This Changes Everything (We Live In)

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Summary

Episode Title: This Changes Everything (We Live In)

Guest: Chris Anderson, CEO, Vantem

What if the way we build homes is part of the problem — and the solution — to climate change, affordability, and outdated systems? In this episode, we talk with Chris Anderson, CEO of Vantem, about how his company is reimagining housing from the ground up. Using a modular, factory-built approach and an innovative panel system, Vantem is delivering energy-efficient, cost-effective homes at scale — without the usual trade-offs.

It’s a conversation about systems thinking, climate impact, and why rethinking “shelter” could shift everything we live in — literally and figuratively.

Transcript

Chris Anderson – This Changes Everything (We Live In)

Rob Brodnick: Welcome to the Positive Turbulence Podcast. Stories from the periphery. I’m Rob Brodnick.

Karyn Zuidinga: And I’m Karyn Zuidinga. In this episode, we’re exploring what happens when you stop trying to fix a broken system and build a new one instead.

Rob Brodnick: Our guest is Chris Anderson, CEO of Vantem. His company is tackling two of the world’s biggest challenges at once: affordable housing and climate change. How? By reinventing the way we build. Vantem’s modular homes are assembled in factories using a lightweight, ceramic-based panel system that’s fast cost effective, and incredibly energy efficient.

This isn’t just a tweak to traditional construction, it’s a systems level reimagining. Chris shares how rethinking materials, labor, and process can unlock real productivity gains in an industry that hasn’t changed in decades.

Karyn Zuidinga: From the rainforest to the factory floor, from local zoning to global emissions. This is a conversation about bold innovation, practical climate action, and why failing faster might be the most underrated superpower. I.

All this and more coming up on today’s episode.

Rob Brodnick: The Positive Turbulence Podcast is brought to you by AMI, an innovation learning community that is celebrating 40 years of supporting innovation and creativity for organizations and individuals. Learn more at aminnovation.org.

Also, we would like to thank Mack Avenue Music Group as a contributing sponsor to hear our theme song, Late Night Sunrise, and other great music, visit mackavenue.com.

Karyn Zuidinga: Thank you and welcome Chris Anderson for joining us today. Really appreciate your time, and I am super excited to have this conversation just because I’m so interested in what you’re doing. Without further ado, could you please give us a sense of who you are? What you’re doing and how it is you arrived at the place that you’re at.

Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you for your interest. This is fun. So I’m Chris Anderson, as you said. In my professional life, I’m the CEO of Vantem Global. And in my real life father, husband and somebody that’s spent his whole life , bridging cultures.

I grew up in South America and have spent my whole working life between South America, the United States, the rest of the world, trying to find, certain solutions that are grounded in that initial upbringing and some of the problems that, that I think that are really important.

So we created Vantem out of a prior company that I had where we were manufacturing sustainably harvested timber in South America in Bolivia especially where I grew up. And, the goal there initially was to give the forest more value than it would have chopped down for grasslands, which was really , one of the really big competing uses for this amazing resource, the Amazon Rainforest was to chop it down and put cattle to graze. So this is in the early nineties out of college started this this company manufacturing high value added products giving jobs and giving that forest a bigger value shipping, things like windows and doors and flooring and all this kind of stuff around the world to construction sites.

And that ended up being a bit of the spark to what Vantem is today because we had a lot of interaction with obviously the construction industry, the home building industry, also notice that now the other competing use for a lot of the rainforest, particularly at the edges of civilization was housing, right?

So humans want a place to live. We want, we want houses. We had to put ’em somewhere. And increasingly one of the things that we saw was that, that the forest was being cut down to put housing down. And when you traveled all around the world and you saw how things were being built, you had another big problem.

We were building things the way that we’d been building things a hundred, 200, 300 years ago and not very effectively really complex systems that were, not precise. You ended up with homes that were not only taking up space in otherwise important areas, but they were costing more than they should.

So people couldn’t afford ’em. Then, eventually we started to focus on the other big problem as I think most of us, slowly became aware of this climate change issue and CO2 emissions and the importance of energy efficiency and trying to mitigate that. Because the way that most of the world builds most homes are not built in an energy efficient way.

So anyway long-winded introduction to what we do today,

Karyn Zuidinga: So what exactly is Vantem?

Chris Anderson: Wow. Wow. I was getting there

Karyn Zuidinga: Okay. Sorry

Chris Anderson: What we did was we, what we thought, okay you have to, let’s find a way to build better and we landed on a solution, which is a.

It’s a cement based panel that we developed that replaces pretty much all of the things that we normally use in construction, either cement or or brick or wood like we use in the US wood framing, right? It replaces all of that. We replace it with this structural panel, and then what we do is we take that panel and we build the houses in a factory setting.

So we do it in a very high production environment, Henry Ford built cars, we build homes on these assembly lines. And, so this panel ends up being a lot less expensive as a material, a more productive way of building. So it also reduces costs and allows you to do volume and scale so that you can try to attack the problem in a meaningful way.

And probably the most important attribute that it has is that the whole middle of the panel is an insulation layer. So it’s 70% or more better energy efficiency than traditional materials. We, what we focus at Vantem, as a product of all of that is building affordable, energy, efficient homes and doing so at scale, trying to be impactful really on a global basis.

Karyn Zuidinga: It’s a massive problem you’re trying to solve.

Chris Anderson: It is a big one. The built environment is what, 40% approximately of CO2 emissions globally. It is one of the fundamental challenges that needs to be addressed if we’re gonna have a meaningful, reduction in and positive impact. On CO2 emissions has to be part of.

Rob Brodnick: I heard somewhere, read somewhere that. In terms of emissions and energy usage, that cement is one of the most dangerous things out there because it, it requires such energy to produce. I don’t, I’m not an expert, so I’m gonna ask you to expand on this a little bit. But then once it’s where it is, it’s inefficient in terms of maintaining heat and other kinds of things. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but when you say your walls are partially made outta cement, talk a little bit about what’s different, maybe about the cement normal people think of the layperson versus cement from an expert’s perspective.

Chris Anderson: Yeah, perfect. You nailed it. The reason the built environment is generating those CO2 emissions is a combination of number one, what we call the embodied carbon. And then number two is the actual energy that it takes to operate. So embodied carbon is, how much energy and carbon does it take to build this thing, right?

And cement as a material is very energy intensive. It takes a lot of energy to make this material. There’s you have to use furnaces that, that, that soak up a ton of energy to generate this material that we call cement. And that’s Portland cement. If you to be really specific. And then the other part is that once you’re done doing that, cement is a terrible insulation material.

It conducts heat and cold extremely well, which is not what you want with thermal efficiency. And so yeah, you end up having most of the world builds actually with cement and and not so much wood. And a big part of that global emission is the cement that’s going into building these buildings and then the energy that it takes to operate it.

Now in our case, what we’re doing is we’re, we really aren’t using Portland cement. And this gets down into the weeds of kind of the material technology, but. What we do is we use a thin layer of a ceramic material that we developed. It’s a cementitious product, but it’s closer to a ceramic.

It’s similar to the ceramic family. It’s in the same family as the ceramic that was on the nose cone or the space shuttle. Okay. It’s very strong. It is a terrible conductor of thermal energy, meaning it’s a great insulator and it’s also makes it extremely fire resistant, which is another benefit.

And then what we do is we have half an inch of that only on both sides of this panel that we make. Imagine each side has a half inch of the ceramic and the entire center layer is a thermal insulation layer. And so we adhered those three pieces together. And it’s almost like magic.

That panel becomes extremely structural. You don’t need additional steel. You don’t need additional wood to support the, large loads. So you can build pretty much the whole house or even a three story apartment building using these panels and use very little additional reinforcement. Back to your original question.

The embodied carbon in our product is very low, right? ’cause we’re not using Portland cement. And and this our ceramic that does have a little bit of embodied energy in it to make it is very little, right? We’re only using half an inch on each face. But then the big part, and this is really the big part, is that the energy efficiency is 70% better.

So to put that in numbers, a house in the United States it depends on the house and all that stuff, but it might have maybe 30 to 50 tons of embodied carbon to build it. If you take that same house and operate it with the regular air conditioning and normal insulation that we have for a wood frame house in the US you might have 2,500 to 3000 tons of CO2 emission from that house over a 50 year period because of the energy use to operate it.

So embodied carbon’s important, but that energy efficiency and that thermal installation is really where the impact is.

Rob Brodnick: Bet you the people that were founding Phoenix, really wish they would’ve had your product whenever, a hundred years ago, 50 years ago, because you know that it’s mostly cement. They poured cement across the desert. They built buildings out of it, and they can’t move the heat anymore.

Chris Anderson: And it’s been repeated that same model has been repeated across the globe. One of the things that’s worrying, and I’m not trying to, make everybody worry today, but, one of the things that we should worry about is something that they call the cooling crunch.

And what that is, is that there’s this really good thing that’s happening that’s causing a lot of other bad things. The good thing that’s happening is that some of the poorest countries in the world are rapidly developing. And a lot of people that previously did not have the means to consider air conditioning.

Now are able to, so countries like China India, Brazil, right? That’s a good thing. People are being lifted out of poverty. The bad thing is that those same countries that have the most rapidly expanding economies are some of the countries that have the highest, what they call cooling days, meaning the days of the year that you’re going to probably use air conditioning.

And then you have the additional problem that these countries are all building with solid concrete, to your point before. The main way that building is being done is with concrete. And so you have that really bad intersection of a projected, dramatic increase in air conditioning use, coupled with areas that you are likely to use it a lot. And buildings that aren’t built within the proper type of insulation. And so this issue of construction and energy efficiency is not. A US-centric issue. And to a certain extent, it’s even more important in the rest of the world because of this.

Because if we do not correct that trend in the cooling crunch, it almost all of the changes that we’re implementing, the hard, hard-earned changes that we’re looking to implement for carbon reduction in the built environment, be completely wiped out just by that one trend.

Rob Brodnick: You have vicious cycle.

Chris Anderson: Yeah, it is. It is.

Karyn Zuidinga: So talk to me a little bit about you mentioned that you prefabricate the homes in your factory and then they have to be taken to where they’re going to be.

So talk to me about the limitations of that or the opportunity of that.

Chris Anderson: What we did was. Really rethought the entire system of building. Currently what happens a bunch of parts are taken to a job site, right? A bunch of sticks, wood and insulation, and, all these little parts. They’re taken to job sites all over the place. And then the people have to go to the job site and, labor and, all the specialized trades. They have to go from job site to job site, putting this stuff together, right? Very inefficient when you think of it logistically, terrible use of labor, right? The labor spending a ton of time moving from place to place, and the job sites are subject to these massive risks that cause delays, because of rain because of all kinds of stuff.

And then controlling quality is really tough, right? You’re you have stuff spread all over the place. If you’re a developer or builder, it’s really hard to control quality. Henry Ford figured that out a long time ago because people, at the turn of the century, there were a bunch of companies building, cars one at a time and garages all over the place he really rethought the system and implemented what we now know as the assembly line.

That’s what we’re doing with factory building homes. Now, the part that really makes this possible to do in a way that’s cost effective is back to this panel, right? Because what we did was we rethought the absolute basics of the system because if you bring in, for example, wood framing and you’re bringing in all those parts into a factory to become effective and cost competitive you really have to figure out how to automate that production a lot, right?

And. A number of companies have tried it. They’ve, bringing in robotics like in, in the auto industry to assemble homes in a factory. And it’s very difficult. Extremely expensive. The investment you need to do it that way to automate traditional construction in a factory is it just it adds a huge burden to the cost of the product, right?

So our feeling was you had to deal with that complexity and simplify it. And that’s at the core of what we did with this panel, we, one panel replaces hundreds and hundreds of parts. So now when we apply Henry Ford’s business model of factory production, inline production.

We’re doing it with a much simplified product. And so you don’t have as many steps, you don’t need as expensive equipment, right? We don’t need all this complex robotics to put things together. It’s just a panel that gets connected to the next panel, et cetera and you build the home that way.

By rethinking the system we really made it viable to factory build a home cost competitively. People have been factory building homes for a long time, but high quality factory built homes, for the most part are premium products in, in, in the US and the rest of the world really set out from day one to not be a premium product.

Our goal has always been to be a highly energy efficient product that’s cost effective and affordable for people. And the only way to do that was to really rethink the system from the ground up.

Karyn Zuidinga: So what does the output look like? So I’m, from a design background, and the first thing I think is oh, all these same boxes. And I get anxious thinking about all these same boxes going yeah, but what about me? What about, a statement that’s about me or whatever.

Chris Anderson: Yeah, no, we do not build boxes. We do not build things that are all identical. That, that’s one of the things that is , certainly what people have in mind. But no, we the homes that we build. You probably may have seen some of ’em and you didn’t even know you were looking at ’em because they look exactly traditional homes.

They look and feel like traditional homes. They don’t stand out as being different. The only thing that stands out is when you walk in one, it’s gonna be a lot more, more comfortable because of the energy efficiency. We have a couple different types of formats of factories. One format is a factory that does highly customized homes one at a time.

And we have other formats of factories that do more repetitive type of product, which is typically apartments, so it those in, in, when you’re building high volume, affordable housing, a lot of that is multifamily meaning, three, four story high buildings. And in those cases, yes, I mean that, that is a little bit more repetitive.

But it will not look any different than apartments you’re used to seeing or the single family homes that you’re used to seeing.

Karyn Zuidinga: Talk to me about affordability now. Affordability is a thing. In so many places. It’s a huge thing where I’m from in Vancouver, nobody can afford to buy a house anymore.

Chris Anderson: The massive challenge.

Karyn Zuidinga: yeah. And the solution that you know, but a lot of cities move to is to build more rental, but that doesn’t solve the problem for people. So talk to me about affordability.

Chris Anderson: Yeah. So affordability, at its core is about cost. It’s not the only element. There’s, there are other things that do feed into affordability and I’ll get a couple of ’em out of the way. Then we’ll talk about cost. One of, one of the things that is a challenge and has to be addressed, that has nothing to do with the construction system, but it is the whole system is is zoning.

So zoning in the United States in particular is a huge challenge. Zoning laws, zoning approach most of the theory that is applied was developed a hundred years ago and in different era. And it was developed before the transition to cars and other things that have ended up really accentuating a problem.

For example, it’s really hard to rezone areas from single family to higher density, multifamily, which you really need if you’re going to, you need a good mix and. It’s not possible as we grow, as in population , everyone have a single family home with two or three acres around them. I mean, it’d be beautiful, but it just isn’t possible.

The planet can’t sustain it, so you have to do things that are a little bit more high density, right? In order to address the problem in an affordable and responsible way. Zoning in the US does not help in that respect. There are a number of issues there. Now, let’s say we can solve that. All right?

The next problem then becomes just the cost basis. And that goes back to what I was alluding to earlier, that when you have a complex system that’s highly inefficient, that translates to higher costs. And if it, again, if we wanna get economist wonky the construction industry is the only major industry in the world that has had almost zero productivity growth in the last 50 years.

Every other industry in the world has had productivity growth, meaning there’s more output per labor hour than before. And so if you don’t address productivity, which directly correlates to cost, you can’t address the underlying problem of affordability. Now, that’s the approach we took, right? We approached the productivity issue by creating a simpler system factory building it, allowing us to hit costs that are otherwise unattainable for high quality product, right? And what our system essentially does, it increases productivity dramatically, and that’s what allows us to deliver, a very highly energy efficient home without a cost premium, right?

It fundamentally is important to be able to deliver that responsible home. It’s not just an affordable affordability issue, but it’s, it has to be of high quality and affordable. Therefore, there cannot be what they call the green premium. From the get go, that was really, our goal was to deliver something that didn’t have that green premium.

Karyn Zuidinga: then what about the other like I know we still build a lot of new in the world. What about the stuff that’s already there? What happens to that stuff?

Chris Anderson: Yeah, that’s an awesome question. And it has to be addressed as well. Now I will. I will confess, that’s not part of the challenge we’ve set out for ourselves. It is a completely different challenge you can imagine, right? You have a, an existing structure. You have to have a way of either refurbishing it by putting insulation on the outside of the walls or on the inside of these existing walls.

There are companies that are working on that and I think successfully applying some really interesting ideas. Some of them have approached us to see if they can, adapt our panel to their challenge, to their solutions and it, it could be possible, but we have our work cut out for us and in, in kind of what we’ve already set out to do.

So it, it isn’t something that we are looking to address, but it is a huge issue. Fortunately I would say, and I think that it’s really helping people focus on this, is that there’s a fair amount of incentive money in the United States available for retrofitting, for energy efficiency.

And the Inflation Reduction Act included some very nice programs, a lot of great incentives to have that happen. And so you have a number of companies that are, I think, coming into that space and kind of incented by the money that’s available for these things that are, I think, are doing a really nice job.

Rob Brodnick: So let’s say I, I’m ready. I want to live in one of your houses. Is it something that like direct consumer, someone could do to seek you out? Or is it, do you approach it through a brokering system? I’m just curious. Like how do you get out there and if I’m really excited, I have some land, I’m like, Chris, I’m ready.

What do I do?

Chris Anderson: We do some direct to consumer. So we have, we currently have a factory the name of it is Affinity. It’s a Vantem factory that’s in southern Georgia in the US that specializes in doing the more customized, direct to consumer buildings. Now we have focused our initial rollout in the US and the southeast of the US.

Currently we’re much we’re in really good spot to supply you if you were actually looking to build in a place like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas. We are slowly maybe not slowly, but we are moving to to put in additional factories in the rest of the country.

But to maybe your question of how do we sell our things? We do have that consumer side. But then the majority of our homes what we do is we partner with large developers that are looking to have that meaningful, impact. Because there’s a lot more than just building the actual home, right? That has to happen. You have to have land, you have to have the entitlements and the permitting and all of this kind of stuff. So we partner with really experienced developers that have been site building before looking to increase their productivity, decrease their cost, and increase energy efficiency.

So they partner with us and we build factories together with them in their backyard. Or the other thing that we also do, and we’re in the process of doing is we acquire existing factories that are doing modular construction. The homes that are on wheels the mobile home type of things. And we’re able to convert those factories completely into a Vantem factory. And so we’re both building new factories and doing some acquisitions that are turning those factories around. All of those we do, again we seek out first. Capable partners that have the ability to deliver a very meaningful number of homes.

And then we either acquire or build a factory kind of in their backyard to supply them and very focused for the next couple years on the southeast of the United States. Then we’ll be, expanding out into the southwest west, Northwest and Northeast.

Karyn Zuidinga: So I feel like this might put a lot of construction workers outta business.

Chris Anderson: No, actually that’s a great, that’s a, a wonderful point. No, we’re those same construction workers are going to be more productive because we, what we end up doing is bringing those construction workers in house into our factory. Suddenly they’re not having to move from job site to job site wasting their time and staying away from their families and all that good stuff.

And they, they now work under a roof, make as much or more money doing so. And that same worker is producing two or three times as many homes as they would if they were doing it the other way. We’re just producing more affordable housing. We’re not reducing the number of people that have jobs.

Actually.

Rob Brodnick: And that’s that change in industry productivity metric that you were talking about hasn’t changed in 50 years. You’re actually going at that.

Chris Anderson: That’s the key. That is absolutely the key. You increase productivity those same workers produce more and if you’re producing more with the same number of labor hours and labor dollars, what happens magically, your costs come down. So that’s, that is really at the key of it.

Yeah, exactly.

Karyn Zuidinga: So where are you finding the pushback then? Or are you finding any pushback? Are there people out there who are like, this is not a good thing?

Chris Anderson: We, so we started our first construction projects and proof of concept and rollout and all that we did in South America. So we’ve built about 3 million feet square feet of homes, schools, university down there and started our US rollout a couple years ago. And that.

That involved getting all of the code approvals so to, when you introduce a new system into the marketplace, there’s a lot of testing,

Karyn Zuidinga: Right.

Chris Anderson: Like FDA approvals for drugs. And so that, that’s something that we concluded in the US last year which allowed us to proceed with this rollout now in the US.

And we did the first acquisition of this company, affinity earlier this year. , We were fully expecting people to push back on a lot of issues, and you brought up some of the, some of the questions that come up. But the construction industry is very conservative, very adverse to change.

That’s one of the reasons that nothing has changed in so long. And you have this productivity issue. But I candidly, was absolutely pleasantly surprised that when we started engaging with developers we just did not get pushback. It was like, we’re, yeah, we want, we wanna do this because, if you step back and you look at it for people that are trying to deliver, develop, and deliver affordable housing.

The biggest challenge that they have is all of this site building risk, all the site, the costs and so forth. Now, many of them have in the past been thinking, how about factory building? ’cause it, it’s a logical thing to to, to factory build. We all know that’s how cars are done, right?

So a lot of these developers have thought about it but it’s not their expertise. And so when we show up with kind of the turnkey solution, here it is, John, we’ll do this for you. And all you need to do is order the stuff from us. We find a just a really receptive audience, and I think the other thing that has happened is and from, we’ve been doing, we developed the system, what was it about 12, 13 years ago now, when we first started, energy efficiency and kind of climate change was not a conversation that most people, would have and understood.

And it just wasn’t part of it, right? It, people didn’t understand it. That’s very different today, and I would say that it’s rare that we have, a discussion with a developer that doesn’t appreciate the importance of, and the responsibility to do this, but also the opportunity because it is an economic opportunity for those that engage.

Karyn Zuidinga: A conversation Rob and I have been having a lot lately is about systems change and about the. One of the things Rob said to me, and I’m gonna just steal this from you right now, Rob, is that when you push on a system in one place all the time you’re likely to find that the next time you come to push at it it’s even stiffer there.

What I’m, I think, charmed by, in a way, with your solution is that it seems that you’ve cracked that nut of systems change and you’re coming at it from lots of different places and you found the thing, the underlying lever or trigger that being a turnkey solution, something that a lot of people have been thinking about a lot to, to, to factory, make homes.

And not make ticky-tacky boxes.

Chris Anderson: I, I, I wish IWI could say that what we did was part of exactly the plan that was designed, 12, 13, 14 years ago. No, innovation doesn’t work that way. But along the way we did, I think, realize and I think the, probably the most intelligent question we asked ourselves was, why aren’t more people doing this?

And when you look at it from that perspective, what you start to see is, number one, what I said before, construction industry and construction companies are quite conservative. And they have their ways of doing it. It’s, they have their tools, they have their equipment, they have, it, it’s like a tennis player.

They have a tennis racket. They’re not gonna go out and play golf. It just, they’re just the way it is. And so that’s issue number one. The other I issue that we saw was, okay, there have been modular companies that have been trying to do what we want to do. Why are they not succeeding?

And there are a couple of spectacular failures at this. They spent billions of dollars doing it. And it was, we, we looked at, they were trying to automate the traditional system. A quote, I love, bill Gates, has this, said that it, if you, that if you try to automate an inefficient system, all you are doing is increasing in efficiency.

So you have to automate an efficient system to increase productivity, to increase efficiency. Therefore, we felt you really had to completely change change the system, swap it out with something different. It’d be, early on we said if we just continue doing this we’re, it’s saying Henry Ford would’ve said, Hey, I’ve got something better.

I’m gonna build a mechanical four-legged horse. That is the equivalent of what people that have been trying to automate traditional construction have been doing. They didn’t rethink the system from the ground up. And then the last part of the puzzle that I, has been really important is to partner with the developers because they know what the market needs.

And the assumption that developers, sometimes, some people say, oh, developers, they’re part of the problem. Absolutely not. My experience has been most developers want to be part of the solution. They just need to have a way, a path to it. And I think that we were able to sew together this technology that allowed us to implement the factory building efficiencies and recognize that the natural partner in this are responsible developers and that really is getting traction.

Rob Brodnick: reading a book right now. It’s called The Ecosystem Economy. And it’s talking about the breakdown of traditional sectors where there was divisions and the new economic, where things are more integrated across boundaries. And it just, the fact that I’m reading this book and hearing you talk about rebuilding sort of the system of construction in a different kind of way it’s really similar to me and one of the examples they use in the book is how Apple developed the ecosystem where there were tech companies for a long time that were doing the bits and pieces. They said, wait, everything plays together now. And the new economic rewards that come out of that. And it just has me thinking, like you’ve got like a new platform that has broken down the traditional patterns and silos. If you think about a here comes a house, someone’s gonna build it.

These 50 workers and 50 different suppliers. You’ve got screws, nails, wood, all of this stuff coming in. My question is like what’s next? If you think about, okay, now the construction industry and all of this it’s now an ecosystem economy where it used to be sectors and silos and old ways of doing things. What might come next? Like the integration of different kinds of system within construction or new technologies or other things. any thoughts about maybe projecting out, let’s say that. Your way is the way homes are all built in 20 years. What are you push? What envelope are you pushing next?

Chris Anderson: it’s a great question. I think where some of the biggest need and opportunity lies as a next step is integrating the user into the. Into that system better today we’re very focused right up until the developer point, and then the developer, we’re selling these homes to the end user, but the relationship shouldn’t stop there.

It does traditionally, right? You buy a home, yeah, you have a warranty, but, essentially, but that relationship stops there. There’s no reason that it should. I, I think that Tesla did show that is an important part of the continued relationship, right?

With that, that consumer and I think in a home environment, it’s the same. So what does that mean? It means that we have to be, I think there are opportunities of including, feedback from, I don’t wanna say sensors because that suddenly it’s like big brothers watching you in your house.

That’s not what I mean, right? But there are certain things like, that there are sensors that a home, a smart home should have. That’s providing feedback that’s allowing the homeowner to better use the home and information that would allow the company to better design future homes.

You, so where are the failure points? Where are for example if you’re thinking of a thermal envelope. If you had decent, really good sensors that are embedded all over the place, you’d be able to know where there might be some spots in the house that aren’t cooled quite as well, or where the airflow isn’t quite as good and you are able to design solutions to that.

Failure points for, electrical systems and different things like that we’re all annoyed by our houses, you, there is a maintenance part of it. There’s no reason that maintenance should be a black box to the builder, and now, yeah I alluded to before, you gotta be careful about this, the privacy side.

How do you do this in a way that it, that it’s not creepy but it, I do think that’s the next step, bring the end user into that family and be a part of, part of that solution. And as you move forward.

Rob Brodnick: That big first step to, to modularize in a sense and be able to produce at scale the things that were always custom built and put together. That’s a big first step to be able to do that. I’m just thinking Chris how do you get the electricity and the water and some of those other major systems that interact with the home are they integrated into the panels or is there just room for them? Just thinking about how do those multiple systems come together rather than every home is just one of a kind built, even if it is similar to the one next door.

Chris Anderson: Great question one of the decisions that we did make early on was how far do you take innovation? And we did decide that there’s certain things that that in in this first long stage we will do. What other people are already doing.

Okay. Electricity and plumbing is one of them. There’s the electricity codes. And the plumbing codes are so complex and difficult for you to actually try to also change that while you’re changing the fundamental, build building envelope that it would’ve been probably a bridge too far. So we do we use regular electrical wire, regular plumbing and that is run through our panel as you would through a regular wall.

And it’s all done in the factory. The good thing about that is people then, if there’s a problem or whatever they’re, it’s, they’re all familiar materials and familiar. You can call your regular electrician. He can, he can solve whatever that is. I do think in the future that that is gonna change.

And we do have plans because one of the things that that would help and does help. With energy efficiency and particularly when you start, when you’re running solar panels on a home. Is that currently we, solar panels produce DC current like batteries, right? It’s a direct current, most appliances work off of alternating current AC current. And so there’s this, there’s a converter that has to be put in that, where you lose your energy in that conversion. Future houses as more renewable energy is used, particularly solar panels are going to start to be DC current houses.

So the wires in the house are, will be very low voltage, 12 volt wires, just like you would have in a, in a a small a small appliance of some sort. Your refrigerator will be DC current, your electric range will be DC current. That allows you to use a lot less energy and it actually ends up being less dangerous too, because you don’t have high voltage going through the house.

But, there’s an, there’s there, there’s an example of where the system has to catch up, right? You have to have. The appliance manufacturers start to build these DC current appliances at scale so that they’re affordable, they’re not there yet. They’ll get there because it is the direction that everything needs to go in.

But it’ll be a few years before that happens.

Rob Brodnick: So Tesla was right and Edison was wrong. Is that what he,

Chris Anderson: Yes, that’s absolutely right. You nailed it. Yes. He was absolutely right. I know. The, he took the long view though, right?

Karyn Zuidinga: But it does bring up an interesting thought for me around somewhere along the line, someone made a decision, we’re gonna do it with AC right? We’re gonna, we’re gonna go that way. Somebody made, for whatever reasons were present at the time, it seemed like the right decision. That’s what they did.

The systems change. It’s a thing, right? It’s a big thing. ’cause sometimes the decision you make. 14 years ago shows up today and hangs around. Are there decisions that you made 14 years ago that maybe you wish you would had done differently or on reflecting on how the system is evolving, things that you thought might be true now aren’t?

Chris Anderson: Oh yeah, no, this, this path, this journey has been absolutely a zigzag journey. There’s no doubt. There, there are things one tries, they don’t work out assumptions you have that don’t, I think we were lucky that the core assumptions, the core plan, the core analysis we did turn out to be, I think correct.

We we did go down the correct path now or, we had the correct destination, the path ended up being a little bit winding. Whereas we when we first set out to do to do this our assumption was for example that we would be doing just very small homes.

That was really at the very beginning. We were like, okay, we’ll just do very small homes. And that’s, that’s all that the world really needs. But, as you start to, to get, get further down and look at really, what I alluded to before if you’re doing small, single family homes you all, you do create more problems down the road because you need more land.

So one of the important changes we made midway was to start a very heavy focus in engineering on doing mid-rise apartment buildings. Which that density is absolutely necessary if you’re going to, I think, get to that goal that we set out for ourselves. Yeah I think that any successful, entrepreneur that tells you they, they didn’t deviate from their original plan is probably not telling you the truth.

I don’t know of any of them. And the other thing is that it always takes longer than you think it’s gonna take. So here we’re, I’m talking to you 13 years after we started this process, and I definitely did not think it was gonna take as long as it did, but here we are, it just it’s part of the process.

You gotta be patient.

Rob Brodnick: I’m thinking about a story I read recently where they are recommending you bring in this huge printing device and print your home 3D printing and I’ve not kept up with the technology, but apparently it’s real and,

Chris Anderson: in Israel. Yeah.

Rob Brodnick: Yeah. So what’s that all about? How’s it even possible and it, is that a competing or is that sort of a, an adjacent space that maybe not intersect with what you’re doing?

Chris Anderson: It’s a, an absolutely cool concept. But it is not more productive. Than other alternatives. Yes, it’s exactly like you described it. If somebody, if you think of a 3D, printer using the, the plastic that, that’s doing 3D printing on plastics, these, some of these machines look like just a really big version of that.

And they’re, instead of printing or extruding plastic, they’re extruding some sort of cement. And glue usually is the way it is. And then, and now where 3D printing makes sense is with really complicated stuff. Do you need a round wall for some reason? I dunno, but if you want a round wall that makes, yeah, three, 3D printing probably is more productive than trying to figure out how to do it with other in other ways.

And there are probably other very specific architectural, details that 3D printing makes a lot of sense, just like 3D printing. A a plastic part makes sense if you’re doing one of them, nobody, 3D prints, shampoo bottles, right? Those are done in a different way just because it’s just not a productive way to do it.

Same thing applies here. I think if you’re gonna, build a house on Mars and you’ve gotta do it all in one, something like that, 3D printing probably makes sense. If you’re trying to do one very specific weird thing it, it makes sense. But it’s not a system that fundamentally is more productive.

It’s more versatile, perhaps. It,

Rob Brodnick: Yeah, just moving that huge printer around.

Chris Anderson: That’s, I could go on and on about it. It’s, they’ve gotten a lot of great press and it’s a cool, it’s a cool idea. It’s wonderful to look at, it’s mesmerizing, the cost of those machines, the productivity and then at the end of the day. I don’t know of any of ’em that have figured out how to print insulation into it.

So you end up with these, they’re printing cement. You back to what we were talking about earlier. There’s no insulation in there, and I don’t know of any of ’em that that they figured out how to include insulation into it. So fundamentally, at least as this technology today they’re terrible in terms of thermal insulation.

Rob Brodnick: Yeah. Yeah.

Karyn Zuidinga: So what are some of your challenges right now, Chris?

Chris Anderson: Our, probably our biggest challenge as we do the, execute this rollout is labor, believe it or not. We typical Vantem factory requires about 150 skilled people in the factory. And, we are investing quite heavily in, developing training programs right now, since we’re at the beginning of our rollout engaging, with technical colleges, engaging with different government entities to try to, attract the right talent.

But interestingly, that is probably our biggest challenge as we look to, to roll out multiple factories we’re having to spend a lot of time on, on trying to attract the right type of talent to make it happen.

Karyn Zuidinga: Always comes down to the people. Huh?

Chris Anderson: You need people, you need good people, you need committed people. And, we’re it’s it is interesting. I mean we’re succeeding on it, but I, I think the, one of the things that, that is. It is interesting is that attracting young people is where the difficulty has been.

And that’s why this this focus on the technical colleges and on getting, younger adults and kids excited about, the about trades and it, it’s not something that, I think we pivoted in our education system away from a lot of that.

And sometimes people even look down at the opportunities because we’ve just been, been trained to, to think in another way. But, getting people to see that these are trades that are actually very lucrative, very rewarding. And there’s really a lot of growth opportunity into it is part of our challenge.

Rob Brodnick: I was just thinking about some of those emerging countries, economies, cultures. Where you talked about the cooling crisis is gonna blow things out of proportion and maybe India other places. Do you have eyes on some of those markets to try to break into them while they’re still in their developing phase?

Chris Anderson: Yes, we do. This is absolutely we are focused on the US for the next few years. Part of that is, is like a bit of bodybuilding, right? We’re putting on muscle and bone mass so that we can then go out and have a more meaningful impact. Internationally, we know that we can compete, we know that we can do it.

We’ve done it in South America. Most of the countries where, we would like to engage. Places like India and so forth are very similar at the end of the day in terms of the type of products the cultural bias towards certain things the costs and all that. So we know that we can do it.

We and we were, quite fortunate to attract Breakthrough Energy, which is a fund that, that Bill Gates created to combat climate change in, as a partner and an investor in Vantem last year. And the main reason they were interested in Vantem is for that international side to, because that, that’s where the biggest carbon reduction impact is gonna come.

And so after we’ve gained a little muscle mass and capability we’re absolutely going to be turning our attention there. And we’ve had a lot of, frankly, a lot of companies interested in, in, in working with us. We just don’t have the capacity currently to to carve out team time and even investment from our side to those opportunities quite yet.

But we’re really looking forward to doing that.

Rob Brodnick: In thinking about ways that, that people innovate. We were talking earlier about Tesla and Edison, everyone knows the great battle between AC and DC back at the time and all of that kinda stuff. But innovation has innovated itself, the tools, techniques and processes can you think of any things that you had to do just brand new in a new kind of way that, that totally just either broke the mold within the industry or things that you had to learn that you couldn’t figure out how to do?

Any stories or anecdotes like that I think would be really interesting.

Chris Anderson: From having worked in other countries a lot I think that one of the things that we may not appreciate here in the US that I think is one of the reasons that the US is a driver of innovation in the world.

It, and it’s one that isn’t always obvious. It’s that it’s a country where we are allowed to fail, dust ourselves off. Go again. And it, I think it, it almost takes working in other, in, in other countries, even in Europe, it is very difficult for an entrepreneur to try something, fail, go bankrupt, dust themselves off and go again. You’re marked for life, number one.

Number two, in most of the world bankruptcy doesn’t really exist in the way that we know it today. Where you’ve risked a certain amount and if it doesn’t work out, that’s, the edge of what’s lost and you start again.

And it is incredibly important to, to innovation to allow people to be able to fail. Get up again, because otherwise, and this is what in the rest of the world, a lot is a fear of innovation. Because if they fail, it is the end, it is the end of their economic life and potentially for generations they will be marked, their family will be marked for this failure.

And that and that goes all the way from how we look at innovators and how we look at failure to, things like, the bankruptcy system in the US it does allow you to do it. It, it does work. And so I, when I talk to y in, in other countries, a lot of times that question comes up.

Why is the US so good at innovation? It, yeah. Yeah. We have a lot of really bright people, but the super structure that we have that allows us to try. And, if it doesn’t work out, hey, try again. Is probably more important than even, having great institutions of learning, across the United States dedicated to to, to creating the, that, the, that technology and so forth.

So anyway, random thought.

Karyn Zuidinga: not so random thought, actually, yours really sparking something for me. ’cause I have observed and perhaps mostly in Canadian companies, so maybe it’s different here. We’ve got good bankruptcy laws, but still I think there’s a shame factor that happens. I’m not sure. What I see a lot of companies do is failing very slowly.

So particularly in the software world, they’ll put

A new feature out or a thing and then they’ll never stop the thing. The thing continues to live and they’ll tweak it to death forever and they’ll put resources behind it to the nth degree and they will never say, oh, that was a failure. Let’s pull that failed product and let’s not continue to sell it to our customers.

Because somebody’s still using it. They’ll never say to somebody, you know what, not never. ’cause there are, I can think of a few software products that did get pulled Google Wave for one. But the vast majority of software companies that I have interacted with, been around don’t pull failure very quickly.

they’ll

fail.

Rob Brodnick: Perpetual denial. They’re just

Karyn Zuidinga: and it’s this thing it was somebody’s,

Chris Anderson: Just put it on life

Rob Brodnick: put it on life support.

Chris Anderson: In a corner somewhere.

Karyn Zuidinga: I’ve seen projects be handed down from, somebody on high. And this is the thing that must happen. And even through the development of the project, we know that nobody wants it. We know in research nobody wants it.

It’s not a thing. We’re not listening to what they do want. We keep going on the thing that they, that somebody out there said they needed to be done.

Rob Brodnick: It’s

that stop listening it, it, it’s almost as if people and organizations can’t harvest learnings during times of that slow decline. And, if you could constantly be attuned to what just happened, what’s the takeaway from that? How do we turn that into something else, in some other kind of way? It seems like the cycle would speed up rather than slow down.

I don’t know. Chris, how do you

overcome that? You’ve done it, you’ve

talked about it. What are some, what’s some of the tips for others?

Chris Anderson: I think you’ve got, hey, you gotta own up to the mistakes you’ve made number one. And then figure out, try not to, not, try not to repeat them. And so yeah. Learn, you got you, you’ve gotta learn from those mistakes. There are some of the smartest investors I’ve met.

The one that’s, their early questions are all right, what are your failures? And if you don’t list a good number of them, they’re not gonna invest in you. It’s the other way around, right? You think, oh man, I’m gonna, ah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna show, I’m gonna tell ’em all my stupid moves.

They’ll never invest in me. No, the smart ones, that’s what they want to hear. They want to hear, ah, okay, yeah you’ve made enough mistakes. So the likelihood that you’ll make one with me and my money is a lot lower. So yeah, you gotta learn from those mistakes.

Karyn Zuidinga: What a great way to stop. Yes. You gotta learn from those mistakes. What a what a lesson, right? That we often ignore. To our peril, but we do, and we wind up failing slowly. I wanna say thank you. Thank you, Chris Anderson, for spending your time and your genius with us because I have so enjoyed this conversation.

Rob Brodnick: another hour. It’s that thing again, right?

Karyn Zuidinga: Is that thing again,

Rob Brodnick: The podcast time warp. I don’t know how that happens.

Chris Anderson: it was fun. I appreciate it. Karyn, Rob, just really enjoyed it. This is fun. Yeah, it was, what, five minutes? That’s all you gave me, right?

Karyn Zuidinga: A huge thank you to AMI who have nurtured us in developing this podcast is the source of so many of our guests, and of course, the founder,. Stan Gryskewicz is also the author of the original book, and dare I say… the Henry Ford of Positive Turbulence.

Rob Brodnick: AMI is a pioneering, nonprofit organization comprised of committed individuals who foster and leverage creativity and innovation in organizations and society. AMI identifies leading edge innovation, shares, experiences, sponsors research, and recognizes innovation and creative processes. Find out more at aminnovation.org.

And thank you to Mack Avenue Music Group, our contributing sponsor for providing our podcast soundtrack, Late Night Sunrise.

Karyn Zuidinga: If you want to share a positive turbulence moment or otherwise comment on what you’re hearing, please drop us a line at podcast@positiveturbulence.com. We welcome your thoughts.

Rob and I took a break from podcasting to work on our book, the Ecosystem Project, but now we’re back starting to create new content. Tune in again soon to hear more great interviews with amazing Turbulators. I’ve also started the Positive Turbulence Book Club for AMI members. To find out more, head over to aminnovation.org/bookclub.

You can also head over to positive turbulence.com to find out more about us. Get a transcript of this episode, get links to find out more about our guests or positive turbulence. Until next time, keep the turbulence positive.