Connect and Construct Summit General Session

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JIM LYNCH: All right, good morning.

SARAH HODGES: Good morning.

JIM LYNCH: Good morning, and welcome to Autodesk University. We are thrilled to be here. We're thrilled to have all of you here. I think this is going to be a great session today, a great day of Connect & Construct, and a fantastic week of big news from Autodesk.

SARAH HODGES: Welcome, everybody. Before we get started, I just wanted to make one observation. So in construction, we look closely at who is coming to AU, and a little bit of healthy competition between the internal groups. But I have to share with all of you that this year, we have over 1,600 construction customers here with us at Autodesk University.

JIM LYNCH: Yeah.

SARAH HODGES: So welcome.

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JIM LYNCH: OK, so let's talk about the agenda to get things started, talk about what today looks like. So, of course, you're all in the general session. So you made it to this point, which is fantastic. We have a great lineup of speakers this morning. I think you're going to be really compelled and enjoy what they have to tell us.

This session this morning ends at 10:30. Then, our classes begin at 11:00 AM up on the fourth floor. Now, we noticed some of you actually didn't sign up for classes. So we really encourage you to look in your agenda, because we have the list of classes there, and just show up. You don't have to sign up. Just pick the classes you want to attend, show up, and take it all in.

I also want to tell you about the Co:Construct Zone. This is a new area that we're setting up on the fourth floor. It's open from 11:00 to 4:00 today, and really encourage you to go there. The BIM 360 product team will be manning the booth, manning Connect and the [? Co:Construct ?] Zone. You'll be able to go there, ask questions, get answers, give your input. We really want to hear your input about BIM 360. And of course, you'll get insight into what our plans are, what's coming next.

Then, tonight, we have a private event at the Tao Nightclub, which is fantastic. If you haven't been, I really encourage you to join us there tonight. It'll be a load of fun, so a lot of great stuff going on today. Before we introduce the first speaker, however, Sarah and I have a few announcements that we'd like to share.

First of all, as you know, we've continued to increase our investment in construction software over the past couple of decades. We think we've produced a compelling portfolio of solutions that really span the entire workflow of a construction project, really, from design through to operations. And while we think this is impressive, we know we haven't done enough in terms of digitizing the project.

So we're really excited about where we are taking BIM 360 as we move forward here. Now, we heard all of you loud and clear that having a single unified platform for AEC projects removes causes of uncertainty, things like data loss, information silos, and disconnected teams. We all know that these things lead to cost overruns, delays, and frustrations for project stakeholders.

So today, we're really pleased to announce the release of a preview of the next generation BIM 360 platform, connecting all of the applications, all the processes. And it's built on the Forge platform. So you're going to see docs. You're going to see a next-generation model coordination, next-generation project management software. So we're really excited. That's one reason to definitely go to the Co-Connect Zone, to learn more about what we're doing there. We'd love your input. And you're going to hear a lot more this week about the next-generation BIM 360 platform.

SARAH HODGES: All right. Thanks, Jim. So if that wasn't enough-- so the announcement of the next-generation BIM 360 platform, which we're inviting all of you to participate in as part of a public preview-- we also recognize that there's needs for you to share data across your project, and you work with a lot of applications. So I'm delighted to announce the arrival of the Connect & Construct Exchange.

We have over 50 partners already integrated through this program. And we're going to really help push forward the construction industry. Through Connect & Construct Exchange, we'll be looking at ways to transform some of your construction workflows, solving collaboration issues, operational challenges across pre-construction and site execution.

Through this program, we believe that construction customers like yourselves can centralize your pre-construction and construction management activities, you'll be able to eliminate the data silos that exist using point solutions, and you'll have access to a number of innovative solutions that support your full construction lifecycle. All right, so two big, big announcements there. And you'll start to hear more from us this week on them.

Now, all of our partners, as part of Connect & Construct Exchange, share the same vision as us, really around improving construction through the use of technology. But I want to take a moment and show you examples from two of our partners integrated with us through Connect & Construct Exchange. One is Smartvid.io, and the second one is Assemble Systems. And what you're going to see now are a few examples of how Assemble Systems and Smartvid.io are already transforming the way you and some of your clients work in construction.

So advances in machine learning and AI, like computer vision, they're changing the way the auto industry operates, like things like Mercedes and Tesla. They're using this to train algorithms to identify people and cars so that their autonomous cars can avoid accidents. Well, the Smartvid.io system uses the same technology to capture photos on construction sites.

It applies tags to objects it recognizes, such as workers or safety vests or hardhats. Construction managers can quickly search all of the photos, identifying and highlighting occurrences so they can monitor projects, take proactive steps to avoid potential problems even before they happen. And it also works on videos. You can see here a safety director walks out onto the job site. The system is analyzing their video in real time, it's locating all of the workers on the construction site, and it's looking for people that might not be wearing their PPE.

In this example, you see it spotted immediately someone that's not wearing a hard hat. It fell off. Automatically, it's analyzing all of this information, the massive amounts of photos and videos that are captured, which normally would take you hours to sift through and can't always be done just by humans. Smartvid.io is taking on this challenge. They're looking to help construction customers be more productive, help them have safer sites. It's a top priority for them.

The second example is Assemble Systems. Now, Assemble Systems-- here we go. Assemble Systems is unlocking more of the power of [? BIM. ?] It's extracting data and assembling it in a way that can be used to support pre-construction workflows. In this example that you see here, BIM 360 can automatically import information from Assemble in just a few clicks. Then, almost immediately, that data is ready and available for analysis.

What you're seeing here is a filtering by material. We can then look at how many cubic yards of concrete, as an example, are needed for each floor. We can take that data and integrate it immediately into our estimating workflow during pre-construction. We can also extend the model data directly into other workflows, like the submittal process, by attaching submittal packages, again, all within the BIM 360 Docs library. And we can use that information directly onto objects with just a few clicks.

Now, this kind of seamless integration not only makes it easier for project teams to use but avoids common problems of duplicating data across the systems. Everyone remains on the same page. So that's just a glimpse. And I encourage you all to please visit the exhibit hall area at AU this week, where many of these partners are here and ready to engage with you.

All right, so one of our primary reasons for making the announcements that we have today as well as the launch of our Connect & Construct Exchange is to help solve the workflow challenges that customers like yourselves are facing. But we recognize there's still a great deal of work left for us to do. And as the industry continues to evolve, it remains plagued by low margin-- excuse me, low margin and high risk. So one of the things that we are continuing to do is really invest in how the future of construction is being done and the role that technology can play. So here to talk about our investment in construction is Scott Herren, our senior vice president and CFO of Autodesk.

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SCOTT HERREN: Thank you. Thanks, Sarah, Jim. All right. So good morning. I've got a nice, full room. Thank you for that. You never know when you say good morning if you're going to just be, like, crickets out there or if someone's going to respond. So thank you. So I'm Scott Herren. I'm the CFO of Autodesk. And I do want to spend a minute talking about our commitment to the construction business and why that's important to us as a business and why it's important to me as the CFO of Autodesk.

You probably know, over the last several years, that Architecture, Engineering, and Construction, AEC, has been the biggest driver of our business. It's been the biggest revenue producer inside Autodesk. But if you peel that back, it's largely in the AE part of it and really hasn't been much in the C.

And what you've seen over the last couple of years is you've seen us invest much more heavily in the construction space. And you've seen the-- Jim just showed the BIM diagram with the BIM products we brought out-- result of some of that investment. I would tell you we're pivoting our investment much more heavily into construction going forward. And I'll talk about why.

I have to say before we go too far, though-- and Jim knows this. He's heard me tell the story. I do feel a connection to the people in the room, not just because you're customers, and I'm the finance guy. But I grew up as the son of a general contractor and spent-- commercial GC-- spent several summers in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is super hot in the summer, working on job sites, so one year in high school and three years when I was at college. And it got me back in school, by the way, every fall, doing that.

But it was a great experience. And through that, I worked with some terrific people on the job sites. So you can imagine, as a teen growing up, pretty impressionable at that point. I worked with some great people who had a significant impact on me-- in a good way, by the way-- had a significant impact on me and my own development.

But I learned a couple things through that process, through being on the job site, during the day, and then coming home in the evening and talking to my dad. And for a long time, actually, I thought I was going to be one of you. I thought I'd be sitting in that chair, being in the construction business, listening to someone up on stage talk about the construction industry.

Went off to school to become an engineer, decided when I got there to be an industrial engineer instead of a civil engineer, and somehow that led to, 30 years later-- I picked up a business degree in the interim and being a finance guy. I was really interested in the construction business, partly because I worked in it, and I had a sense of the people that are in the construction business, and partly because I think every kid at that age wants to do what their dad's doing, right? I wanted to be like my dad, in some ways.

Interestingly, by the way, when you were just showing the Assemble video, I saw the name of the general contracting firm my dad was a part of flash up in there. That's the first time I'd seen that. So great experience, but here's what I learned.

First of all, it's hard. The execution phase, working in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 7:30 in the morning, you're soaked with sweat. You're soaked with sweat till the end of the day. It's a hard business. Job sites are complex. There's a lot going on. There's a lot to coordinate. These are super smart people at every level trying to work their way through the execution phase.

And the second is, from talking to my dad at night about the business side of it itself, it's a tough business, right? It's a business that runs on really thin margins. I think you all know that. If you don't have the low bid, then a lot of times you don't get the job. And so that drives the margins down. And at the same time, you're dealing with a lot of risk.

Fortunately, I didn't work on that job site, or this job site, because that looks incredibly chaotic. But you can imagine the complexity that has to be managed on that job site, and it has to be managed with razor-thin margins. So that's the opportunity we see. As we look ahead at where the construction business is headed and specifically what Autodesk desk can do in the construction field, what I learned, both working on job sites and talking to my father, has shaped my thinking about the opportunity there.

And it's an opportunity to move for all of us, frankly, to move from what Sarah said in the opening, from low margins and pretty high risk to-- I won't say high margins-- higher margins and lower risk. I don't think technology itself is going to turn construction into a high-margin business, but better margins and lower risk. And I think that's the opportunity for all of us as we look ahead.

And that's exactly what the BIM product line is focused on, right? That's why we've built out the things that we've built out on BIM 360. And it's the bigger opportunity we see ahead. So you've seen us increase our investment over the last couple years. You can expect to see that investment increase pretty significantly again. We'll pivot more of our internal investment into the construction phase because it's a huge opportunity.

But we know it's not just an opportunity for us. In other words, we know we can't solve every problem that you've got through both the planning and the execution phase. We're pretty good on the upstream end in architecture and engineering. There's a lot to do in both the planning and the execution phase. And that's the opportunity to bring in the partners that Sarah just talked about. It's an ecosystem that we work with actively.

Frankly, through the Forge platform, it enables the seamless connection and the seamless handoffs between Autodesk products, by the way, also, but Autodesk to partners and vice versa, back and forth. So you'll hear more about Forge as the day goes on. You'll hear more about Forge over the next couple of days in some of the plenary sessions.

So Forge becomes a foundational piece for us. And it also helps play to what I think are one of the competitive advantages that we have over everyone else, which is, more and more, the merger, the confluence of both the construction-execution phase and our manufacturing business. And I think we're one of the few companies that has a lot of strength in both areas. So that's the opportunity.

Here's why it's important. By 2050-- and who knows? That's always made me smile. But let's assume they're directionally correct. By 2050, the estimate is there will be double the number of people living in urban areas that are living there today. And you can go, yeah, yeah, that's fine, 5 billion people in urban areas.

Think of it this way. It's taken us 2,000-- several thousand years, I guess more than 2,000 years, to build the cities, the urban centers for the populations they have today with the infrastructure and the buildings that are there. We're going to double that again in a little more than 30 years, all right? That's the challenge. That's an enormous challenge. And frankly, that challenge is going to be met by you, by the people in this room.

And so as you think about what that takes to not only build out the buildings but to do it in a sustainable way-- because the sustainability is not going to be a feel-good thing. It's not going to be optional. We won't be able to meet the infrastructure needs of a doubling of the urban cities without doing it in a sustainable way. So building that out, doubling the capacity that we have in urban areas is a gigantic challenge and a great opportunity, frankly, for everyone in the room.

But the second main point-- and Dominic will peel these back a little bit more after me. The second big point is you have to do it profitably. If you can't make a profitable business out of this-- and like I said, it's a tough business. It's a complicated business. If you can't do it profitably, it's not going to happen. And so I think that's the opportunity that we see.

We think technology can help. We think the technology that are required to do that is either available or can be made available very quickly. We think this industry is on the cusp of adopting that technology much more robustly than it's been done in the past. And I think everyone in here will be a part of that.

That's one of the things that I think drives the statistic that Sarah just gave of 1,600 construction services people at the event. It's more, interestingly, than the number of people we have on the architecture side. If you had said this two years ago, I think people would have thought you were crazy, right? That's what's driving it. We're on the cusp of adoption. And we think that's a great opportunity for Autodesk, and it's a great opportunity for you.

So we are all in on construction. You heard Andrew Anagnost, our CEO. If you listened to our last earnings call, you heard him say this exact phrase. We're all in. We are pivoting investment internally to invest more heavily in this space. And that's the opportunity for all of us to go off and drive that in a profitable way.

So I want to thank you for being here. I want to thank everyone for getting into this room by 8:00 AM in Las Vegas, which I don't think has ever happened, that you collected a crowd this big at that early in the morning. And with that, I'll hand it back off to Sarah.

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SARAH HODGES: Thank you. Thank you, Scott. So Scott outlined a little bit about his personal history, which I think is really exciting and good for you to hear, too. And he also talked a little bit about some of the challenges the industry is facing. So our next speaker is Dominic Thasarathar. He's from our Thought Leadership and Strategy team here at Autodesk.

He has a steep construction background, holding many senior positions at a number of firms, including he was a former CIO at CH2M Hill where he worked on the Olympics Project in London. He's also worked at Bechtel and [INAUDIBLE] just to name a few. And he's now going to ping for you the vision that we have around how Autodesk tries to solve some of these challenges that we've outlined in the industry for you. So please join me in welcoming Dominic to the stage.

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DOMINIC THASARATHAR: So good morning, and thank you for taking the time to join us for what I hope, what I know will be an insightful and interesting day. So I have 15 short minutes to talk to you about the future of the construction industry. So I'll perhaps start with a question that I pose to your peers as I bump around the world. Why is it important to think about the future of your industry?

And the classic response I get back is, because our industry is important. And it's pretty hard to argue with these kinds of numbers, 10% to 12% of global GDP. Your industry employs around 12% to 15% of the world's workforce and is an incredible stimulant for economic activity. Every $1 spent with you delivers $3.21 of GDP growth here in North America, with similar numbers around the world. So your industry is important.

But it's important for another reason as well, because your industry is the progenitor to every other industry. Without the good work that all of you in this room do, there would be no homes for us to live in. There would be no offices for us to work in. There would be no transportation networks to get us from A to B. There would be no industrial facilities to power our economies. And there would be no utility networks to light and heat our built environment.

And that role that you have in underwriting so much human endeavor is only going to get more important over the coming years. If we look out over the next 20 to 30 years, I could argue everything we need to know about the future of your industry is in these two charts. Population growth, urbanization, economic expansion, are underwriting an insatiable demand for more, more buildings, more infrastructure.

By 2020, China will have had to install 31,000 miles of high-speed rail network. By 2030, India needs to build enough homes to house an additional 165 million new urban dwellers. By 2035, the world needs an additional 4,400 gigawatts of power-generating capacity to meet growing demand for electricity. Collectively, that is pushing up global output for construction to around $17 trillion by 2030. That's fantastic news for everybody in this room. There's more work to go around.

The trouble is, we know that it's not going to be more of the same. When I talk with your peers around the world, I ask them what's keeping them up at night when they think about the future of their company and the markets in which they'll be competing. And there's a lot of things, as you can imagine. But they seem to graduate back to these four key trends, sustainability, growth, where the money is going to come from, and the fact that everything is just getting more complex.

Let's talk about sustainability. You don't need me to repeat the numbers. You already know them. Today, our built environment places too much strain on our natural environment. And put that in context of that future pipeline of work. These numbers are simply unsustainable. We're all familiar with COP 21, the climate change target of significantly below 2 degrees centigrade by the middle of the century.

Things have to change. And you are excelling at tackling that issue. Pat yourselves on the back for the great work you have done in helping to deliver net zero carbon, net zero energy new buildings and new infrastructure. But what about the existing built environment? And what about the job site? Just by switching from Diesel powered to electric power plant, you could slash energy consumption at the job site by over 70%.

Let's talk about growth. There's a lot more growth coming, over $17 trillion. But where that growth is happening is quite different. But 2030, over 6 in every 10 construction dollars are going to be spent in what are considered today's emerging nations. What does that mean for where you're going to be competing for work and with whom?

Looking back over the last 10 years, there has been a huge uptick in the level of construction exports. People are taking their skills, and they are competing overseas. Between 2005 in 2015, in real terms, construction exports jumped by over 125%. And one in two of you is thinking about, how can we seek out a new geography? That could be the city down the road. It could be a completely different continent. How are you going to compete against that?

Let's talk about the most important thing, money. Design is easy. Design is cheap. Building something takes a lot of money, millions, tens, hundreds, billions of dollars. If that future pipeline of work is to be anything other than an aspiration, you need to help your clients to unlock the funding to flow into those projects. But we know that a large majority of those projects are government related.

Think about governments' traditional role of supplying the social and economic infrastructure for their citizens. And then take a look at this chart. Governments can no longer afford to do that, which means the money has to come from the private sector, public-private partnerships.

You will increasingly be tasked in solving those really complex challenges of, how do you help investors matchmake on their risk appetite with the risk profile of the projects that are seeking funding? How do you help step change downwards, the construction risk of projects, so that funds will flow into them? And how do you sweat the existing built environment, the $200-plus trillion worth of assets that already exist?

Let's talk about complexity. This is, of course, a very famous set of statistics from the McKinsey report. 600 cities today house a little over a fifth of the world's population yet account for 60% of global GDP. Our cities are incredibly important. This is the century of the city. They're also very delicate ecosystems. When you're putting down projects into these incredibly complex environments, how can you make sure that you're ensuring that that city remains socially inclusive, environmentally sustainable, economically viable? Projects are getting more difficult.

So how ready is the construction industry for that challenge of tomorrow? Well, let's think about the metrics of today. Your industry, as Scott mentioned, is a difficult one in which to make a corporate living. You don't need me to tell you that. You can just take a look at your annual reports. Let's think about productivity. Productivity here in the US over the last 50 years has declined by 19%, in real terms, compared to non-farm productivity generally across the economy, which has soared over the last 50 years by 153%.

Let's talk about predictability, custom program. Anybody that's achieving more than 50% is probably doing pretty well. Let's talk about cyclicality. Your industry is the most cyclical, so tightly coupled with the economic cycle. After the 2008 downturn here in the US, you lost 2.3 million construction workers. Now times are better. You know you can't get skilled workers [? if you ?] [? have no ?] money. In the UK, where I'm from, we lost 20% of our supply chain capacity. This is a difficult industry to make a living in.

Let's think about the other issues you have. You're expected to deliver change. Your balance sheets are quite likely capitalized. You frequently deal with clients who ask for innovation but expect you to prove it 20 times over before they'll actually sign on the dotted line with you. And this is perhaps the only industry I'm aware of where a company will agree to do work for less than cost.

They will suicide bid just to keep the cash flow coming in because, of course, your industry is underwritten so strongly by the use of trade credit. And that's great in the good times when you can tap into that huge pipeline of work. But it hurts like hell, doesn't it, in the bad times? You have to keep that money coming in to keep yourself afloat.

Finally, let's talk about collaboration. Collaboration is a funny thing, isn't it? Everybody talks about it. Everybody agrees it's something we should all do. But you all know the challenges of how you get collaboration to happen around [? that ?] asset lifecycle. I'd ask you to compare and contrast these two charts, which is from a report a couple of years ago by KPMG, asking clients, what do you see as the outlook for collaboration with your contracted partners?

82% expected more collaboration over the next five years. Fantastic. But look at the level of trust. Only 31% had a high degree of trust. The industry, its clients, all of the stakeholders still have a long way to go before we can tackle this issue of collaboration.

So the question is, can technology help you square the circle? Can it help you solve the issues you have today and prepare for tomorrow? You are an incredibly important inflection point in your industry. Never before have you had access to such a surfeit of technological trends, all of which have the capacity to significantly change one or more aspects of how you deliver business.

Collectively, we're seeing them give rise to three major disruptions. The first is it's changing the way in which you design. This type of stuff needs no introduction to you, but what it means is the physical and the digital worlds are colliding. It's getting far easier to suck the real world into a silicon environment, to play with your designs via things like gaming engines, and to push those designs out via AR and VR, collision of the digital and physical.

But perhaps even more importantly is the way in which design tools are fundamentally shifting, moving from being instructive tools where we have to tell the tool to do something to harnessing that huge amount of computing power in the cloud, smart algorithms to tap into things like generative design, to have the tool help us, where we can actually focus far more on the end outcome.

Second disruption, all those technology trends are changing how we actually build. At last, your industry can tap into huge amounts of structured data gathered off all those projects and start applying things like machine learning to help you better plan your delivery at the job site. And physical delivery is, of course, also changing. Forget about yesterday's robots. What about robots you could interact with, or what about robots that you can plug into machine learning and can actually think for themselves and work out problems and build?

And what about the rise of microfactories? For the last 30, 40-- arguably longer-- years, your industry has managed to take advantage of reduced trade barriers, reduce shipping costs to develop incredibly globally extended supply chains, to get all the bits and pieces that you need to deliver your projects. But what if you could fabricate those components at facilities like this very close to your job sites?

Yes, it reduces carbon. Yes, it reduces energy. But it also creates the opportunity for a new era of localism, where the people involved in, perhaps, using the assets that you're building are also working on actually creating the components that go into them.

The final, the third trend that we're seeing is this changing nature of how we operate our built assets. We're all familiar with the smart home, increasingly becoming familiar with the smart highway. What's the effect of this going to be? Well, certainly, we're going to get far more efficient at operating and maintaining facilities. But that goes far beyond just making sure that things are replaced or that predictive maintenance happens.

It's going to allow repurposing of assets on the fly, the 24-hour building, adding value in a way that, traditionally, you could not have done. You think about when you built a building, the amount of value was fixed. It was finite based on the fabric of that building and the systems you put in at the time of construction. Now you can repurpose those assets. You can unlock new ways to add value and new business models.

What about at the larger scale, the city scale? As all of these things start to get smarter and get connected, everything from pieces of rotating equipment to sensors in buildings, and we start to get adept at throwing huge amounts of cloud-computing power at that data, what might we learn? Well, I think we're going to be able to close the gap between how much built asset stock we need to build and what we actually need to build because we should be able to get far better at understanding how we're utilizing that built environment and therefore predict what future needs should be, building just enough.

And there's another aspect to this as well, the role of social computing. You all shop on Amazon and other online shopping portals. And invariably, most of you also put a star rating against the product that you buy. Why should it be any different for the built assets that we're involved with? I'm working in a building. I don't like this building. This is how I feel about it. I'm going to give it this star rating. Increasingly, the end users of your assets are going to be voting via social media on the quality of life, the quality of usage of those assets.

Collectively, we're seeing those three disruptions in how things are built, designed, built, and operated open up a new era for you. We, of course, call it the era of connection, hopefully for obvious reasons, because it's putting into your hands some pretty fantastic capabilities, the ability to seamlessly connect teams together, connect insights, outcomes, delivery, assets, and perhaps most importantly, capital.

We think the net of this is you're going to see a step change in your industry for those of you that jump on board and take advantage of those connected capabilities, delivering a margin that is both appropriate and predictable, delivering a greater level of resilience, enabling you to ride out the peaks and troughs of the economic cycle, and allowing you to tap into that huge pipeline of growth over the next 20 years, that generational opportunity.

If you would like to know more, you can read the booklet-- I believe it was handed out-- or, better still, jump onto our website, where there are plenty of good examples about how we're looking at moving forward with this vision. And later today, you'll see plenty of examples from customers in the classes of how we're taking that forward. Thank you very much for your time.

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JIM LYNCH: Thank you, Dominic. [INAUDIBLE]. All right, thank you. Thank you, Dominic. Well, it's clear the opportunity for all of us is extremely compelling, and it's real. So hopefully, over the next couple of days you're going to learn a lot about our technology that we believe can play an important role in helping to achieve and pursue some of these opportunities.

So I want to introduce the next speaker. Our next speaker is a gentleman by the name of Michael Collins. Michael was a former bricklayer. And at one point, he actually owned a construction company. Now he's the director of education at a company called Build Change.

I had an opportunity to talk to Michael last night at dinner. And he's got a really compelling story. The work that his team is doing is extremely important. Build Change designs disaster-resistant houses and schools in emerging nations and helps train engineers, builders, architects, et cetera to use the technology to drive these outcomes. So without further ado, please welcome Michael Collins to the stage. Thank you.

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MICHAEL COLLINS: Hi, guys. Thank you very much, Jim, for the introduction. It's great to be here with so many colleagues from the construction industry. I grew up in the construction industry. I started working when I was 14. This is the only photo that I have of back in the day. I wasn't 14. I must've been 18 or 19 here. And I wasn't actually doing anything. I was just lying in a sand pit, right? Please don't take it to be representative of what I do every day.

I worked for about 3 and 1/2 years as a laborer. And then, as Jim mentioned, I started working as a bricklayer. And then I had the opportunity to specialize a bit more in stone masonry. I grew up on the northeast coast of Spain, where there were lots of stone and wooden houses. In fact, at the age of 23, I had the opportunity to open up a small construction company specializing in the historical restoration of buildings.

Now, Spain was a cheap place to live in at the time. There were a lot of European people who would buy old farmhouses that I would restore that they would then use as second residences. So business was very good, but I couldn't really shake off the feeling of being able to do something better with the skills that I had. So I started looking around and had the opportunity, or saw this opportunity to work with what, at the time, was a small organization called Build Change, who were looking for somebody with practical skills to be able to manage their response after a disaster in Indonesia in 2009.

This was an earthquake that damaged around 200,000 homes. So, as Jim mentioned, Build Change's mission was to reduce the deaths, injuries, and economic losses caused by housing and school collapse in earthquakes and typhoons in emerging nations. And we say emerging nations because, despite the recent spate of disastrous events here in the US, 9 out of 10 deaths by natural disaster happen in developing countries. And that's for many reasons, but most, if not all, are related to construction practice.

Earthquakes and hurricanes don't kill people. Poorly built buildings do. Governments in developing countries generally lack the capacity to be able to enforce construction codes. Homeowners lack the means to be able to employ formal companies and employ unformal or untrained builders. And the quality of materials is extremely low. Now, worse still, in environments such as this, many people rebuild in the same vulnerable way that they built before the earthquake. So the opportunity to be able to actually reduce risk is lost.

So while I was there, I had the chance to be able to work with a wonderful team providing technical assistance for homeowners rebuilding their homes, provide on-the-job training for builders working on them, partnering with vocational training authorities to be able to train the next generation of builders, and even opening up a bed of brickmaking program that's ongoing to this day to be able to improve the quality of construction materials.

And after a couple of years, I felt like my position there was no longer key. So I let Build Change know that I was going to be making a move. And at the time, we'd just started working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake there, doing very much the same kind of similar activities. And they said, hey, listen, can you please go over to Haiti just for a week and share any lessons learned that you may have accumulated during your time in Indonesia?

So for those of you who may not be from the humanitarian business, when we say lessons learned, that's code for stuff that went really wrong, right? So I spent a week in Haiti working with a team that turned into two that turned into three. I ended up living in Haiti or working in Haiti for 3 and 1/2 years. And that's because our program there greatly expanded. Haiti was the first place that we were able to do seismic retrofitting. So when I say seismic retrofitting, basic strengthening of buildings that had been damaged in the earthquake but also houses that hadn't been damaged but may be vulnerable.

So we did over 1,200 retrofits and about 400 new builds. We opened up a training center that's still running, providing formal qualification for builders and apprentices. We started retrofitting schools, which is something we do in all of the countries where we work now. So I'd actually like to show you guys a video just to provide you a bit more context.

OK, so this is drone footage from one of our recently completed projects in Haiti. It included about 250 retrofits and about a quarter mile of retaining walls. It was part of a larger program that included sanitation, a widening of pathways, and helping a lot of the homeowners that lived in the ravines to be able to move out into safer areas.

Right here, in the middle, you can see one of the two schools that we were able to retrofit. And this particular shot is very interesting because you can really see to the extent in which people build down the ravines. You'll see right here on the right-hand side. Now, that's a significant challenge to be able to find retrofit solutions for these houses. Some of them can be retrofitted. Some of them cannot, and homeowners need to be relocated.

Now, here, you can see the widening of the pathways done by one of our partners. And all of the houses that you guys see with the colored roofs and some of the ones with the newer silver roofs will be Build Change retrofits. Now, that's not because we asked people to paint their roofs. It's simply because that's the color that the sheets, the CGI sheets were produced at that time.

You guys will probably also see that there were a lot of vertical expansions. In other words, people have added a lot of new second floors. And that's because we and our partners had the opportunity to provide retrofit subsidies for the first floor but also wanted to make sure that we could provide technical assistance for homeowners that wanted to, in the future, increase-- sorry, expand their house upwards. So providing they had their own funds, we could provide them with the technical assistance so that, basically, people wouldn't build an unsafe second story on top of a safe first story.

Now, all of the techniques that we used-- these are houses, you know? I mean, we didn't use any small houses, for that matter. We didn't use special pistons or bolts or any special techniques, very simple stuff, structural plaster, adding a ring beam, reinforcing the windows, making sure the roof is properly tied down to the ring beam. And here, you can see downtown [INAUDIBLE] in the background and the creation of a public space that was also done as part of the program.

So right now, I have the luxury of being able to work with Build Change on a global level. We are working in Haiti, in Indonesia, in Philippines, Colombia, Guatemala, and Nepal. And one of the largest challenges that we currently have is to be able to cost-efficiently scale what we are doing. Just to provide you an example, in the time it took us to retrofit the 1,200 houses in Haiti, thousands of houses, unsafe houses were built in informal neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities in South America. Hundreds of thousands of houses already exist that need to be retrofitted.

So this is a technology conference, so I'd love to be able to go over a couple of technological aspects that are helping us to be able to reach that scale and reduce the cost of our technical assistance. Where we're most advanced, if you will, is in Nepal after our response in 2015. And then we're using drone technology to be able to provide updated aerial information about damaged areas so we don't have to rely on Google Maps from 2009. But it's also a really good tool to be able to work with community leaders to be able to plan projects.

We use drone-- sorry, drones and Autodesk software to be able to create topographical maps that allow us to provide better recommendations as to where homeowners should or should not be building. And we also use it as a construction supervision tool to be able to see the progress of construction activities over time. It's actually a very convenient donor-reporting tool as well because donors can very much see the visual impact that we are having.