How a $100K Bad Debt Sparked 14 Patents — Peter Lasensky on Voice, Documentation, and Building Software Contractors Actually Use

Peter Lasensky (00:41)
Lysinski, yes.

Rishi Srivastava (00:42)
Today our guest is Peter Lasensky. Peter, welcome.

Peter Lasensky (00:47)
Thank you, Rishi. Thank you for having me on your show.

Rishi Srivastava (00:50)
The first section is on your origin story in construction. Take us back to the beginning. What did your first life in construction look like before software was even part of the picture?

Peter Lasensky (01:03)
Well, know, sometimes I say that I was born with a hammer in my hand and that I just love to work with my hands and to build things. And it’s kind of strange because my family is in the waste paper business and has been there for 120 years. So I grew up around waste paper and turning into new cardboard boxes and so forth.

And, but I just love to work with my hands and I started doing it as a hobby and then when I turned 16 I just wanted to get into construction which I started early.

leading up. That’s what kind of got me in there. Just the, you know, one thing about construction, and I say that people in the business are there, it’s very hard, but they’re in there because they love it, right? That’s why they do it. And that’s, you know, and you can see something done, you know, you…

build something, you leave the day and you’re sleeping at night and you’re like, yeah, you’re thinking about the walls you just put up and it feels good. And I just love that. you know, picking up truckloads and moving truckloads of waste paper around, it really didn’t do much for me. So I kind of went off on my own and got rid

Rishi Srivastava (02:08)
Also job to job, there’s so much variance in construction. This job one is so much different compared to job two.

Peter Lasensky (02:15)
Well, that is the core of the problem when it comes to the non-residential, these projects, because they’ve usually never been built before. It’s a team of people that never worked together before, right? So it’s just set up for problems.

Rishi Srivastava (02:30)
It’s surprise that it even works.

Peter Lasensky (02:32)
Yeah, well, if you look at the results 80 % of projects, these big projects are a year or more behind. is it working? You know, it’s at least not working for the plan. That’s for sure. People are not factoring in the, what happens factor.

Rishi Srivastava (02:51)
Yeah, you built Peter Belt Corporation into one of San Diego’s top construction firms. What was the hardest lesson you learned running jobs day to day?

Peter Lasensky (03:03)
So if I could just go back into Philadelphia before I started Peterbilt, I was doing work in Philadelphia. I became a union contractor because the unions came in and took me out for a ride and convinced me in a very compelling way I had to join the unions.

So I did that and I was self-performing most of my work. And then because of the weather and the unions, I moved to San Diego and started Peterbilt Construction. And when I did, I started the company with a different attitude. I said, you know what, I’m not gonna try to self-perform everything. I’m gonna do the trades I make the most money at in-house and everything else I’m in a subcontract. so I had a different philosophy. kind of, when I got into construction,

back east, knew kind of knew how to build but I didn’t know how to run a construction company and then by the time I left I knew how to run a construction company and I knew how to build so when I started Peterbilt. I hit the ground running with that and so that was really a good experience place to come in at

Rishi Srivastava (04:02)
running jobs day to day in Peter Belt Corporation?

Peter Lasensky (04:06)
Yeah, so that’s a great question and applies to both companies. there’s a lot of lessons to learn, right? I say I learned through the school of hard knocks. I got knocked around quite a bit. there’s two kinds of problems on projects, right? Problems that you really…

can’t avoid, right? That could be underground rock, hitting water, weather issues, and all these things. And then there’s a section of problems that you could avoid just by having talked about something or having double checked on something or written something down. And it was those problems that were super frustrating for me, the ones that could have been avoided. Problems such as,

the tenants couldn’t move in because the guy that had the phone number for the fire inspector was on vacation. There’s just, this type of stuff is just, there’s enough problems that you can’t avoid. the problems you can’t avoid should be avoided. It was super frustrating. If I had to learn, talk about the one problem that was the impetus for me, people stuck it to me over the years here and there, but one particular project in…

2001 really kind of led me to want to address these problems. that was essentially a project that I didn’t get paid on, the final bill. I was owed $100,000. And the guy, the owner of the building was a real jerk too, right? Somebody can stick it to you and make you feel good about it. This guy was just a jerk.

real jerk and it got under my skin and that was a very painful experience for me that kind of led me to create a better way to document progress and problems on construction projects.

Rishi Srivastava (05:41)
Yeah, yeah, it’s tough. You don’t get paid for the work you’ve done.

Peter Lasensky (05:47)
That’s right. All that work and then you don’t get paid.

Rishi Srivastava (05:50)
Yeah. Was there a specific moment in the field where you thought there has to be a better way to capture what’s happening on site?

Peter Lasensky (05:59)
Well, continuing with the same thing, right? The customer didn’t pay me. And part of the problem is when you don’t get paid, and there’s lien rights, but this customer kind of strung me out so that I went past my lien right period. So by the time I realized I wasn’t going to get paid, I couldn’t file a lien anymore. So I had to just file litigation, which I did. But two years later, I’m in court.

Right? And he went out and hired experts to say this or that. And it turned out that

these experts were essentially making things up. They were paid to find problems, and of course, they’ll make them up if they don’t find anything. And this arbitration was very frustrating. And after four days in the arbitration, I was sitting with my superintendent in his truck, and I was super frustrated. And I was holding my Nextel phone at the time.

And I was just saying to myself, how can I make sure this never happens again? And I looked at my phone and I said, hey, why don’t we use the mobile phone to document events on our projects? And my superintendent looked at me and he says, you know, that’s a great idea because I don’t have time to go to the bathroom, yet alone go to the trailer and write stuff down.

And the next morning I talked to the arbitrator and I said, what do you think about this idea? And he said to me, says, Peter, that’s a great idea because I’ve been doing dispute resolution for 30 years and nobody writes anything down. And if they do write it down, you can’t read it. You they just don’t spell well, so they don’t write clearly, you’re legibly, so you can see that they don’t spell well. And I relate to that problem because I was kind of the same way.

And so based on that, that was my epiphany that said, hey, I need to build a solution for this based off of the mobile phone. That was the real epiphany for

Rishi Srivastava (07:42)
You know, the best software is made for yourself first. If you can be your own customer, you found some problem that at least has one customer. There’s like so many companies building software and it’s so easy nowadays. Like 90 % of the companies, can’t find even one customer.

Peter Lasensky (07:51)
Yeah

They can’t find what’s up.

Rishi Srivastava (08:02)
even one customer to use their software.

Peter Lasensky (08:04)
Yeah,

well, you know, there’s there. Yeah, there that happens a lot. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea. It just means maybe the market’s not ready for it yet.

Right? And it’s like if you’re putting out fires and someone’s got, you know, this is, hey, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It says, yeah, it might be, but I’m putting out fires here. really can’t, you know, I gotta do that. Right? You’ve got to take care of the most immediate and painful thing first. you know, that’s people have priorities. If you’re not their first priority, it’s pretty much not gonna happen.

So there’s a saying, not a saying, but a story that when the shopping cart was invented, it took 40 years, 40 years before it was actually adopted by grocery stores. And that’s because people didn’t want to use it. They didn’t want to be the first person using it. They’d rather carry their stuff than be someone laughing at them because they’re using a shopping cart. But after people get comfortable with it, then it became adopting.

Rishi Srivastava (08:47)
Wow.

Peter Lasensky (09:03)
I think that’s a pretty typical thing. They want to make sure that they don’t want to the first one on their block to try something, right? They want to, well, if it’s good, it’ll be around later and so forth. And that’s kind of a shame. But you can only do what you can do. That’s part of the issue.

Rishi Srivastava (09:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, you know, a story that occurs to me at Toilet Paper, the way the founders got it adopted was they started convincing hotels to put them in the rooms of the people who were there by themselves, you know, and that’s how slowly Toilet Paper got adopted. Yeah, adoption is kind of a challenge a founder has to figure out.

Peter Lasensky (09:40)
wow.

Well, that’s the thing. If you’re going to create, like one of the things that I’ve been doing is none of the products that I ever created existed before. And honestly, that excites me. I don’t want to just build something else, something that someone else has already done, even if it’s better. That’s not my, doesn’t do much for me. I really like to create things that didn’t exist before. And that does come with people not knowing what it is, right?

Rishi Srivastava (09:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lasensky (10:13)
For instance,

my first product before the Daily Report tool, it product, it was called Command Post at the day, in 1997 we released it. And it was basically a central project database that I created because we were using spreadsheets for managing information. We had a marketing team who using a spreadsheet to track the leads they had. Operations used spreadsheets to track the projects they were working on.

Rishi Srivastava (10:20)
Mm.

Peter Lasensky (10:39)
I used spreadsheets to track the performance of the business and forecasting and I realized that the same information was being re-entered in everyone’s spreadsheets. And then when I was doing a forecast, I had to get information from other people’s spreadsheets. And I realized that, this was again in 1997, right? We released it in 95. It’s like there had to be a better way.

So we had this concept of a project database, and so we wound up building it, but the problem with it was nothing existed like that. You had three things that existed. You had project management software, accounting software, and basically spreadsheets are estimating.

The idea that you would have a business management software, right? Because I wasn’t meant to need help managing the job. I needed help managing my business What are the projects coming in? What’s my pipeline look like when you know how many who’s handling these projects? Who’s going to do the estimating who’s going to provide? project management input who’s going to

And bringing all that together, and then how does this look? I wanted to be able to see my next quarter before my financial statements were done. So if I had a problem, I could do something about it. So I needed to know early, knowing you lost money in a month after the fact, you can’t do much about it. Anyhow, that problem didn’t exist.

Rishi Srivastava (11:56)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Lasensky (11:59)
Now it’s a category called rev ops, which is exactly what it is. A few years back I saw, actually my daughter said, know, command post is a rev ops application. like, what’s that? And I look at it it says, well, it’s a platform that takes your business development, your estimating and your operations teams and puts them all on the same platform and automates the management reporting and allows each of those people to use their own tools to do their job. So you could use whatever tool you

Rishi Srivastava (12:11)
Thank

Peter Lasensky (12:26)
wanted to use to estimate whatever tool you wanted to use to do the project management, et cetera. But it brought it all together. And so that’s actually been helpful that now there’s a category for it. And we do have customers running it. And we’re using it internally as well for managing our pipeline and conversion and the operational phase and so forth.

So that’s, and then with Note Vault, right? We were the first mobile app for in construction that I’m aware of. at first, the idea that to use a mobile phone to do your daily report was a little odd, right? And so it took some, it was really the pain point of the customers where.

they had to get documentation and they would try anything. As a matter of fact, when we first launched it, we were only on AT &T. So I had customers sign up and they would change their phone service from Verizon, for whatever it was, over to AT &T, get new phones for everybody so that they could actually use our product. That was how much pain there was. And the other challenge with that is,

our first iteration of Notevault was using a dial up phone numbers. You would essentially store a phone number in your phone and when you wanted to make a note, you’d call that, go to that, in your phone book, go to that job name, instead of calling a person, you’re calling our computer and you would leave your message.

But just working with people to be able to store a contact in their phone was a huge problem because everybody had different phones. It was different on every single phone how to store a contact. And they didn’t know. So we tried to explain and say, well, listen, I don’t know what to tell you. Just go to the store where you bought your phone and have them tell you how to do it. And now, of course, you’ve got

Rishi Srivastava (14:06)
Wow.

Peter Lasensky (14:09)
two phones, right? You’ve got an Android and you’ve got, you know, and people know how to do it. Even people of all ages, right, actually can use their phone now, right, of every age. It’s not like it was. So it was a huge issue for us just getting people to be able to, you know, to train people because everything was so different. And today things are a lot easier and you have a different set of problems today, so.

Rishi Srivastava (14:29)
Yeah. The next section here Peter’s on the spark behind Notevault and early innovation. Notevault became famous for talk, add photo, get a report. What problem were you obsessed with solving when you created it?

Peter Lasensky (14:47)
Well, when I created it, idea was, because I had lived with people not doing daily reports. I had my construction company, Peterbilt, we would hold up people’s paychecks until Friday afternoon. They would come and get their paycheck, but they could only get it if they turned in their daily reports.

We used to joke that the daily reports were written in the same color ink and they were probably written all at 3.30 Friday afternoon in the parking lot before they came in, right? What happened Monday? I don’t think they did that. Nothing important happened Monday. What happened Tuesday? Nothing happened Tuesday. And we used to joke that a daily report would have a little smiley face on it because it might as well be because they’re putting little to nothing on there and it’s not helpful. And so we would hold up

Rishi Srivastava (15:15)
Yeah.

Peter Lasensky (15:34)
our paycheck. When we created the first version, the first iteration I call it, Command Post is our fourth iteration of the same concept. I created the first one because it was on the Nextel walkie talkie. It was lightning fast and easy. And that made all the difference. And if you think about it, when people…

Rishi Srivastava (15:34)
Mmm.

Peter Lasensky (15:53)
especially working in the field, if they’re foreman level or working superintendents or whatever, it’s super fun to build. Documenting is not fun. Staying after work and doing a report is not fun. And

You have to have something that makes them want to do it. Well, what would do that? Well, it’s easier. So if it’s easier for them to document something as it’s happening by just pushing a button on their phone.

they’ll do it and then you don’t have to beat them over the head and you don’t have to beg them or threaten them, right? Because it’s kind of hard. Getting good skilled people in construction is very hard if they’re good. And you don’t want to rock the boat and make them leave, right? So if you keep beating them over the head, that’s not good. So, but if you give them a tool that they want to use, that makes the difference in them actually doing it.

Rishi Srivastava (16:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

Peter Lasensky (16:39)
And yeah, and actually we’ve adopted that same push one button and make a note concept in Command Post. And just if I could, I don’t know if I should do a live demo, but if it’s okay, I’m going to do. I don’t need to share my screen, I’m just gonna show you my phone. This is my phone, right?

Rishi Srivastava (16:50)
You can share your screen. You can share your screen, I think. Okay.

Peter Lasensky (16:57)
I’m going to push one button on the side of the phone and it’s called the action button. It’s just above there’s on the iPhone there’s volume up and down or up and down and then this button above used to turn the ringer off. Now it’s a soft key that you can program. So we programmed it. So I’m going to take this button. I’m just going to push it.

It’s recording my voice now. I pushed it. opened my app. The app wasn’t open. It went right to the project I’m on. It’s allowing me to record the note because it knows where I am. And it went right into the project. And I’m recording my note. And then I put this here. I’ve got the text transcribed instantly. And I’m going to add photos. And press and hold for video here. And then.

Add that to the note. So you can see I’ve got media files already attached, my narrative, and I hit this and it’s done. It’s all uploading to the cloud and I made a note. And so I didn’t, right? It’s as good as the Nextel phone was. It’s one click basically to go right to the job to record a note.

Rishi Srivastava (17:49)
Wow.

Peter Lasensky (17:58)
And that’s important because when things are busy, especially if there’s an incident, People get nervous, I’m fussing around or find my job and that kind of thing. we focus on, this is a long answer to your question, but it comes down to ease of use, simplicity that you don’t need. You can just use it fast and easy. And you’re competing with remembering to do something later.

which is very frustrating for people too. I’ll just do that, but it’s so important I won’t forget to do it later, right? Well later, you’re driving home in your car and you think about, my God, I forgot to do that. And then you get home, you forget about it. And then on the way back to work, you remember, and you’re like, my God, when I get to work, I gotta document that. You get to work and you forget about it. And it never gets documented. And that’s a huge issue. And you avoid that by having something that’s super simple.

Rishi Srivastava (18:42)
I love it man.

Construction is an industry full of paperwork and friction. Why do you think voice became the breakthrough interface?

Peter Lasensky (18:51)
Well, that’s a great question. I’m going to say that voice has always been the way construction gets built, right? People, they call on the phone, they’re talking, they’re talking at the site, at the work face, they’re discussing things, they have meetings, talking about things. So voice is obviously a very natural thing to do. And when it comes to reporting,

The idea of using voice to make entries, again, that was something new, right? Siri didn’t exist when we started any of this, but they knew the pain of having to write something down, right? Having to do it on a piece of paper and all these other issues. So the voice was adopted quickly because you could speak much faster than you can type or write.

So you get a lot more information much quicker. So something that might take 30 minutes to do a report, typing or writing, or an hour to do a report is five minutes or 10 minutes now. So that made it really great. The other thing is by recording and retaining the audio file,

That’s a core function. by having that, that does two things. One is it makes it more likely the person will actually make that note. Because if they have to use Siri or type it, if they’re busy and there’s people waiting for them, they might not do it. They’ll do it later. So that’s the core factor there. also, proof, the other thing is when people type things down,

You can make an argument that they didn’t write that. They can say, well, I didn’t do that. Someone edited my work or something. Or someone else did it. Or they had my login. They had my password and they didn’t edit it. Well, when you have someone’s voice, a voice print is like a fingerprint. And I talk about going back a number of years to when Osama bin Laden was releasing audio recordings that he made.

Rishi Srivastava (20:29)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Lasensky (20:36)
They were saying that, you know, that’s him, right? Because a voice profile is unique to the person and they weren’t saying, they kind of had proof that it was that person. So by us retaining that audio file, we can prove that it’s that person. And one more point on that, this might go into some of your other questions, but we have what we call verified capture feature.

so that when voice is captured in our app or photos or videos are captured in our app, like I did for you, we’re custodian. CommandPost is a custodian of that data. can download the file, you can have access to it, you can share it, but you can’t touch the original file that came out of our app. You can’t modify it. So what that means is that in litigation,

down the road, no one can claim that that’s AI, that that video that suddenly appears out of nowhere, they’re gonna question it, right? This is, here’s a video of shows that plate was covered or wasn’t covered or with a trench or whatever it is. People can dispute that. even though most people are honest, people that when it comes to litigation and people trying to avoid paying, they’ll do anything to avoid paying.

So, and because you can’t, already you cannot believe photos and videos you see online, right? You saw the one with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting. Did you see that video on a rooftop? It was, it looks very real. It didn’t exist. They made it up. And you can’t put ChatGTP on the stand, right? You know, can’t chat. was, know. So it’s very important to have verified content, captured content.

Rishi Srivastava (21:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s really hard to trust now the information on the internet. You know, the text and the photos and the videos, so much is like AI made now.

Peter Lasensky (22:18)
You literally, it’s already a problem in that respect. And when it comes to litigation, it’s looming crisis in construction. Because most people.

document things after the fact, they take pictures with their own phone or some camera and then they upload them, the custody chain, the provenance of that file is broken because you had it in your possession, so you could have done whatever you wanted to it. And now you can do it on this phone, right? There’s someone not wearing a hard hat in the background, you can just tap them and it’s gone, right? Right? So it’s so easy to do that people will do that.

Rishi Srivastava (22:47)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, so easy.

Peter Lasensky (22:53)
And that’s an argument later.

Rishi Srivastava (22:54)
Yeah, makes sense. You hold 14 US patents. What’s one invention you are most proud of and what real job site pain did it come from?

Peter Lasensky (23:05)
That’s a great question. I’m going to go back to 2001, when I told you about my experience on the job and using the Nextel phone. We had to hire engineers to, actually one engineer to figure out how to connect the Nextel phone to my computer system. And we got the software development kit for Motorola. We downloaded it. And we actually got it to work. When a call came in, we could answer the call.

when someone was speaking, we connected the earpiece into the sound card on the computer so we could record the call. We put it into a database, and we were able to do it. The challenge happened that…

That was one phone, right? So we had one phone. So a person would make a call to that one phone. Well, people have more than one job, right? So how do you, you have to have a different phone. If they have five jobs, you have to have five phones that they can call. Well, and then the next problem is, well, it costs $40 a month to have for each phone, right? So if I allow them to have five jobs, that’s $200 a month.

Rishi Srivastava (23:52)
was in a while.

Peter Lasensky (24:04)
just my cost for each user, for each company, right? That was a huge problem. So we had to figure out a way to use one number to address many projects. And we did that through what we call compound indexing. We took the phone number of the caller and the phone number they were calling, and that string became the index for that project. So.

Rishi Srivastava (24:25)
Mmm.

Peter Lasensky (24:26)
So that allowed us to use one phone for as many projects as we wanted because if you were calling for project, it was maybe the airport expansion. If I was calling that same number, it went into the Denny’s Restaurant or whatever, the hospital project. And that patent…

Has been very important. It’s been utilized by many other companies since I haven’t really tried to monetize it I haven’t gone after this mainly because I love creating things. don’t know going and shaking people down for for License fees just didn’t just it wasn’t important to me But but as far as patents go that was really pivotal because that made the med made the whole thing work from a business model perspective

And by the way, those phones that we built, we built racks of them, they were in production use for 14 years after that original thing until that whole Nextel system went away.

Rishi Srivastava (25:19)
Mmm,

Peter Lasensky (25:21)
several countries as well. really it was kind of odd, but it worked every time. You push the button, you get that call, yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (25:27)
All right.

Very interesting invention. The next section here, is on command post and the philosophy of simplicity. You’ve said contractors shouldn’t need to be software engineers to run their business. Where do most systems fail contractors today?

Peter Lasensky (25:47)
Well, that brings up another good point. I’ll tell you that, for example, let’s take the typical contractor today. They buy Procore or some other system.

But all their jobs aren’t in Procore, right? They have some jobs that don’t require project management, right? But they have to enter them into Procore anyhow. Or their customer wants them to use something else. So now they have to put the information in both places. Procore, there isn’t any project management system that can be comprehensive, meaning have every single project, whether it’s you’re going to manage it in spreadsheets, or Procore, or ACC, or Kahua, or PMWeb, or whatever.

system has to be used for that particular project. And so that’s the one problem. And then the other problem is people have all these point solutions, which are great apps, but they’re all disconnected, right? And then you have to re-provision the project, and you have to re-provision the users. And the other thing is that…

people what they call the silos of data right problem. And then you have the fact that because you can have all these point solutions when you have litigation and there’s discovery, where is the information, right? Okay, well, what project matter? I think we use Procore on that job or, know, but I can’t find it there or where was it or they archive that project and now I can’t find it or, and I know we have this information. I don’t know whether it’s in,

you know, what app I used, what did I use for that, right? And now there’s 10 apps, average on the average job has 10 different apps. And so that’s another looming problem, right? It’s been a problem, but it’s now a much bigger problem. 10 years from now, you’ll have no idea, not only what app was used,

But whose login, right? You can’t just say, I know it was this, but you have to have, who had the login and password for it, right? It is a disaster, looming disaster coming. So this fragment of information is a massive issue, not to mention the fact that people have to reenter information over and over again, which we know based on a well-known report that

It’s about $20 billion in today’s dollars wasted every year by people entering the same information. And the other problem is they enter it differently. They don’t enter, you’re typing a job name. So estimating, they put a job name in. business development puts a job name. When they’re to guess estimating, they sometimes will put a prefix on it or a post-fix. Or they’ll just shorten the name a little bit.

And then, but to an accounting department, they don’t know if it’s the same job or not, right? So you could only rely on the job number, but those numbers are also different across all the suppliers. Every single person in the supply chain has a different number for the same job. The building department, the bank, the owner, the general contractor, all the subcontractors, all the suppliers have a different number for the same job. It’s a disaster, and one of our visions here is to bring it all together with what we call the hub.

We built a hub, we’re not marketing it right now. Not putting it out, but it’s a hub that has a many to one connection. And people have been.

doing peer-to-peer connections, that’s how the integrations are typically done. And if you have two software systems, it’s perfect. One talks to the other, everything’s fine. As soon as you add a third, now, which you have to pick one of those that’s gonna be the one that has it, and then as you get to nine apps on a job, there’s 81 different connections now that you’d have to make to actually be able to have all of them talk to each other. And with the Hub and Spoke it’s nine connections. Each one only connects to the Hub.

any other software, each one connects to the hub, the hub takes that information and reads and writes and updates the other system. That’s the solution for this problem.

Rishi Srivastava (29:29)
Actually, this is such a great point, Hub and Spoke. I’ve been thinking about how we can make systems talk. But yeah, Hub and Spoke seems like the way to do it, you know?

Peter Lasensky (29:40)
Yeah, there’s, you know, we’ve, you know, it’s a big job. We’ve focused on contacts, companies, and projects. And when I say that, you have contacts, affiliations to companies, the companies that people work for, and then, know, projects. So you’re entering the job name, and then you got the job address, and all this information is retyped and it’s wrong. And the other thing is that if,

People have a phone number, right, for someone, and that phone number gets changed and somebody knows it, right? let’s say in the accounting department, they’re calling a company, they changed their phone number. Now it’s this person I need to contact, I’m gonna call his mobile phone instead of his desk phone now, because they got rid of their desk phones, for example. So the accounting team takes that number, they update the contact. But no one in operations has that update.

Right? People are still going to call the old number and they might not know they have the old number until they need them. They got to get a hold of somebody and they call and they can’t get them. The numbers, they don’t know what to do. And now with a hub and spoke, the accounting department makes that phone number change and then every other system gets updated instantly through the hub. Right? So those are the problems are not only avoiding reentry, but making sure everybody has the most current.

Rishi Srivastava (30:35)
Mmm.

Wow.

Command Post notes claims to capture 9x more content without slowing crews down. What’s the secret to making crews actually want to use it?

Peter Lasensky (31:00)
Well, we talked about the simplicity and we talked about the voice, but just to reiterate that, when it comes to documentation, the quantity is important, but also when it’s taken.

If you write down, someone goes at the end of the day and sits down and says, okay, what happened, what I had for lunch today, I can’t remember what I had for lunch today. What happened to the meeting, the details of that event that occurred this morning at 10 a.m.? They’ll just type what their best recollection is. And in many jurisdictions, it’s inadmissible as evidence because it’s a synopsis, it’s considered hearsay because it wasn’t documented at the time of the event.

Rishi Srivastava (31:35)
Hmm.

Peter Lasensky (31:37)
That’s a huge problem if there’s a lot of money involved, number one, which when you look at delay claims, liquidated damages can vary 10,000 a day, 100,000 a day, to a million a day on one of our jobs that I know of. The one that just got bombed in Abu Dhabi, was an aluminum smelting plant. was a million dollars a day for liquidated damages.

Rishi Srivastava (32:02)
Mmm.

Peter Lasensky (32:02)
If you’re gonna end projects aren’t one day late, right? They’re 30 60 90 180 days late 300 days late So the amount of money is immense when it when you’re dealing with that much money You need contemporaneous documentation Taken so you have you can recreate the day. Okay. Why is that annex? Why should that day you get paid general conditions? And your and profit

instead of paying me damages, right? Why? So if you say, well, at 8.35 in the morning this happened, at 9.38 in the morning this happened, at 10 o’clock this, then people can say, okay, now I understand. You get paid today on that for the general conditions. That was not your fault. Without that, you’re subject to the whims and the desires of the judge. Did the judge have a good day that day? Maybe he had a, you know.

fight with his wife in the morning, right? There’s all the factors. And the only way you get rid of that is by documenting events as they occur. That’s critical. In terms of the amount of content, you you saw me add two photos and a video in seconds. You you didn’t see what I touched, you the videos and the photos and that note. That causes people to make, put more documentation in.

Rishi Srivastava (32:56)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lasensky (33:18)
because it’s easy and that’s where that nine times content comes from. Another factor is when people are, let’s say they even do this, at the end of the day they’re supposed to go write things down. Well, I’ve been working all day, I got to the job at 6 a.m., I’m tired, right?

I, you know, I need, I, you’re, you know, the, at that point, that daily report standing between that person and a beer or playing frisbee with their dog or hanging out with their friends, they don’t want to do a report, right? And so they say, well, I’ll do it in the morning. Well, they slept on it. Now that, now that documentation, even if they do it is, is hearsay, it’s not valid, effective documentation, but

Rishi Srivastava (33:47)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Lasensky (33:58)
they try to do it the next day. Again, what the next morning, what they should be worrying about is that day, right? What problems can I head off today? I better call that guy. I know he told me he’s gonna be here today, but I’m just gonna call him and make sure he’s on his way, right?

There’s so much to do. So when they get in the morning, that would be planning that day. So when they document events as they occur, they don’t have to stay after work to do a report. So they get a better report, and they get a break. They get to go play Frisbee, have a beer.

Rishi Srivastava (34:26)
important to have, play a Frisbee and have a beer after work.

Peter Lasensky (34:31)
Right. And a lot of these guys don’t get paid for the time, right? They’re on salary. Who cares? Well, they care. They’re working and paid on salary for eight hours, and they just work 10 hours, and now they got to stay and do a report. You’re not going to get it. You’re not going to get your report.

Rishi Srivastava (34:32)
See.

Mm-hmm.

You’ve built around simplicity as a core principle. How do you design software for the job site without over complicating it?

Peter Lasensky (34:58)
That is so hard. I have wondered why more people don’t pay attention to that. And if it’s easy, people will do it. And look at, I’ll just make an example. Remember MySpace, right? And then they got some adoption, excitement, hype, and then all of Facebook came out and kicked their butt.

Well, Facebook had a much more refined user experience. And that makes the difference. It’s very subtle, but it’s very hard to make something easy. It really is. The concept is easy, but making it actually easy in the palm, right? can think it’s easy here, it might not be easy here.

And the key is there’s a tendency to things. One is, oh, we’ll just add one more thing and then add one more thing. Also, now it’s complicated. So we’re true to the simplicity objective. And our bar for that is it has to be easier than the alternatives, which is to remember to do it later or to write it down on a piece of drywall or cardboard.

You know, that’s, and people wearing gloves, know, they’re pouring concrete, right? And that’s been one of the things we’ve been very successful with is getting down from just the project managers and superintendents actually down to the foreman level so that they can document proof of work and problems they incur themselves. That’s huge. So, yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (36:18)
Hmm.

Peter Lasensky (36:23)
You can’t underestimate how important simplicity is.

And another factor, if you think, back to Facebook, I don’t think they’ve trained anybody how to use Facebook. That’s not a thing, You know what saying? I’m gonna get trained on how to use Facebook. Now, now it’s gotten so complicated, maybe you need to. But billions of people use something without training any of them. That’s hard, right? And you wonder, how can an app and a website be worth, you know…

trillion dollars or whatever it’s worth. Well, they put a ton of money into understanding how people think, the ergonomics and the…

We’ve done the same thing. We’re narrow-focused and we’re able to work with people. But it’s really that simplicity and that ability to – like our latest iteration, Command Post Notes, is something that is simple, but we’ve also been able to put advanced features in it, such as traffic-tracking work areas, right, and things like that. So it’s – we’ve done a good job, I believe, at

customers think that as well, that we’ve been able to keep it simple.

Rishi Srivastava (37:24)
You know, Einstein said simplicity is the greatest sophistication.

Anyways, the next section here is on risk, documentation, and getting paid. Daily reports are often treated as admin work, but you argue they protect contractors from the courtroom. Can you tell a story where documentation saved a project?

Peter Lasensky (37:50)
Yeah, so let’s just talk about daily reports a bit first, that when there’s a litigation, okay, so I’m going to come back to two-part story. When litigation is occurring, it usually happens because people don’t trust each other, right, and they don’t believe each other, and the last resort thing, so they litigate.

and then you bring in experts, the first go-to document is a daily report, right? Because these are the official record of events and they’re mandated by law in some areas that they have to be done. So the experts will go to the daily reports and sometimes the contractor will bring in a box of paper, right? Because sometimes they just hand write them, they stick them in a binder, right? And then the litigation occurs, they get a banker’s box, they fill it with all the binders and the…

The lawyers have to root through these looking for nuggets that they can hang their hat on, right? And when they have an issue, they all want to do some research on this particular issue. There’s no way to automatically scan all those electronically. to literally read them again to get it.

So the daily reports are historically and today the go-to document.

the what was it remind me again what is

Rishi Srivastava (38:59)
Can you tell a story where documentation saved the project?

Peter Lasensky (39:02)
I have lots of ideas on there and since that time when I had that day in court, you know, and where the whole idea came up, once we released our first app and ever since, I’ve had story after story from customers that resolve claims from $50,000 to $20 million. And I’ll just give you a few examples. One of my own examples at my own company was, you know, when you have equipment on a job site,

the contractor owns it until it’s installed, and then it becomes the owner owns it. Even if they didn’t pay for it yet, technically they own it. If you bolt an air conditioning unit down on a project, that’s the owners. They don’t pay you. You can’t go on and it and take it. That’s theft, right? That distinction, if it’s not installed, this is how you determine who owns it, who’s responsible for it. So we had a project where there was a storm.

And the air conditioner was knocked off the roof and destroyed. And so the question came up, was it installed or not? Right? So if it’s not installed, that’s the contractor’s problem. If it was installed, it’s the building owner’s problem. And we were able to demonstrate that it was installed, and in fact, it wasn’t the contractor’s problem, because they took photos of it. Right? They had the documentation there.

I’ll give you another example, a project by major company. This is a project up north in Northern California, San Francisco area. And there was a TI, and the painter comes to the superintendent, he says, here I have a change order for touch-up paint. It’s $50,000. Or $30,000, I can’t remember the exact number.

The superintendent says, how could Touch-Up paint the $30,000? He says, well, know, a semi-gloss, I had to paint the entire wall. I couldn’t just touch it up. wouldn’t be acceptable. So the superintendent called a meeting with his, you know, mechanical, electro, plumbing, fire suppression guys, sat them down in the room.

said, OK, I got a $30,000 touch-up bill. All these guys, you have to pay one year portion of this. And my guys never do anything to the walls. We train them, and dah, dah, dah. And then the superintendent brought out the reports. This was a note fault in the day.

off the reports and says are these your air handlers leaning against the wall and the guy’s like yeah or air vents and are this your ladder against the wall the other guy yeah that is and these are light fixtures against the wall right and the guy’s like yeah and so they all agreed to pay their share in one meeting

The meeting I said to the superintendent, said, how long was the meeting? He says it was like five minutes, right? So when you have the documentation and people see it, it’s like, done. This could go on and spiral out of control. So most of our customers are able to resolve these disputes without litigating at all because they have the docu-

Rishi Srivastava (41:48)
Mmm.

Peter Lasensky (41:49)
came from the very first project that I did in 2001 with Turner on the San Diego Convention Center. They had three to five tight-written pages, blow by blow, that they were able to resolve a major claim there. Another example was a customer that was working on a major project, and the change order was $20 million. And the owner didn’t want to pay it, of course. And he said, well, you.

Rishi Srivastava (42:09)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Lasensky (42:15)
you know, we had people there, we were there to answer your questions, you shouldn’t have any problem at all. says, here’s photos of the meeting room with, your guys weren’t there. And here’s the week after that, they weren’t there, right? And because they documented the attendees in the room and so forth, they paid it. The owner actually said, paid the $20 million. So these are, these are.

Rishi Srivastava (42:34)
So.

Peter Lasensky (42:38)
examples and there’s many, many, examples. I’ll just give you one more example because do we have time for one more? Oh, just a little one. There’s a contractor, major drilling contractor for vertical drilling. They went in and drilled a sizable hole down to a certain depth. They demobilize. The general contractor comes in. It does work. And then they realize that the hole’s two feet too short. Right.

Rishi Srivastava (42:45)
Yeah, yeah, continue. Yeah.

Mmm.

Peter Lasensky (43:06)
They needed them to come back in and drill another two feet. cost to come back in and drill two more feet was $200,000.

Who’s paying that? The contractor doesn’t want to have to pay for that. The subcontract drilling guy doesn’t want to pay. The general contractor doesn’t want pay. Nobody wants to pay that, right? But if you’re the drilling contractor, that’s the worst, because you’re the one that has to actually do that work. They looked up the reports, and they found out. And this is the example of having a lot more photos. This is how you benefit.

They looked at everything and then they found one photo that actually had a picture of the stake with the mark on it of how deep to drill. And there was an error, a two foot error on it. Guess what? Instead of that contractor having to pay $200,000, he got paid $200,000 to go back and drill it. That’s a $400,000 discrepancy on one mark on one stake on one job, right?

These things go on and on and on and of course you can have a lot of problems on jobs. These are just examples of specific ones. the bottom line is if you have nine times the content in your reports and if your notes are taken and documented as things happen, you’re going to likely prevail, avoid litigation, resolve these in one meeting in many cases, and avoid litigation. And if it does litigate, you win.

Rishi Srivastava (44:23)
Most of the time,

exactly, most of the time if the evidence is clear, you know, if it’s my fault and you show me the evidence, why would I go to the court to figure that out? You know?

Peter Lasensky (44:32)
Well, that’s right.

that’s problem is people go to court because it’s not clear. If everything was clear, people that don’t have the money or they’re thieves, they’re going to lie. But most people, at least in the larger or the non-residential stuff, are being straightforward. they remember things differently. It was snowing that day. No, was sunny that day. It’s like, what the hell?

Rishi Srivastava (44:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nah.

Yeah, exactly.

mean, memories are, you know, not reliable.

Peter Lasensky (45:02)
No, and even yesterday,

right? You and I could talk about a conversation we had yesterday and come up with completely different understandings. And that brings up another point in our app is that we do daily reports, but we also have a collaboration aspect. We call it a smart collaboration. So if I make a post, a note about whatever, and then you’re in there, because our app looks like Instagram for construction, right? I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I’m going to just show you real

You know, it looks just like Instagram, right? You could, like that. So when someone makes it just like Instagram, right? People can make a post and you can make comments on it.

Rishi Srivastava (45:34)
Yeah, yeah, I can see it,

Peter Lasensky (45:40)
Hey, that’s really cool or add more photos of this or take videos of that other thing or call whatever they want. So that engages more people into that. And that’s great because what that does is it avoids people sending text messages. I saw your email. They send them a text to ask them the question. Now that question is gone and the response is gone too. So here it’s all a conversation string related to a specific note, just like an Instagram.

Rishi Srivastava (45:41)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Peter Lasensky (46:06)
about things.

Rishi Srivastava (46:07)
command post is about staying ahead of problems and protecting time and materials. How does better field reporting directly impact cash flow?

Peter Lasensky (46:16)
Well, this is a great example, too. So when you have, for example, T&M tickets, where they come up. Here’s a potential change order, number one. It’s time and material. Just go ahead and do that work, like breaking rock. You’re digging, trenching. You hit rock. You have to bring in special equipment to remove the rock. there it goes. And there’s all this time, and the owner’s like, no, that equipment wasn’t used that long.

Why do have to pay for that machine to be there when it wasn’t being used and that kind of stuff? so having documenting all these things as they happen gives you, that conversation is a short conversation. Here it is, here’s our data, you owe and they’ll pay. And that obviously affects cashflow because if you have to litigate, like in my case, I wound up not getting paid at all, but it can take years to get that money.

And you can see every day if you look at the construction stuff publications, these are major delays and problems for major companies and tens of hundreds of millions of dollars being disputed. And that’s a huge problem from a cash flow perspective. It also is a because it brings all the senior management. They’re the ones that have to get involved to clean up the mess.

Rishi Srivastava (47:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. The next section is on the future. Voice, AI, and the next job site interface. You’ve lived through multiple waves of construction technology. What’s different about the AI plus voice wave we are entering now?

Peter Lasensky (47:39)
Well, we’re running into a disaster on projects because AI is, again, is just a tool. It’s one tool out of many tools. And people are, which is kind of normal when new tools come out, they can do everything, right? And then it’s like, well, like people are creating a whole lawsuit in there and submitting it to the court. And then they’re citing case study that doesn’t even exist. It fabricated it, right? And you’re going to use AI to write, create reports?

Rishi Srivastava (48:02)
Yeah.

Peter Lasensky (48:05)
Well, you can’t put AI on the stand, right? You can’t put in the courtroom, can’t put ChatGPT on the stand and ask ChatGPT to explain why it wrote it that way, right?

Rishi Srivastava (48:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Peter Lasensky (48:17)
That’s a huge problem coming up. So we have to remember that the AI is a tool only. And so in our case, have two parts. We consider our app an anti-AI app because you can capture content, voice, photos and video in our app and we provide a capture certification that says it’s not AI. Now AI is great for after the fact. So for instance, if people want to speak Spanish in their phone, we use AI to translate it

into English. That’s a great application for AI. We use AI to look at the content that’s being written and look for people that might have omitted the last names of personnel or company names and so forth. So we’re using AI, what we call post capture, right? The capture cannot be AI at all.

Rishi Srivastava (49:00)
I’m here.

Peter Lasensky (49:03)
but to clean it up and help nudge people to remember to put people’s last names in, or to remember to not put opinions in. That kind of thing is what we’re using AI for, and I think that’s a very valuable use for that tool.

Rishi Srivastava (49:16)
after the fact conversion of formats. What do you think the next generation of construction leaders will expect from software that past generations never demanded?

Peter Lasensky (49:28)
I think this disconnected silos thing is a massive problem. Like I said, it’s gone from three software apps to the average job has nine, but the company may use 100, right? Because they allow people to pick the tools they want to use for that job. Nothing brings these together. Even companies that buy products, they don’t connect them together, right? You’ve got, you know.

Rishi Srivastava (49:44)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Lasensky (49:49)
large software companies, global software companies that buy a bunch, they have a bunch of left hands and right hands, and they can’t even get them to work together. So this is a real problem that we are tackling and we’ll be focused on that.

right? They’re still trying to figure out time cards right now, yet alone.

Rishi Srivastava (50:04)
Last session is closing reflection. If you could give one piece of advice to a contractor today, drowning in chaos, what’s the first system or habit they should put in place tomorrow morning? And this is the last question as well, Peter.

Peter Lasensky (50:23)
Well, I’ll tell you that when you look at some of the technology surveys done by JB Knowledge, for example, every year, 68 % of people were looking for daily reports. That’s something that they already know that they need and they want. And they’re generally not happy with the quality of the content they’re getting from their team.

If you want to, you the chaos has to be done little by little, the number one thing they need is great field documentation of the progress and problems on that job, on all their jobs. And that will…

help them resolve claims which because they in themselves these claims and litigation are a huge burden and take mind share of it’s very painful to put discovery materials together scrape you know walk around asking people what they remember about this and that it’s it’s a it’s a disaster and

That would be my recommendation, and not just because I have a daily report app, but it’s because this is the simplest way to get rid of probably the majority of their chaos right there. And then, of course, good planning and resource allocation and this other stuff is important as well.

Rishi Srivastava (51:27)
Yeah. Peter, this conversation was so insightful. Thank you so much for giving us your time.

Peter Lasensky (51:34)
Thank you for your time and thank you for the compliment and hopefully it helps somebody along the way here.