still friends today. We were actually in a band together back in undergrad. That company we did well with and sold. Mike and Philip went on to different things — Mike started a computer vision video analytics company, and Philip stayed at MIT as a research scientist. Then we were all on roughly the same trajectory: selling our respective companies around the same time, looking to do something new around the same time.
The founding of OpenSpace starts with Mike calling me one day. He had stayed in the Boston-Cambridge area to build his company, while I had been in California for mine. His wife had agreed to move to Boston for a couple of years while Mike was in grad school — those couple of years had turned into many more years. So he was under a lot of pressure to come back to sunny California.
He called me with this interesting problem. He said: I'm trying to find a new apartment from across the country, and it's such a pain. I'm looking at a couple of photos here and there, some text descriptions — I wish I could just see what these places look like without physically having to be there. He and Philip were starting to work on an idea using new cameras called 360 cameras, where you can quickly create a full, immersive visual record of a space. Wouldn't that be a cool way to find an apartment?
I was listening to him, and I had all this experience from my time at 3D Robotics building things that moved the needle for construction companies. So as he described it further, I said: that's a cool idea that might benefit you personally, Mike — but the people who could really use it are enterprises, people who build buildings. For them, a picture really is worth a thousand words. And then the question was: well, what are you doing these days? I wasn't doing anything. I had been president of 3D Robotics, and I was taking a year or two off — my kids were younger, and I had the opportunity to do that. But this idea sounded pretty exciting. Mike said: let's work on it together. I said: sure, that sounds awesome. And that's how the company got started.
Lessons from 3D Robotics
3D Robotics really set the stage for OpenSpace in a number of ways — both in terms of the business thesis and understanding of user pain, and also culturally, in terms of what works and what doesn't.
3D Robotics was a drone company. It grew up making drone kits, then drone hardware as consumer products, and then applications of drones specifically for builders. During my tenure there, when 3D Robotics acquired our company, I was first the product leader, then Chief Product Officer, and eventually president of the company. The focus shifted toward an enterprise use case: software to control the drone, to go see what's happening on a job site from above — primarily for industrial and construction use cases rather than consumer applications.
A few things I learned from a business thesis perspective. Number one: a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially for people working in real physical reality. No amount of words or documents is as good as a picture. A picture is truth. That's the coin of the realm — the most important data point for making a decision is what's actually there. Drones give you an inkling of that thesis. Fly over and you see a map of what's going on. 3D Robotics built some pretty impressive technology on top of image data. But talking to building superintendents, what they loved most was simply being able to see what was going on without having to be there — and having proof of what was there, so they didn't have to have extended disputes with project partners.
The second thing I noticed was that the drone solution was a technology looking for a problem. It found a problem, it was definitely useful. But if you think about the core idea of transforming the industry from one that's forced to write stuff down and use office workflows, to one that can operate more naturally in reality and with images — the drone was kind of an awkward fit. What you'd really want to tell a builder is: I have this magical tool that will capture what's happening on your job sites and that will be the basis of how you do your work. Drone is cool, but it only works outside and from above. As one superintendent told me: yeah, drones are good for ground-up projects. But most of what we do isn't even ground-up. And it's only useful for innings two and three of a building — indoors is where the action is. That stuck in my head. If you're going to really change how the industry works, you'd need a simpler way to capture more of the project.
The third thing: drones are cool, but in some fundamental way they're a pain. You're out there on these projects, your customers are using the solution, and you look around the job site trailer and think: which exact person is going to go and fly the drone on Friday? These are all very busy people. They're trying to build a building, and flying a drone is yet another thing on the list. That led me to a general rule of thumb for technology products: if you're going to solve someone's problem, do it in a way that removes work, doesn't add it. There's a narrow path you have to tread that makes people feel like you're simplifying their life, not complicating it.
Why Building for Builders
OpenSpace serves the construction industry — builders, construction companies, developers, trades, and other industrial organizations that create value by moving real physical reality from point A to point B under a certain schedule and budget.
I like doing this because — and I'll be grandiose for a second — this kind of is what civilization is. The environments we create for ourselves as humans to live in, work in, and play in. It's a different game to play, though. Our customers are not fundamentally in front of a computer all day. They are out there in the real world building real stuff. So the types of products and technologies they need are just different from those that are primarily computer-based. As a technology company, you really have to embrace that. Your user is in the field doing something — which means different constraints, less time to mess around with something that doesn't work, less tolerance for looking at a bunch of screens.
After having a hardware company and trying to build a real physical thing — which is a real pain — I understood that building a device is maybe 10% as hard as building a building. When I started building products for builders, it wasn't just: oh, this is a place where you could build a big company. I felt the pain. And the main thing is: when you're building something in real physical reality, there's no undo button. If you mess something up, it can be permanent. And knowing what's going on is hard. With a document you can check it from anywhere. But if you're building something real, just tracking how it's going is genuinely a challenge.
At my hardware company, we had the problem of building physical things in a factory far away. The factory would call and say: here's a major issue, and if we don't fix it, it'll delay your launch by 12 weeks — which can be lethal for a company. You're scared. You go physically visit the factory, you see the problem, and it can be solved in five seconds. Not because the factory people were bad at their job — it's just that shared visual context is super important. I saw that problem over and over in construction: being in a fog of war, just getting on the same page. When Mike called with this idea to bring a solution where you can see what's going on without needing to be there, I felt that pain personally. And it seemed like something we could help with.
What OpenSpace Does
What OpenSpace is really trying to do is create a new way of working that is oriented around reality — the reality of the field. The way we do that is by making it incredibly easy to have a full visual snapshot of a job site, day in and day out, through images coming from smartphones, 360 cameras, and drones — and for that to be the basis of how you work: how you solve issues, how you think about safety, how you integrate data with other systems, and even how you generate high-level insights like schedule and productivity reports.
A picture is worth a thousand words. And that's a much more trusted, compact way to represent progress and the reality of a project.
A superintendent I was talking to recently said something that gave me a lot of confidence in this approach. He said: your new technology is really amazing — it's incredible that you got all this cutting-edge stuff to work. But the reason I really love you OpenSpace guys is this really new way of working. It's kind of like the old way of working.
I asked what he meant. He said: back when I started my career — he was in the industry from the 1960s — if there was an issue on the job site, like an outlet two feet off, I would just huddle with the team responsible, say "move it from here to here," they'd do it, and we'd move on. Now I feel like we're drowning in digital paperwork. If there's a missing outlet, I have to go fill out a form on my phone, type everything in, it goes to some person off the project, they don't know what I'm talking about because I didn't describe it clearly, it pings back and forth a thousand times on the internet, and three weeks later we move the outlet. What you guys are doing is this image-first way. It's like the old way — you just look at the problem, deal with it, solve it, and move on.
I thought that was really cool for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's nice when people say nice things. But more importantly, it's a clear story about working more efficiently, which turns into concrete ROI. But most important to me is what I call cultural relevance. It's a somewhat unusual concept for technology companies, because we're usually focused on making something 10% faster. But if you're doing something that taps into the way a person, a company, or an entire industry perceives itself — if you can be part of a movement — that's really exciting.
For OpenSpace, this story helped me realize: maybe we're part of a simpler way to build, something that touches not just on our technology but reminds people of a recent past that was a bit more efficient, a bit less wasteful, when buildings got built more quickly. And we can bring that back — not by going back to the 1930s, but by applying cutting-edge technologies to recapture what the industry was capable of back then.
Validating the Idea Early
When you're first starting a company, you're going off guesses — beliefs based on past experience. You don't know if you're right. My attitude toward that as an entrepreneur is: what are the biggest, scariest risks? Deal with those as soon as humanly possible. Figure out if you're right or wrong and learn, because the worst thing you can do is build a company that fundamentally makes no sense.
Very early on, when it was just the three of us, we were pretty confident that an image-first way of working was better — based on my experience at 3D Robotics. But if you can't get someone to pay you for it, then it's interesting, but maybe not a business. I was very fixated on proving as early as humanly possible that we were generating enough value that someone would actually pay us for the software.
We had two job sites total on the OpenSpace platform at that point, and the only people capable of using the software were me, Mike, and Philip. You couldn't just send someone out with a camera — it had to be us. Uploading the videos was complicated; you had to type in scripts and do all this nerdy computer stuff. But the end result wasn't so different from what you see today: you could look around and see what was going on in a project.
I got a call from a superintendent named Tim. He said: "OpenSpace really saved my ass." Tell me more. He explained that he'd gotten into a conflict with the drywall contractor, because the contractor had covered up some MEP work that needed to get inspected. The contractor said he did it on a certain date. Tim said: no you didn't. Then Tim realized we had OpenSpace on the job. He sat down at the computer, pulled up the exact spot, used what he called "instant replay" to rewind time — and it turned out he was right. He said: this was really important, because the project has been screwed up and there have been a lot of change orders. I couldn't absorb another $50,000 change order from this guy — and now I don't have to pay it. I asked: was the guy you were fighting with angry about this? He said: no, not at all. As long as you have the facts, we all work together every day. If the facts are there, people own up to what they did and move on.
That's saving $50,000 in about ten minutes. If we're doing that, I could extrapolate that this concept was going to scale. That made me feel really good. And as the CEO of a three-person company, I was also the head of sales — and I was able to close a few hundred thousand dollars based on experiences like that. I knew we were onto something.
Growing the Use Case
That particular use case — using the data as evidence when you need it — was just a small sliver of what we eventually became. We started seeing customers use OpenSpace just to run their projects day to day.
About a year later, I was shadowing a project, just hanging around the job site to see what was going on. I sat in on an OAC meeting — an owner-architect-contractor meeting. In every OAC meeting I had attended before OpenSpace, a project engineer would create a PowerPoint or a spreadsheet, they'd go down a list of issues, and these meetings could be really painful. People would dispute every description. There was always this moment of tension when something was going to cost somebody money — and the truth was out on the job site, but you were in the trailer, and there was this awkward question: are we all going to leave the meeting and go look at who's right? Nobody wants to do that. It takes time and it's stressful.
Then I went into a meeting where, instead of that spreadsheet, OpenSpace was on the screen. They were just clicking around and looking at each issue with visual evidence of what was actually there. The meeting was so much faster. And there was no tension — people could just see what was going on. That was another moment that told me: we're not just creating a nice reality-capture company that has some data in case you need it. This is going to be a better way of executing projects across the board.
Cultural Relevance and Being a Fly on the Wall
I talked about cultural relevance and how it can be a weird concept for tech people. You're usually trying to make a technology product that does something 10% faster. But things to think about: when you're listening to your customers, what are they talking about in general — completely separate from technology? Are you tapping into that? Can you help with that? Is there a movement in the industry that you can contribute to?
I wouldn't advise any entrepreneur to navel-gaze too much on these questions. If you're creating value, that's probably a good thing. But just pay attention to what your customers are talking about. Be a fly on the wall — it can go a really long, long way.
With OpenSpace, I'd love to tell you that I had my finger on the pulse of what builders cared about in their hearts. I did not. We just saw an area where technology could contribute in a way it couldn't before — because computer vision and camera technology had finally gotten to the point where you could more comprehensively capture the reality of a project. We didn't invent the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words. We didn't invent cameras. People have been taking job site photos forever. We just recognized we could do it way more comprehensively than ever before. And it just so happened that this way of doing things reminded more experienced, successful builders of a better, more familiar way of working. We recognized we could tap into that and try to drive our products and technologies in a way that caught that wave of change.
How to Stay Customer-Focused as You Scale
It's a truism that if you're building a company that works, you need to understand your customers and find ways to add value. Easier said than done. Here are a few things we do at OpenSpace and tried to scale up.
First, I already had enough knowledge to be dangerous about what builders actually wanted from my prior experience at 3D Robotics. We weren't just tech guys reading McKinsey reports and guessing — we had a pretty good idea of what was genuinely painful for a project manager or superintendent, and what would move the needle for them, not just conceptually but in their day to day.
When we were starting the company, I told Mike and Philip: let's bootstrap it. We're lucky enough to be able to do that. And if the idea is stupid, we'll move on. So how do we avoid the stupidity? Be close to the customers. We had a couple of job sites where we were essentially interns — useless from a construction perspective, but we were around the job site all the time. Knowing a couple of builders from 3D Robotics, I could call project managers and say: hey, I'm starting a new company, we're going to do X, Y, and Z — do you mind if I hang around the job site? And they said sure. It's not easy to just walk onto a job site without personal relationships — those mattered a lot.
Just be in the field. Try things out. Be the fly on the wall in the trailer. See what people are talking about in general. And get feedback on what would work and what wouldn't.
One really critical story from those early days: I was on a job site not far from where we are now in Berkeley, and I used our crappy prototype software to get a visual record of a podium area before concrete was going to be poured. Back in the trailer, I processed the data into a visual record — that was how the software worked back then. The project manager came into the trailer and I showed him. He said: this will be really useful. I can just see all the stuff from anywhere. Oh my God, there are so many times where, especially after you pour the concrete, there's some issue and you don't know what's under there — that's a disaster to assess. I think you're onto something here.
I was feeling pretty good. And then he said: how long did it take you to capture all these images? I told him — it took me about an hour to cover 50,000 square feet or so. And he said: cool idea, but we're never going to use it. Why? He said: who besides you would have time to take all these photos? I'm barely on the job today. The assistant superintendents are working six to six.
Then he said something really important: what would be cool is if I could just walk around the job site with some camera around my neck, almost like taking a video, and then you guys do whatever computer stuff you do in the background — and by just walking around with the camera, I get the same result you're showing me here. If you do that, I would definitely pay you for it.
Message received. Orders received. That is what OpenSpace needed to do. Give this guy the experience he wants. In truth, Mike, Philip, and I kind of already knew that was how it had to work — we weren't happy about it because it was technically much more difficult. But in a way we were happy, because we knew we had the technical ability to pull it off better than most people, and that if we did, we'd have a real competitive advantage. And that turned out to be true — it remains true.
That experience in the field was critical to the founding of OpenSpace. If we had just been thinking about it in an office, we wouldn't have committed to building the technology the way it needed to be built.
Scaling Customer Focus
How do you scale that customer focus as the company grows? OpenSpace has around 350 people today. A few things we do and recommend to others scaling construction tech companies:
First, ensure that the people making product decisions are in the field a lot and are talking to customers. A little rule we have: if a product manager here doesn't have a handful of people in their contacts they can just call to get feedback, that's not acceptable. Second, I and the rest of the leadership team need to be talking to customers frequently. I get very paranoid when I'm not. Third — and this is something I really love about being in construction technology — if you're doing something good, some of your customers will want to come work at your company. Hire them. Make those folks your customer-facing solutions engineers. If you have enough of those people, you have this short-circuit: a quick and direct way to validate whether an idea makes sense. You can call Adam or Aaron and ask in 25 seconds whether what you're thinking about building is a good idea. Maybe they're wrong and you overrule them. But having that feedback loop is really valuable.
Two Failure Modes in Construction Tech
There are almost two failure modes I see repeatedly in technology companies serving real-world industries.
The first is the classic: some tech people who don't know the industry make something really cool but that nobody wants. They have impressive technology and it works, but they go out of business because there's no real demand.
The second is more subtle: companies started by people from within the industry. They're almost never wrong in identifying a real problem — they felt it themselves, they're scratching their own itch. But oftentimes they create what I'd call low-ceiling companies. They solve a problem that turns out to not be a very big problem, or it's really just a feature of another system. And they can't get past $5 or $10 million in revenue.
So when you're listening to customers, you need to do two things simultaneously. You need to understand the customer well enough that what they're saying isn't Greek to you. But you also need to have your "weirdo hat" on — how could you solve this in a way that's a little different from how they're thinking about it? That's a lot of what we try to do at OpenSpace.
Take feedback seriously, but not always literally. If feedback is harsh, don't take it personally. If it's positive, don't just feel good about it and carry on. Try to incorporate all of it. One way of forcing that synthesis: just ask yourself what are the top three things we're going to do next year. That forces you to be creative in interpreting all those data points and coming up with something that could really move the needle — without just building a faster horse.
Spatial AI: The Next Wave
It could not be a more exciting time to be creating technology for the construction industry — for a variety of reasons. The problems are real, and the industry is very open to new solutions. But from a pure technology angle, there's really incredible stuff happening.
Our customers operate in real physical reality and should be basing decisions on that reality. We want to allow them to make better decisions faster. And the data they can generate — reality data, images — represents the next huge wave of opportunity for AI.
At OpenSpace, we call this spatial AI. Others use the term too. The basic idea: all the AI developments that everybody's been reading about — generative AI, large language models — are fundamentally oriented around language, text, and documents. They're trained on what's on the internet. They aren't necessarily great at understanding real physical reality. That's not ideal for our customers, because what they do is manipulate real physical reality. But it represents a massive opportunity to build the next generation of intelligent systems that truly understand what's happening in three-dimensional space, in a domain-specific construction context, and that can help builders make better decisions — whether they're assessing a project remotely or standing in the field looking at an issue.
At OpenSpace, we have gathered really massive datasets across a variety of modalities. We have the ability to start building spatial AI agents and adding intelligence to an industry where getting good information in the moment — when you need to make a call — is genuinely hard. Watch this space: over the next three to five years, there are going to be some pretty incredible innovations from intelligent systems that understand real physical reality. And we at OpenSpace fully intend to be not just the recipients of those technologies, but a driving force in making them real and applying them to what our customers need.
A couple of concrete examples. OpenSpace has a product called Progress Tracking. If you're digitizing your job site with OpenSpace cameras, we can take that data and produce high-level insights: is your schedule on track, where are the areas that might slow you down, productivity analysis — things like automatically updating your P6 schedule. The way we do it is human-verified, so you can be confident the answers are correct. With spatial AI, you can supercharge that over time — make it faster, make the human verification more accurate because the AI is assisting more and more of the process. So instead of laboriously checking and rechecking data, people just get a result and verify it.
That's the insights layer for executives or regional directors. But even in the field: imagine someone in room 603 trying to solve an issue. Spatial AI agents can flag issues relevant to that person based on their location, and even suggest who should resolve it. We call these field agents. It's a future that isn't far off for OpenSpace. Building these field agents that allow people in the field to have relevant information right away — acting as if they have 15 more years of experience than they actually do — that's a really big deal. We don't have enough experienced people and those who exist are stretched thin. If we can augment that, it could be remarkable.
Spatial AI isn't just about what's in front of the camera at a given moment — it also has to incorporate all the prior visual information in that space, pull in language documents like specs and drawings, and understand location. As one customer told me: if I don't know where something happened, I might as well not know it at all. That's something we're pioneering at OpenSpace — of course we know where all the 360 images are taken, that's core to what we do. And we recently invented something called Auto Location, where we can provide the location of a smartphone indoors in real time, without GPS. So anything being annotated — a punch list item, for example — we can estimate the location. All these data pieces come together to create intelligent agents that aren't just looking at a document in the abstract, but are pulling information relevant to that person at their specific location, based on the real physical reality of what's going on around them.
Mistakes and Lessons
Was it all due to flawless execution? Every single step of the way? No, it was not. We made plenty of mistakes and screw-ups. Those are valuable lessons too.
One of our core values is "simplify everything." And I'll tell you, one of the gravest mistakes I tend to make is when we stray from that. One example was building out the organization of OpenSpace as we were growing, with a lot of different functions pretty early on — in a way that was just complicated. We didn't have our act together enough to be clear about what everyone was supposed to do. That created a lot of lack of clarity internally and it was painful. And it was because we just didn't keep things simple.
Another thing — and this one is more personal — is taking ourselves too seriously. We actually have a core value that says "don't take yourself too seriously." And there have been times when we strayed from that. A very concrete example: we got a bunch of customers early on who really liked what we were doing, and that created a flood of feature requests. You want to build all of them, you're stressed about it, and before you know it you have a very slow-feeling R&D organization, just chipping away at a never-ending list of small features. None of it feels exciting. Customers start asking for bigger things and you feel like you're drowning. That doesn't feel good, and your customers start to sense it too.
The lesson we learned is: that backlog of 53 zillion items? Throw it in the garbage. Free yourself from it. Just ask: what are the top three things our customers actually want? Make your best guess — you're probably right. And if you're wrong, you'll find out and adjust. That was a huge lesson in not freaking out, not taking ourselves too seriously, and trusting our own judgment.
I used to say in some board meetings: we're going to make this decision, and the worst thing that happens if I'm wrong is the company fails — and it's not that bad. No one's going to die. Investors didn't find that funny. But I still believe there's truth in it. If you're starting a technology company, you're going to have to take calculated risks. It's stressful — it just is. But for most of us, you're not running a hospital or a military organization. If you make an educated guess and you're wrong, no one's going to die. Let that be freeing. When we got too stressed out and too defensive, we started doing things that weren't that interesting. And customers don't want boring companies to work with. They want something reliable that moves the needle. And if you're stressed out all the time, you're not going to come up with good ideas.
On Being an Entrepreneur
Was I born to be an entrepreneur? I guess I am one now, so maybe by default, yes. But when I meet other founders and CEOs, I don't think there's a common pattern that makes people who start companies successful. The only thing you can really say is that they're very effectively good at being themselves — they try to be true to whatever core beliefs they have, and that can generally get people aligned and drive results.
There's this idea of the entrepreneur who ran a lemonade stand as a kid, who was trading baseball cards and finding arbitrage opportunities in school. That was not me at all. I had zero interest in that. I was more interested in learning about things I found fascinating, being good at school, doing art projects. Not at all the cutthroat entrepreneur hunting for angles.
I find myself doing what I do now because sometimes you see problems that are extremely painful for the people trying to solve them. And every now and then a technology can be the solution. And every now and then, the best way to bring that technology to market is through a startup rather than a large company. When you see that problem, you just want to go deal with it. And that's really rewarding.
The way I think about revenue and money: it's a symbol, a proxy that you've created something genuinely valuable — something so valuable that someone is willing to pay you for it. OpenSpace doesn't exist to make money. We exist to create value. Money is like oxygen. It's the thing that allows the organism to breathe and grow. But we don't live to breathe. You breathe so that you can live. That's how I think about starting companies. There are other successful entrepreneurs who think much more commercially, and that can be a great way to go too. But that's just me.
Would I Do It Again?
Looking back over the past seven-plus years — would I do it all over again? Definitely yes. I'd like to think we'd make fewer mistakes and we'd be further along. But I would totally do it again. It's been such a rewarding journey for so many reasons.
The relationships you create with your coworkers. The moments where customers are so grateful because you made their life a little bit easier — and these are people who work incredibly hard and are so important for civilization. If you can make their life easier, God, it's so great. And then we get to work on some pretty incredible cutting-edge technologies along the way.
That said, I don't spend much time looking back. I'm always thinking about what's next, what's the next scary challenge, what's out there that could threaten OpenSpace and how do we get ahead of it, what's the big new thing we could do.
One thing I'm sometimes criticized for is that I don't celebrate our wins enough. That's probably just how I'm always going to be. I always want to move the goalposts. Companies aren't really defined by a beginning, a middle, and an end — they're about keep wanting to do more, to be more, to push the narrative further. That's what I'm focused on, and we've got a lot of good stuff to work with.
Watch the video on YouTube.
