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Built This Week is a weekly podcast where real builders share what they're shipping, the AI tools they're trying, and the tech news that actually matters. Hosted by Sam and Jordan from Ryz Labs, the show offers a raw, inside look at building products in the AI era—no fluff, no performative hype, just honest takes and practical insights from the front lines.
I built games. Adventure Tycoon. It's, kinda like roller coaster tycoon. This one is, another construction game. Built this week, breaking it down.
Jordan:Built this week, we show you how. A fresh idea,
Sam:a clever tweak, you locked in shoe. Built this week. Hey, everyone, and welcome to Built this week, the podcast where we share what we're building, how we're building it, and what it means for the world of AI and startups. I'm Sam Nadler, cofounder here at Rise Labs. And each and every week, I'm joined by my friend and business partner, Jordan Metzner.
Sam:And this week, we have a guest, Tristan Wilson, who is the CEO of EdgeVanta. Tristan, give us a thirty second intro, and then I'll I'll get into the docket. Sounds
Tristan:good. Thanks for, thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it.
Tristan:Sam and Jordan. So my name is Tristan Wilson. I'm the CEO and founder at EdgeVance. We make AI agents for civil estimating. A little bit about my background.
Tristan:So I actually grew up in the construction industry. So I worked as a project manager and an estimator, and my family was actually in the road construction business in Louisiana. So we sold our company. I moved up to Nashville and started EdgeVanta in 2022. So I kinda felt a lot of the pain that estimators feel, which is like going through really a bunch of bid documents and having to, like, corral all this information and try to make, decisions, and there's just a lot of data to go through.
Tristan:So what we're focused on is helping estimators do their work faster, and more accurately, and we're doing that with the help, of, of AI in, in civil construction. So that's a little bit that's a little
Sam:bit about us. Perfect. And we'll dive into the EdgeVanta product in a little bit. But right before I cover the docket, please like and subscribe. We launch new episodes every Friday and, available on all your favorite platforms to listen to podcasts, whether it's Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.
Sam:And so today, we're gonna cover, you know, something Jordan built that, hopefully, is is a fun kind of tool with EdgeVanta in mind. Then we're gonna go into a little bit more in detail, of the EdgeVanta product and then cover some of the latest and greatest news, over the past couple days in a in AI and technology in general. So with that, Jordan, why don't you kinda walk us through what you built?
Jordan:Hey, guys. How's it going? Another exciting week in Built this week in in AI and in the world in general. Alright. Let's get started.
Jordan:So Edgevanta helps with construction projects. So I built a different games. Let's see kind of how fun each one is. And hopefully, you guys like it. The first game I built, it's called the Adventa Tycoon.
Jordan:It's kinda like roller coaster tycoon where you build your own roller park except in this case, you need to bid on construction projects, and then you gotta build you gotta build them out, and then you gotta grow your company, and you gotta use Edgevanta to help you do that. So let's first go through the Edgevanta Tycoon. Let's start building. Okay. So when you're in an Edgevanta Tycoon, you have some available projects.
Jordan:Let's look at the downtown parking lot. This is our our first project. Okay. So the budget is 150,000 in thirty days. You know, it says to recommend a bid between $1.20 and $1.50.
Jordan:Okay. Let's do $1.25 and thank God to Edgevanta for giving us the suggestion here. And then oh, wow. Okay. Let's here we go.
Jordan:Well, they're supposed to be like kind of these agents and then you're supposed to be able to buy them. Okay. Cool. I unlocked an agent and now I have, you know, an Advanta agent. This is a a bid brief summary agent.
Jordan:And there's some additional agents here, but I need to earn more more projects in order to do that as well as buy additional equipment. I just need some more capital. I only have 50,000. But I could try the real Advanta if I just go to advanta.ai. Okay.
Jordan:Let's go into my next game. This one is another construction game. So let's see. Let's start construction. So I think the first thing you do first thing you do is you click to crush the rocks.
Jordan:So you so you got the rocks, you gotta fill your your container. You wanna get them filled up, and then once you get it all filled cool. Then we can heat up the rocks because we're gonna build some some highway. It's heating up. It's heating up.
Jordan:Alright. Now we gotta go to paving mode. Alright. We're gonna go to paving. Let's see if we can pave the highway.
Jordan:There we go. It's paving.
Tristan:Nice.
Jordan:Alright. Now we gotta roll it out. Alright. Come on. Let's roll the highway out.
Jordan:Alright. Click and hold the roll. Tried my best here, guys. Maybe done my maybe wasn't my all best, but I paved the highway. I used Edgevanta to do it, and it wouldn't all be possible here without Edgevanta.
Jordan:So but, you know, I think all of this just comes down to it. Know, I'm just real really no expert in the highway construction space, but I do like to make some fun games on the Internet. So, you know, let me just leave that into, you know Chris Tristan, why don't you tell us a little bit more about, like, you know, what is Advanta? Who are your customers? What do people use it for?
Jordan:And how does it work?
Sam:Question. One of one of the things that I think is so interesting is, like, this is from my you know, I'm not too familiar with the industry, but it's a it's a kind of a what I'm guessing is historically old school industry. And, like, the part of the process you're tackling, you know, could it will significantly benefit from AI. And I I do want you to mention kind of, you know, how that how the presence of AI has really, you know, created some significant efficiencies for for the role you're solving for. That's a pretty cool
Tristan:that that's perfect kinda entree into, like, you know, what a little bit about kinda what what we do. So I think a few of the challenges that, like, we hear from, you know, the, like, the tens of estimators that we've talked with a little bit about, like, what is an estimator? So an estimator is is a professional that's responsible for on the civil construction side of basically taking a bunch of specs and a bunch of drawings and bid packages and basically figuring out, okay. What is the scope of work? And then how much is it gonna cost us to go do this work?
Tristan:And then how do I make sure that I fill out all of the forms and the requirements and the schedule and everything appropriately to submit a compliant bid? And how you kinda measure success is a couple of things. One, is our bid, you know, been accepted, right, by by the owner? And then two, how did, you know, how did we perform on the bid? Were we the low bidder?
Tristan:And then if we win the job, we get to find out, you know, how did what we thought it was gonna cost us compared to what it actually cost us in the field. And the this whole process, like, the way it kinda works today is, like, let's say I'm an estimator in, you know, South Carolina. I get a bid package from a county for redoing a bunch of roadways. So we're widening highway, for instance. I get, like, 15 anywhere from, like, maybe 1,200 to 1,500 pages of documents.
Tristan:So a ton of specifications, bid forms, drawings, etcetera. And I literally have to go through and physically read every single page and then summarize what matters. Because the way it works is there's, like, the like, of the, you know, 1,200 pages, there's probably only, you know, like, maybe 80 to a 100 of stuff that really matters that you wanna make sure that you capture. So you really it's like finding a needle, you know, in a haystack, and it just takes hours. Like, it literally takes I mean, when I did it, it took me, you anywhere from, like, four to six hours per bid just to review the documents, not even start to take offs or, you know, do my, like, analysis.
Tristan:So that's really important. And then the other part, the other challenge is, like, if you miss a small detail and I actually have a horror story about this. So I was the estimator on a six and a half million dollar airport bid, and I missed a small requirement in the bid form so that we had to submit something from our subcontractors, and they did it in an addendum, which is like a change kinda last minute. And I messed up, and I got all the forms late. And I submitted my bid, which was 6 and a half million dollars nineteen seconds late, and we would have had low bid and won the job.
Tristan:And it really, really, really burned. And those are the types of things that that that happen and that should never, right, should never happen again. So there's that. And then there's also, like, figuring out how to price the jobs. There's, like, market information that's out there.
Tristan:And if you in an ideal world, you would try to predict what do you think the competitors are gonna do because in low bid construction, you don't get any multiple shots at it. You get one shot. So everybody submits their bid. They open the bids up. It's called ribbon read, and you you either won or you didn't.
Tristan:And, also, there's a big amount of money that gets left on the table in between first and second place. So those are kinda like the three things that, you know, that we really help people with, and they're really expensive challenges. So, like, you know, if you got a five person estimating team that spends 20% of their time on spec review, that's a $100,000 that you're investing in that every year. If you miss one small qualification on a bid, that could cost you million a million or millions dollars worth of worth of work, and you leave about, you know, 8% on the table on average on a lot of the public work. So, you know, what's different now, like, what's changed is that AI can now, like, parse and understand documents with human level like accuracy, and it was not able to do this, you know, a couple of years ago, and and now it can.
Tristan:And I think a lot of people, they hear that, think that, okay. Well, this is gonna all of a sudden, like, replace estimators, but that's actually not what we're seeing at all. We're actually seeing that these tools can actually just make estimators a lot better, improve their, you know, quality of life, and and basically make their lives make their lives a lot a lot easier. So part of how we're able to do that is through AI agents. So, basically, these AI agents are the way it works is I have a bunch of bid documents.
Tristan:I upload those bid documents into EdgeVance, and then I have a bunch of AI agents that go through and parse through the documents and are trained on civil construction data, and they basically help me pull out all the important information out of the document. And then I review that. I am the, you know, what what's referred to as human in the loop. You guys are familiar with this, but I check that as I'm doing it. And a small example, like, was sitting with somebody in South Carolina last week.
Tristan:She was working on a bid. She had she had three different bid forms. And the way that she would have to do this in the past is she would have to literally upload the p she would have to get get the PDFs side by side and then type in into an Excel document because these are not formatted in a in a in in a really good way. And that that could take two hours to type every single one of the bid items for the three bid forms. With our platform, she uploads the documents, presses a button, and there's an agent that's designed specifically to do that, go extract all those all those items, and she can literally press two buttons and exports it in a CSV.
Tristan:That two hours, gone. You can do it in a matter of two minutes. And then you can spend time on the stuff that really matters, which is like, how do I go build this job in the most cost efficient way and make sure that I have, you know, a compliant bid? So that's kinda one small example of kinda the the broader picture of how do we get people time back in their day with the help of of of AI. And then the second part of it is how do we make sure that we, like, win jobs but leave as little money on the table as possible?
Tristan:So how we do that is we go to the Department of Transportation websites. We gather critical data, historical pricing information. We bring that into our platform, and then we have agents that are built on top of that that can help us call and query all past historical bidding information so that we can really understand, like, where's the market at for this job right now? How much work do our competitors have? Then most importantly, like, what do we think is gonna happen in the future on on upcoming bids?
Tristan:In the past, you would have to jockey Excel spreadsheets. At my family's company, we actually had somebody who did this full time. All they did was bid tap forecasting. With the help of AI, we don't we can actually that we can have some of our team members now do that, and and we don't have to go hire, you know, full time staff, multiple, you know, additional team members. We can basically do it kind of in house with the with the crew that we have.
Tristan:So and that can really help add to our add to our bottom line. Like, just for instance, at our company, we were leaving 11% on the table on all of our bids. You know, that was tens of millions of dollars for us. We were able to reduce that down to closer to about 7 which meant that we put almost $8,000,000, you know, back in our pocket. So that's worth spending time on.
Tristan:That's worth spending money on and investing time in. So that's another part of what we're really able to help people do is not just the time savings, but also, you know, adding money to the bottom line through having better data.
Jordan:That's awesome. It's a great application of of AI, and it seems like a lot of these things, as you mentioned earlier, just would not be possible without AI previously. And I guess one also question here is, I mean, if it took so long previously to to do a bid, I guess you'd have to be selective on which bids were worth, like, worth working on. And maybe with Advanta, you can bid on more jobs, you know, simply since they take so much faster to bid on as well. Right?
Tristan:Yeah. So part of another thing that we have helped with is the the go, no go process. So, like, you get, like, our our customers. So who who are our customers? They're civil contractors, so they do site.
Tristan:They move dirt. They put in pipe. They lay pavement. So it's a lot of kinda heavy infrastructure, you know, site work, road building, that those types of folks. And they get tens of bid packages in the door per day or, you know, per week, sometimes even per day.
Tristan:And it's really hard to keep track of it all. I mean, it's it's like a constant flow of is is this interesting to us? Like, does it have something that we might be, you know, worthwhile looking into? Part And of what we've done is really helped with that go, no go process the way it used to work. Like, I remember when I was an estimator, somebody would be like I would get, like, five emails, they'd be like, look at this job.
Tristan:Look at this job. And I'd to, like, download the plans and go, like, look at it, and the plans are, like, sideways, and you're, like, trying to click through and be like, alright. Is there anything that's of interest into us in this job? With these agents, we can we can we can just upload the documents and ask it a question, or even better, we can get a structured output that gives us a summary of the bid that says, yeah. This is what you normally bid on.
Tristan:This is definitely gonna be of interest to you, or, you know, this job has nothing. It's a, you know, it's a it's a it's a, you know, medical building or something. Like, this doesn't have anything that you might be interested in. So even, you know, just getting those cup even that, you know, thirty, forty five minutes back really adds up over time. You look at the the volume of bid packages that people are going through it, AI is really, really good.
Tristan:Our AI specifically is really, really good at helping kinda assist that. So you may not you may not necessarily bid more jobs, but you're able to not waste time on the jobs that you're not bidding. Right? So really really important time.
Sam:You made a comment at the beginning, something about we're not here to replace estimators. And, you know, we've pursued here at RiseLab some AI solutions that I think for the, like, ideal ICP or the ideal kind of customer, they're you know, initially, even though, like, we we think it saves them tons of time and generates tons of efficiency, there was a little bit of, I guess, fear, trepidation, maybe even a little bit of resistance until they kinda see the product and see how it, like, really benefits them. Are you experiencing that at all with the estimators or or the clients you're working with? Or are they like, oh my god. This is the greatest solution.
Sam:Like, I'm you know, this is this is the best.
Tristan:This this is a great this is a great question. I mean, I I think we see a broad spectrum of of different reactions to when when we say AI. I know I've, like, present it to large groups of PMs and project managers and estimators where there's a lot of fear in the room. And I think it's important to understand and define, like, what AI is. Right?
Tristan:How it's there, how it can be there to help us, and then also how it's just a tool and it doesn't necessarily replace the person who is doing the important work of figuring out what's it gonna cost us to go build this job. It just makes that person a heck of a lot better, a heck of a lot more efficient, and able to spend times on the stuff that matters. Like, hand entering a 120 items does not make you a better estimator. All it does, it basically makes you spend time on stuff that doesn't matter. And if you compare two companies and one company has the power of of AI and they're using it, they're able to spend a lot more time on the stuff that really matters compared to somebody who isn't using it and is doing it, you know, the the way of of manual entry.
Tristan:But that doesn't mean that we don't still need to review every page, that we still don't need to review every single document, and that we're still not fully responsible for the job as the estimator. And knowing how to do it the old school way is important. It's just now how can we apply these new tools to help us make you know, to help help make us more, more efficient and and more accurate and also catch things that we might have missed? Like, I had a really cool thing the other day where somebody ran a bid, somebody put a bid package in, and they had actually gone through and reviewed this thing in great detail, highlighted stuff and everything. And the AI actually caught something in the bid where the owner gave them conflicting information.
Tristan:The owner said, hey. The project should be completed in this many days, but then when you look deep, deep, deep down on the contract, it actually conflicted with what the owner said in another part. And we're human. Right? There are things that we miss, and the AI can help us catch those things that we might have missed so that that doesn't become a dispute or a claim later on down the line, you know, for the successful for the successful bidder.
Tristan:Part of doing this job is figuring out if anything's wrong with the documents that you've been provided and letting the owner know, hey. There's a problem here. Right? And and it's really hard when you're so busy. You'd you might miss things in AI.
Tristan:You know, it it doesn't get tired. It it and it's one great rule of thumb that I make sure to tell to everybody that we work with is that assume this is the worst AI that you're ever gonna use. Right? Because it's just going to keep getting better. Right?
Tristan:And we can use it to our our advantage. And I I think estimators are awesome. Like, I am an estimator, so I would not also, like, I've this is kind of who I am. It's in my DNA. And and I I don't think that estimators should be there in the 10:00 the night before the bid trying to crank and get stuff done.
Tristan:Why not use this great technology that's available to us just to help us do our job a little bit better and a little bit little bit faster?
Sam:Amazing.
Jordan:Awesome. Alright, Justin. Well, yeah, I think that was awesome, you know, perfect fit for Built this week. Just, you know, how using AI to build new products and services that, you know, were probably not possible without AI. In the last segment here, we're just gonna jump into some AI news.
Jordan:It's been another super duper hot week. I'll first jump into this news. I don't know if you guys saw, but, x AI is raising money and NVIDIA is investing, I think, 2,000,000,000 into the round. So we've got Jensen now investing in x AI, OpenAI, Core Weave, you know, the money's sloshing all over the place. But, yeah, just wanted to get your guys feedback here as well as just watching the market continue to rip, you know, as as these hyperscalers continue to grow.
Sam:Yeah. I mean, I thought, you know, my immediate take was, you know, interesting from the deal with NVIDIA and OpenAI, and now seeing with this kind of circular financing with NVIDIA and x AI and all these other examples coming out, you know, within the last two weeks. I guess I guess I'm a little concerned. Is it, you know, true infrastructure build out that makes sense, these relationships, or is it really this speculative bubble that, you know, could lead to some major problems for the space in the near future or a little bit farther down the line. You know, I think one or one of these examples makes a lot of sense potentially for NVIDIA.
Sam:But, you know, is it is it just a huge signal for speculative action?
Jordan:I don't know. I don't think so. I don't Jensen says, like, he got the opportunity to invest, so they're investing. I don't know. Would you I would invest.
Jordan:Tristan, wouldn't you invest?
Tristan:It's hard to say, Pan. I don't know. I I think x AI's got an interesting approach. I like kind of what they're doing with, like, their philosophy of truth seeking. I think that's something that's unique that they do that I like that I don't think other people do.
Tristan:You know? There's a there's a long line of people that have bet against Elon that are wrong. So, yeah, I I I don't know. I'm I'm not a I'm not an expert on, you know, like, AI funding and that type of stuff, but that's those are just kinda my initial thoughts on that.
Jordan:Okay. Cool. Alright. Well, let's jump into the next one. You know, just rolling this out.
Jordan:So, you know, all of this adds up to just a massive investment from Open AI. They got some money obviously from NVIDIA as we spoke about on our last episode and then today as well. And, yeah, they say that estimated spending by OpenAI is gonna be close to a trillion dollars. And I think as like, current revenues are, like, around 10 or $15,000,000,000 annually, which is obviously incredibly impressive for a start up, but nowhere near a trillion dollars. But it just shows at least their belief as well as kind of these hyperscalers belief in in where AI is going and where the AI spend is going.
Jordan:You know, I'd love to get your guys' feedback here, but I don't think we've ever seen an investment project of a trillion dollars before. This has gotta be like the biggest ever. And, you know, I mean, what does this mean? Like, you know, if AI is this prevalent right now, you know, how early are we when, you know, all of this trillion dollars is actually invested in these, you know, these data centers and pipelines and all these other things software is built?
Sam:Who knows? I mean, it's it it is a mind boggling amount of money. And and at the end of the day, I'd I'd like I said in my last comment, I think I think there it could be a signal for some concerns. But, you know, taking the other side, you know, I'm pretty much investing all of my free cash flow in NVIDIA. I And Yola.
Sam:Yeah. I think I'll probably continue doing that even at $4,500,000,000,000 valuation.
Jordan:Yeah. It's still early, I think. Tristan, what do you think?
Tristan:I think AI is massively underhyped. That's my opinion, just just as as a whole. So, like, so, like, where do I you know, I do see more, you know, like, OpenAI enterprise accounts. That's becoming very common in construction. I'd say probably, I don't know.
Tristan:If I had to you know, I'd say 15 to 20%, you know, of the folks that we talk to are using, you know, AI across the enterprise, of course, because they know that if they sign up for the, you know, enterprise account that they can feel more secure with, like, people uploading sensitive information. At least that's kind of the basis that I've heard. And just people getting more familiar with using, you know, with using AI. There just aren't a lot of tools that are purpose built for our industry, you know, in civil construction that are very specific to the industry that have AI. I mean, we're I think we're one of the few.
Tristan:There there are some others. So I think, yeah, people they know AI is a big thing. They know it's coming. They read the headlines, and, you know, they don't wanna they don't wanna miss out. I think that's the biggest concern, you know, because like you said, our our my industry is very traditional, and, you know, we're not known for being the most for grabbing on to innovation, you know, as as soon as as soon as it's available.
Tristan:There are, of course, just like anything else, like, there's the technology adoption life cycle. Right? Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey Moore, where he talks about there's, like, the 13 and a half percent that are innovators and early adopters. There are those, you know, in in this industry, but the majority is in the you know, early majority, late majority, you know, there's they they wanna see products that are that are more proven before they before they jump in. But I think everybody that I talk to, like executives, they're all using they're all using ChatGPT, you know, maybe Claude, Grock, those those types of those types of tools on a daily basis, whether that's for personal or for professional use.
Jordan:Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. I mean, yeah, you can see when, you know, more AI is implemented inside of instruction and more chips, more open AI, more hyperscalers. I mean, you know, that's where the trillion dollars is gonna pay itself off.
Jordan:Right?
Tristan:I saw I saw I saw an article yesterday or maybe Dave Hoy yesterday about one of the management consulting firms. I think it was maybe I don't know if it was Ernst and Young or just, you know, one of those management consulting firms. 470,000 people got access to, you know, to with Anthropic Claude, the kind of an enterprise academy. And just imagine, like, the size and scale of a deal like that. You know?
Tristan:I mean, 470,000 people with, you know, a license to an app. Just It's amazing how big some of those deals can get. Right? Hundreds of millions, right, per year.
Jordan:Hey, guys. Overall, I think it was a great episode. It was really awesome, Tristan, just to hear your side of talking about an industry that, you know, we don't think that much about since we're focused so much on technology. It's taking industry like construction and, you know, roadside highway and how AI is, you know, being adopted and and being applied. And, you know, it does definitely seem like the early days and just shows how exciting it is.
Jordan:And, you know, hopefully, we'll we'll get AI implemented on the other side as well from those governments. And, you know, they'll make, you know, better contracts and better diagrams. And, you know, it'll be AI talking to AI, and at the end of the day, you know, trying to, you know, make a process that that becomes smooth for everybody. So alright. Well, I'm Jordan.
Jordan:On behalf of Sam and Tristan and everybody else, this was an awesome episode of built this week. You can check us out at builtthisweek.com or on YouTube or Spotify or all your favorite podcast platforms. Built This Week Podcast. So thanks everyone. Thanks Tristan.
Jordan:Thanks Sam. And hope you guys all have a great week. See you soon. Built this week