Managing engineering teams and data in multiple locations and offices can be a challenge. Existing solutions are bulky, require hefty implementation, are difficult to learn, and aren’t flexible enough. Bild has designed a secure and integrated way for engineers and hardware teams to share and collaborate on visual assets on the cloud. getbild.com

Full show transcript:

Brian Gomski
Hey, engineering tomorrow, fans, I’m your host, Brian Gomski Gorski. Today we are interviewing Perdue Paul, CEO and co-founder of Build Builders, a modern design management platform that brings together cloud storage product data management, project management and design reviews together for the first time. Stick around and see how build is changing the way MEP design is done and managed in the future to come.

Brian Gomski
Sit back, relax and get ready for engineering tomorrow.

Speaker 2
Broadcasting around the world. This is engineering. Tomorrow the podcast committed to bringing you the best in commercial construction design and engineering from the brightest minds in the industry. This is the stuff they don’t teach you in school. So sit back, relax, and open your mind. You’re about to get the insider knowledge to improve your next construction project or advance your career.

Speaker 2
This is engineering tomorrow.

Brian Gomski
Hey, dude, how are you doing today?

Pradyut Paul
Doing really well. How are you, Brian Gomski?

Brian Gomski
Excellent. Excellent. Where are we speaking to you from?

Pradyut Paul
I am out in San Francisco, California.

Brian Gomski
Awesome. Yep, we’re out here in Saint Louis. And you mentioned you’ve spent a little time out here in Chicago. So.

Pradyut Paul
That’s right. You grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, spent almost two decades out there, went to school at Urbana Champaign. So very familiar with that region, the Midwest.

Brian Gomski
Cool. So Purdue, tell me a little bit about your background.

Pradyut Paul
Absolutely. So a lot of my background is revolving around electrical engineering. I come from a very technical background from both my academic studies as well as my profession and E so started out as a low level RF ICI designer out at Raytheon, you know, really creating next generation chips for space and airborne systems quickly moved over to a higher level of system level design over at a startup out in Santa Barbara.

Pradyut Paul
We are creating these Bluetooth electronic devices very similar to that airtags that you see nowadays. But Apple created. So let the team of hardware engineers out there. And that was really the first time I got involved in roles outside of just electrical engineering. So got a lot of opportunities and leading that overall hardware team from mechanical to electrical to firmware, all the way to manufacturing and test validation.

Pradyut Paul
So really the entire gambit of the low level nature of hardware engineering all within the high level system architecture at a startup.

Brian Gomski
Okay. Yeah. So you really got a good picture of the mile high view of how everything works as well.

Pradyut Paul
Yeah. That’s like one of the benefits of working at a startup is, you know, you really get that the responsibility and accountability of essentially managing the entire product line. So we were selling over a couple million units every year, sort of going from a couple of thousand a day all the way to multiple thousand a day and wrapping up that manufacturing facility in China.

Brian Gomski
Oh, wow. What do you think’s happening in the hardware market around development tools right now?

Pradyut Paul
Yeah. So really, I think over the last two years, these companies have revisited essentially what is the core infrastructure of how they develop their designs. So back in the day, a lot of the developer tools revolved around these archaic processes. The Microsoft Suite in all the screenshots that were floating around, if you actually look at the infrastructure of how designs were made and shared, it would all be network server based.

Pradyut Paul
So you’d have to physically go into your workstation at the office, get connected to a hard wired network server, and start designing whether it was in SolidWorks, Altium, Cadence, whatever it was there. Nowadays what we’re seeing is hardware companies are looking to understand how can you have a more hybrid slash remote work culture and obviously having that based foundation of this network server based collaboration is just not going to work, right?

Pradyut Paul
So developer tools are now moving from what used to be supplementary to in-person communication to now something that’s more like what we’re doing right now over Zoom or Cloud collaboration, as we call it. And so we’re finally seeing the shift from on prem systems in the development maybe to cloud based systems. So whether that’s a company in the hardware industry integrating Slack or implementing Microsoft teams, as for, you know, part of their main communication or just moving away from in-person meetings and CAT scans, right?

Pradyut Paul
So the next generation of developer tools for these hardware companies are really going to be cloud native. They’re going to be purpose built for the designers that don’t have to be in person every single day and that really allow for a more distributed team.

Brian Gomski
Okay. Traditionally, hardware companies and there are there probably are still a lot of hardware companies like this have been very hesitant on adopting cloud tools. What do you see is changing in that mindset?

Pradyut Paul
Yeah, so we work with a lot of companies that have essentially said we’re never going to move off of our on prem solutions, and they’ve been like that for four decades. All of a sudden there’s been that shift in the market where hardware has finally caught up to, let’s say, the software industry. They’ve seen how cloud based solutions can really expedite a lot of their manufacturing processes, a lot of the design processes, and really is the foundation of this new culture that we live in.

Pradyut Paul
Right. In the past, you had to go in office and that was the only real thing that people cared about. Right, is what are the tools that can support us being in the workstation today? What we’re seeing are companies finally saying, okay, we know that this can’t be the case. What are the solutions there for us? And VPN, right.

Pradyut Paul
Is just not as great as what it used to be. They want to have a cloud native tool. It’s a tried and tried or a try solution in other industries that seem to benefits and they’re finally open to actually trying this out. So we’ve noticed these manufacturing companies out in the Midwest, out in the South that have been on on Prinsloo oceans for decades, finally saying, okay, you know, we’re going to move to Google Drive or we’re going to move to Dropbox is now our main form of cloud storage.

Pradyut Paul
And they’ll start with that as a lightweight way of getting to the cloud, but quickly realize that these solutions weren’t really built for the hardware industry. Right? They’re not built for CAD development or board development and they’ll start looking out for more now. Cloud solutions that is built, purpose built for hardware.

Brian Gomski
Could you elaborate on that more specifically? I guess why specifically did it not work previously for hardware?

Pradyut Paul
Yeah. So, you know, hardware as an industry has been very conservative in nature. There’s a lot of IP around these CAD models. And so the leaders in the hardware industry decades ago basically said, well, if these models get out, we essentially lose all IP. And, you know, folks in other countries that are especially getting hold of this IP and replicating products inside the was that if we can keep it on prem it’s more secure.

Pradyut Paul
We won’t have these data leaks. And that’s just kind of been this conservative nature and heart of it. But as technologies involved in security has gotten better and encryption and there’s now all these other security layers and protocols around what cloud storage looks like, the hardware industry has finally said, okay, you know, there is an opportunity for us to host IP out in the cloud without having to worry about these factors that we had thought about before.

Brian Gomski
Gotcha. What do you think is the biggest challenge that design engineers face today?

Pradyut Paul
Yeah, this is a great question. You know, we work with design engineers every day, whether mechanical engineers, electrical engineers or even industrial engineers. And we hear the same thing is they’re spending too much time just not designing. They’re spending at least 30% of their week just going back and forth with cross-functional stakeholders, whether it’s sales or marketing, whether it’s management of another department communicating some of their design changes or talking through feedback that these other teams have with them.

Pradyut Paul
And right now, the developer tools are placed in such a way that it doesn’t allow easy way for these other teams to communicate with them. So they’re spending a lot of time organizing feedback over email, sifting through thousands of screenshots, right? I mean, when we think of CAD, it’s very visual in nature. Yeah, not as easy as saying go look at line 35 in this code.

Pradyut Paul
Right. And you can’t say, I’m going to give you an X, Y, Z, coordinate and go find this both there. It’s literally screenshots that are being sent over email, emails. They’re spending a lot of time just managing this communication and feedback from these cross-functional stakeholders. So that’s about a third of their time. The other third of their time is just sitting in meetings and they’re really frustrated.

Pradyut Paul
They don’t want to be sitting on Zoom calls, rotating CAD models, or they don’t want to be sitting on Zoom calls just in case someone has a quiet turn on the design that only they can answer. They want to have this more asynchronous environment where they can control their own schedule, where they can improve their bandwidth to actually do their core competency.

Pradyut Paul
When we look at an organization, oftentimes these designers are like the highest paid individuals, yet the bandwidth and the utilization of their core skills is not being at 100%. And so really what these engineers want to do is find a process that’s meaningful for them and tailor for them so that they can still have these engagements with these cross-functional stakeholders that enable the company to progress in the right way, but also allow them to have more time to focus on what they want to do, which is design and innovate.

Pradyut Paul
Hmm.

Brian Gomski
What is the landscape of tools that design engineers are using right now, and how would you say that’s adapted over time.

Pradyut Paul
Is so I love know really kind of looking back and how things have evolved. If you look at like the 1980s, 1990, the number one way that you would actually talk about these very visual designs is you would print it out on this very large piece of paper. Oh yeah, you get this marker and you’d circle different parts and you’d annotate a red line, these documents essentially.

Pradyut Paul
Right. And if you wanted to send to somebody else, you roll it up and send it to them or you’d scan it. Fast forward to the early 2000s. They’re pretty much doing the same thing, except now instead of like scanning it or handing it over, you’re pretty much just taking a picture of it and emailing it over. So not much had really changed over those two decades.

Pradyut Paul
2010 came and there was some innovation in the CAD environment and there were you can now take screenshots, you can now convert 3D CAD to 2D flat, right? There were these drawings or PDFs. Companies like Blue Beam came out. What allowed you to make it in the 2D PDF format? And there were PDF viewers that allowed you to mark it up.

Pradyut Paul
So now instead of having to print out CAD, you could convert it to this 2D model and then you can redline it on your computer. Right. But that’s kind of not how it stuck, right? We’re now living we’re creating a 3D model of what we’re living in the truly world, which seems counterintuitive because a lot of that, the fidelity of that product of that model is lost when you convert it.

Pradyut Paul
And so what we’re seeing in the market is even though these software tools are there, you still have that requirement of pulling up that 3D model, walking through it, taking cross-sections being will take measurements. All right. We don’t want to take really, really rich data and convert it to dumb cad. We want to get a smart and leverage as much of that data as possible.

Pradyut Paul
And so over the last decade, none of those processes have changed. We’re still living in that 2D world, right? Companies are still using these 2D flaps, whether it’s in the form of a screenshot or a PDF, they’re sharing these documents over email as attachments or adding them as slide decks. And so issue tracking and communication still is living in the 2D world, even though the designers are building 3D CAD models.

Pradyut Paul
And so the idea and where we’re trying to go to over the next few years is if you’re building in a 3D model, you want to convey all of your designs, that 3D fashion. And so how can you do that in a meaningful way where it’s cloud based? Right. In the past, the technology really hasn’t allowed for these really rich design to live in the cloud, to be able to render, to be able to have meaningful engagements.

Pradyut Paul
We’re finally there where technology is caught up and it’s allowed this level of collaboration to finally exist. And so at Build, that’s a lot of what we’re focusing on is how can we take a 3D environment and convey in 3D rather than having to convert it into DX and then have a level of communication of collaboration there?

Brian Gomski
Okay. I’m with you so far when we think of the future, what would you then say is the ideal solution for design engineers?

Pradyut Paul
Yeah, so there’s the way we look at it is there’s a lot to learn from these other industries. So for example, if we look at like the software industry, right, you would never look at the software engineer, just like taking a screenshot of code and sending it over, they would literally drop its code. And that’s because code is like text is universal.

Pradyut Paul
You can load it in any computer. That’s kind of our goal, right? Is how can you share a model without having to down convert it or have it having to make it dumb and share it with another collaborator? And so we use a lot of inspiration from the software industry and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. And but it’s not just as easy as replicating the workflow from the software industry over to the hardware industry.

Pradyut Paul
You have to understand the nuances of the engineers, right? We’re living in a world where you can’t just design something, deploy it, and then change it after it’s been deployed like it is in software. When you manufacture something, it’s done and there’s a very high cost to change that product. And so we understand these nuances in the workflows, and we’re really where the future is.

Pradyut Paul
It’s replicating what’s done in other industries that are about five, seven years ahead of us. And putting in the flavor of the hardware industry is understanding the nuances, understanding the kind of assets that we live in, tech space assets in the software industry versus, you know, very visual assets in the hardware industry. If you look at marketing assets and these other digital assets, they’re very visual in nature.

Pradyut Paul
And so how can you replicate the technologies and the workflows that have been able to provide a lot of value in these other industries now in the hardware industries? And so that’s kind of where we’re headed. Being, again, very cloud first is extremely important for the world, the new world that we live in today, where we’re not just relying on sitting behind an engineer’s desk and having them walk through our design, but having meaningful engagements from across the world.

Brian Gomski
Okay. So obviously you are with Build. So tell me what is build and everything we’ve talked about. How does build fit into all of this?

Pradyut Paul
Yeah. So at Build, we’re a design management platform and so what does that mean. We, we own different parts of the workflow for these design engineers all the way from a PDF tool that allows you to do version control on your designs to having a single source of truth. Check and check out capabilities. The Cloud Storage, how you have a better feel of Google Drive, right?

Pradyut Paul
So when you put assets on a Google drive like a CAD model, Google Drive doesn’t render it. And so a lot of the value Google Drive provides to the people using Google Drive is to be able to quickly look at designs or quickly look at PDFs. And so we want to replicate a better version of cloud storage, specifically built for the hardware engineers.

Pradyut Paul
Then we go into the project management layer. So we’ve talked about new software platforms that have been innovated over the next over the past few years. Tools like JIRA tools like a sign on Monday dot com that have a lot of value for software engineers because they’ve been built around these tech space assets. How can we replicate the feel but put in the flavor for hardware engineer that allows the same feeling, the combined boards, the issue, tracking the tasks, management, all of that to be built around these three dimensional assets.

Pradyut Paul
And then we go into design review. So we’ve talked a little bit about how design reviews over the past few decades have essentially been all in person sitting across the table from each other, having a designer rotate a model. How can we allow for a future where designers can do their own thing? And anyone that wants to review a design can come in an asynchronous say, review a design, provide their feedback without being reliant on a designer.

Pradyut Paul
And so we take those four pillars PDM, Cloud Storage, Project Management, design reviews, and combine it into what we call a design management platform, really enabling the future of hardware engineering to be less reliant on in-person engagement, more allowing for collaboration across different teams to come into the process at their own speed and allow for a tailored experience around hardware, engineering.

Brian Gomski
And this frees up your, like you said earlier, your design engineers to do what they want to do. Which is design.

Pradyut Paul
Exactly. That’s right.

Brian Gomski
So what is the plan for the future of build?

Pradyut Paul
Right. So everything we’ve talked about right now has been really rotating around CAD and these design engineers sitting in front of a computer. But the reality is that as a mechanical or electrical engineer, there’s another dimension to their work, right? They don’t just stop at a cat station. They have to go and manufacture these designs. There’s testing and validation and then there’s iterating on top of these models.

Pradyut Paul
And so the future of build is taking all of this rich data that’s coming in, these downstream engagements that include manufacturing, testing, validation and quality control and rolling it up into a platform. So you get a holistic view of not only your designs, but empirical data that you’re collecting on those designed to make more informed decisions faster on in the development cycle.

Pradyut Paul
And so the future of build is encompassing the entire workflow for this specific engineer, right? For this specific designer. So we’re providing a lot of value in terms of collaboration and communication and the workflows around building CAD look like. But once you go and actually manufacture the product on the factory floor, you’re collecting a lot of rich data that unfortunately is very difficult to access.

Brian Gomski
Okay, it sounds like a great tool. Yeah, we have a lot of mechanical engineers who listen to this, as well as mechanical engineering students. So for the companies that are listening and they want to streamline their processes and get engineers doing what they always wanted to do, which is engineers less administration, less back and forth email, where should they or where can they find build yeah.

Pradyut Paul
So they can find build at get bill.com that’s g t b I lead aecom. And what’s really great is we have a program for academics and students and teachers that want to get on to build. We offer a free license to them and then we also have hobbyist licenses and startup licenses for companies that are just getting started as well.

Brian Gomski
Okay. Is there an ideal company size you like to work with or is it everything and anything in between?

Pradyut Paul
Yeah. I mean, companies that aren’t on PDM that have been using Google Drive and Dropbox and are seeing the pains and they aren’t really extracting the value of version control at check out process. They’re looking for a new PDM system or data management tool that’s going to drive the next level of growth. That organization, that would be perfect.

Pradyut Paul
You know, we work with companies anywhere as small as like ten designers all the way, thousands of designers as well.

Brian Gomski
Wow. Okay. All right. Purdue, thank you for being on engineering tomorrow. And for all our listeners, keep engineering for tomorrow. Today.

Pradyut Paul
Thank you so much, Ryan.

Speaker 2
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