Alex Le Roux Built Giant Robots that 3D Print Houses as Icon Cofounder - Now Stay on His Wheel

One year ago, Franco Martins, a friend and collaborator, told me that the CTO at his place of work, Icon, is a cyclist and was going to ride bikes with us. Here’s why this is a big deal: 

Icon is one of Austin’s more buzzy unicorns because they 3D print housing communities using massive robots that lay down concrete walls in the same way you squeeze toothpaste from the tube. If that wasn’t crazy enough, they have government contracts to build roads on the moon using the moon’s surface material. Yah.

Alex Le Roux didn’t turn up on a Hill Climbers ride until recently, and it took me until his second ride to chat him up to learn that he’s the guy. This is what it’s all about! It turns out Alex is no slouch on a bike and throughout the day we participated in a bit of a slugfest (he got me on Mt Bonnell and I returned the favor on Jester). Also, that thing when you’re putting out 320+ watts while talking shop and trying to make it seem like your breathing isn’t so labored…

You can probably guess that I asked Alex to come on the show and he was super generous with his time, as he recently stepped away from Icon after investing 10 years of his career. We talk a lot about how he’s experiencing and thinking about that transition, on top of the more obvious topics like contrasting 3D printing houses with traditional construction.

Honestly, Alex’s path and Icon are so innovative that I tried to frame questions that would help me understand how he experiences the world. Spoiler alert: this guy loves solving big societal problems, and somehow wasn’t afraid to get started at a young age. Another tantalizing nugget…he’s winning bike races! Watch the show and draw your own conclusions about what makes Alex tick.

Alex Le Roux Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderleroux/

Icon:
https://www.iconbuild.com/

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Theme Music: Summer Vibes by Rizik

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01)
you

Speaker 2 (00:03)
Formally

wanted to welcome Alex Larue to the Hill Climbers show. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. I always give it a little background on, basically the connection, how we met. And this one goes back like, I don't know, probably six or eight months. Franco, who was helping out with the show was a colleague of yours. Franco worked at Icon, which is a very notable.

Speaker 1 (00:09)
Yeah, it's good to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:30)
local, I don't know if you still call it a startup. Okay. And icon is a interesting company. It's got a lot of press because they 3d print houses. Frank was like, Hey, you know, the CTO, one of the co-founders isn't the bikes. He's going to come join us one of these days. And I was like, you know, I was very curious, couldn't wait to meet you. And it basically like never happened. Tuck that in the back of my mind.

Speaker 1 (00:33)
Yeah, I'd still call him.

Speaker 2 (00:58)
But fast forward to, I guess the last couple of months, you joined our weekend ride. I didn't realize you had joined. And then we struck up a conversation on the last one. So you finally made it.

Speaker 1 (01:08)
Yeah, no, it's been super fun to join. You're super fit as well, so it's been fun to ride with you and the other folks in that group. It's a pretty neat little community that you guys have built with Hill Climbers. Thanks. Yeah, fun to be kind of part of it now.

Speaker 2 (01:21)
And by the way, I'm very pleased and excited with a photo that was taken on Jester from the last weekend ride. Vincent Amandt, who was the ride leader, got to the top of the hill and started taking photos of us. So Alex is second wheel, right on my wheel in the foreground of this like epic photo that showcases not just Jester and how steep it is, but like the Austin skyline. yeah.

Thanks for being a part of that. And, ⁓ yeah, was pretty, pretty awesome to get that, that photo.

Speaker 1 (01:52)
Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, that was a fun ride.

Speaker 2 (01:55)
So just to kind of like kick things off, I mean, there's a whole lot to talk about with you and your background in this like fantastic, incredible local company you built. Let's start early days. I guess where are you from? What were you like as a kid? Like, let's start early.

Speaker 1 (02:14)
Yeah. So my parents are both immigrants. So dad's French, mom's Canadian. I was born in Canada and grew up speaking French at home. And ⁓ we pretty quickly immigrated here as a family and ⁓ then grew up in Texas, in Houston. As a kid, was really, I learned pretty quickly. I was like into math and science much more so than like the English and the- And Yeah, for sure. My dad's an engineer as well.

Speaker 2 (02:40)
And does that run in the family?

Speaker 1 (02:44)
Yeah, my mom was a school teacher growing up. so the math stuff always kind of came very naturally, very easily. You know, got a perfect score on the calculus exams in high school, which was like, you know, I was like, okay, I'm pretty good at this and really encouraged me to like go into like studying engineering after graduating. But yeah, you know, growing up, I spent a lot of time trying to get good grades and all that stuff, but also ended up running track and cross country in high school.

which led to me running in college, the mile, the two mile, and then the 5K as well. like my claim to fame, maybe like, you know, one of the highlights of my like, you know, childhood was running a four minute, 12 second mile my senior year of high school. At the time I was like, you know, I feel like I'm on top of the world.

Speaker 2 (03:15)
What were your events?

And does that rank you pretty high like in the stage?

Speaker 1 (03:35)
It was like the year I graduated high school. I was like the fastest runner in Houston and then one of the top five to 10 runners in the state of Texas. Wow. Which was like, you know, I thought pretty neat. Yeah. But you know, I've now, you know, now that I'm not a serious athlete, you know, I try to like pull some lessons from, you know, athletics. And I think there are a ton of lessons that maybe we can kind of get into, you know, know, persevering and hard work and, know, all these good things. Right.

Speaker 2 (03:59)
Yeah

That's a, the one, two mile and 5k, like those are brutal, brutal races. Like, my God.

Speaker 1 (04:11)
Yeah,

absolutely. Yeah, they're super painful. Maybe not as painful as 800. I think that's probably the worst. Okay. You know, people debate this a little bit. Right. Yeah, definitely quite tough event.

Speaker 2 (04:20)
You know, we'll talk about your cycling habit a little bit, but you can't really tell. You're probably what? 6'2". Yeah. So Alex, yeah, as a runner, I guess you're probably like on the taller side for a fast runner.

Speaker 1 (04:29)
Yeah, six,

Right. Yeah, for sure. Though I was a little bit shorter back then. Right. But you know, I had my growth spurt pretty late, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:42)
Yeah, love, I mean, you know, our cyclists are so obsessed with like physique and weight, obviously. So Alex being 6'2", climbing hills at a good clip, like, yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:57)
Yeah,

in fact, you know, yeah, I appreciate that. That's another way of saying it. If you lose a little bit of weight, you can probably get up the hill even faster.

Speaker 2 (05:04)
Well,

okay. So, let's, let's jump into that. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got it got into bikes? And, and by the way, you've got some French heritage. So how did, how did the tour play into your.

Speaker 1 (05:15)
I mean, when I was growing up, I'd always watch the tour at my grandparents' house. know, there it was in the afternoons, now it's here in the mornings. In France. In France, yeah, yeah, go visit them. Right. You know, I was always like really enamored with the sport, but it was only recently that I got into it seriously. Because, you know, you get to the age of 30 and it's like, well, running becomes a little harder and then, you know, cycling becomes a little easier. Yeah. A little easier on the joints.

Speaker 2 (05:22)
Grandparents in France

Did anyone like kind of get you into it or is there a story there?

Speaker 1 (05:44)
think

it was really just COVID where it was just like we were all locked up inside and I was like one of the millions of people in the US who was like, I need to go buy a bike and just get outside. And, you know, that turned out to be like a great decision.

Speaker 2 (05:59)
And how'd you get the 3D printing bug? What was the story with?

Speaker 1 (06:02)
Yeah. So back in 2014, there were all these, like around the time I was graduating from college and trying to figure out what I should do next, there are all these articles coming out around, you know, everyone's going to have a 3D printer in their house. It'll just be like the desktop computer and you're going to be printing all sorts of trinkets. And that was like what all the, like the futurists were saying. And at the time, I just remember thinking that this was a super cool technology, but perhaps misapplied. not everyone needs a 3D printer.

in their house printing little trinkets. You know, it's like the use cases people would suggest were like, you know, you can print spoons, little coffee cups and.

Speaker 2 (06:38)
And

also not everyone's an engineer who's like printing their own pieces to build something.

Speaker 1 (06:43)
Yeah,

exactly. It felt like a little bit of a stretch. It's like, sure, you could 3D print a coffee cup, but like, I don't know that it makes, you know, it's not the right manufacturing method there. But I thought this was like a super neat concept and that there were probably other applications. And so that's where, you know, I started thinking through, you know, how could this be used in a way that's much more meaningful? And then you look at like all the problems that we have as a society today, housing is like at the very top of the list. And so

I saw that as well, just a lot of homeless situation in Waco where I went to school was not great. And so you kind of get all these little data points and you're like, there something at the intersection of all this that could be impactful?

Speaker 2 (07:24)
And, and you were, you were pondering these different challenges and, 3d printing in college. was. Yeah. And was there already as, as a young man, you know, let's say 20 years old, you're, you're thinking about pretty significant issues, societal issues. there anything that you think kind of, ⁓ why were you thinking big?

Speaker 1 (07:32)
In college, yeah.

Well, it's

interesting, know, it's like there's so many, when you're graduating from college, you almost have like a quarter life crisis where you're like, what is, what am I going to spend time on? And back then a lot of people were still going into like oil and gas. That was like, you you graduate from engineering. Yeah. You go, you go into oil and gas and you know, was nothing like inherently wrong with that, you know, sector, but I just felt like it was a little bit of like a dying industry. And I wanted to kind of be on the next wave of things. You know, that was like another way to look at it.

Speaker 2 (08:18)
When

you're comparing, you know, as a young engineering student going into the energy sector, you know, those are pretty big concepts, know, industries that have, you know, far reaching impact across the globe. I guess if you're kind of extrapolating that, that you can make the jump.

Speaker 1 (08:33)
Yeah

Yeah. Yeah.

I was trying to like imagine almost like if I'm a venture capitalist and I'm trying to figure out what to invest in, like what am I going to invest in today? You know, it's like if it was the like early nineties, maybe it'd be like, you know, some dot com something. Yeah. You know, if it was like early two thousands, it'd be something in social media. If it was a fifties, I'd start like an oil and gas exploration. I was like, you know, it's now 2015 oil and gas is like old news. What's the next thing? Yeah. You know, and I just felt like construction technologies.

Speaker 2 (08:58)
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:08)
along with all these other data points I was mentioning, it was like, all right, this feels like the future. It's like something worth spending the next 10 years of my life doing. And that's ultimately what I ended up doing. Yeah, so graduated from college, had built some prototype machines. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna try to move this forward. I'm gonna turn down the job offers and go out and try to productize this.

Speaker 2 (09:17)
How'd you get started?

Did you have any entrepreneurial sort of DNA or had you done anything like that in the past?

Speaker 1 (09:38)
I spent

a lot of time in the business school at college, you know, so trying to like be a little bit more well-rounded than just, you the engineer. And there were like some great mentors that they pair you up with at Baylor where I went to school. I kind of got the bug listening to them. You know, as often like a lot of entrepreneurs do, you know, they just listen and you're like, you know, they, they did it, you know, why not me? So I think that's where I got maybe some of the inspiration.

Speaker 2 (10:01)
And by the way, just to give you credit, clearly you're an ambitious young guy. I mean, looking to solve some, really big problems. And, you know, I bring that up cause that that's like not where my head was at. What's next? You start tinkering with machines and, can you like for, for the folks that are not engineers, what, does that look like?

Speaker 1 (10:15)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of going down rabbit holes on, you know, how on the internet about like how you might like build something like this. So it's like, what's the right control strategy? You know, what's the right sort of material to use? There's like some research papers out there that, you know, some people have done some concepts kind of like this that, you know, I can learn from them as opposed to like learning everything on my own. So you try to like piece together like a cohesive story, a cohesive, like technical strategy, and then you try to like go, go build upon it.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I was doing a lot of that and very quickly realized I had kind of like some technical instinct here, but ⁓ as like a 20, yeah, the time 23, 24 year old, the thing that you're missing is you don't have much of a network and you you haven't started businesses in the past. And so that's where I ended up connecting with my other co-founders at Icon, Jason and Evan. And they brought a lot of that experience starting companies in the first place. By the way,

Speaker 2 (11:20)
So I did, sorry to interrupt, I did watch the 60 minute special, which probably came out in like 23, would you say?

Speaker 1 (11:29)
Yeah, something like that. Yeah, late 23.

Speaker 2 (11:31)
So 20, 20, 60 minutes did a solid 25 minute piece on, you guys. And there was footage of you again, as a, as a young man having three printed a shed. And I think that was something that you basically accomplished more or less on your own. Right. Before meeting them. Right. So can you, can you tell us about kind of.

Speaker 1 (11:49)
Yeah, that's right.

that this shed, you know, I kind of had it in my mind that like, if I could build, uh, you know, the ultimate goal was to build real houses, but you know, to start with, you got to build, you know, the MVP, like the small exactly. And so that was like a shed, you know, the shed didn't look particularly great. People roast me for, for, know, the way that shed ended up looking all the time.

Speaker 2 (12:03)
Call you crawl, walk, run, right?

It looked

like a shed made of concrete. Yeah. That's right.

Speaker 1 (12:17)
That's right. ⁓ So in true like MVP fashion, it didn't look great, but you know, it was enough to give me some credit to like suggest that like this is like ⁓ feasible, you know, there's like not technically like impossible. Yeah, we can build upon this. And I think that was one of the like, you know, milestones that ultimately led me to like connecting with Evan and Jason, the other co-founders.

Yeah, mutual friend at another 3D printing company connected us. ⁓ She, cause we both knew her and she was like, Hey, like there aren't that many people in Texas working on this. Like you guys should know each other and connected us over email and you know, the rest is history.

Speaker 2 (12:59)
early

days, you guys must have had a meeting of the minds and a cultural fit in order to shake hands and co-found the company. Can you share that experience and how you guys each kind of had your area of expertise that complemented each other?

Speaker 1 (13:17)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we met at a South Congress hotel in that lobby over there. And that's where like we, met over, you know, a handful of days over a couple of weeks and, you know, agreed on all the terms around, you know, split of equity and like, what do we want? Like the company ended up looking like one day and, you know, all these sort of details, you know, we had some drinks along the way, you know, but, you know, sometimes it can be like pretty like mysterious how these things get done, but like it wasn't,

You know, it was all pretty straightforward.

Speaker 2 (13:49)
Yeah.

Well, and I think on the show, this team has come up a lot, early stage team building specifically. And it just sounds like you guys must've hit it off to really get kind of that intimate right out of the gate. There must've just been some, some really solid.

Speaker 1 (14:09)
Yeah. Well, you know, they, Jason, Evan and I like didn't, you know, on day one decide to like co-found the company together. ⁓ I mean, it was like a couple of meetings over, you know, I say like a few weeks, but that, you know, that few week period when we were kind of working through some of the details that was probably, you know, year after we had first met. Yeah. And so like there was email correspondences along the way. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And so.

Speaker 2 (14:34)
Whore being built.

Speaker 1 (14:38)
Yeah, I don't know that I would encourage anyone to like... Shock. Yeah, exactly. That'd be almost like getting married three weeks in or something.

Speaker 2 (14:41)
Got it.

Well, that's why I brought it up because again, the theme that we've touched on is, Hey, you know, really spend time with these people. And actually my, my sister is, looking at co-found something and she's been asking about this. I say, Hey, you know, watch her listen to my podcast. The show with Rob Taylor, who's a VC at Silverton partners and who has done a number of companies has, has a lot of valuable insight.

Speaker 1 (15:08)
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:08)
Totally. And I think, I think the insight is like spend quality time with people, get, get to know them. And actually you, you mentioned it, you brought it up. What's the vision for the company? You know, and is it, is it a, you know, long, long-term hold? it, Hey, let's get it to this milestone and then step back for a ⁓ more corporate CEO. Like those are really important questions to ask.

Speaker 1 (15:26)
Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And if you're not aligned upfront, you're going to find out that you're not aligned down the line and it's going to be very painful. Right. And so like, you really want to have like the hard conversations at the very beginning.

Speaker 2 (15:41)
Yeah. So, so I guess, um, you're the CTO, Evan Loomis is sort of the, the, the money guy that the, you fill out?

Speaker 1 (15:54)
Yeah,

I'll try to describe the cast of characters. So Jason is a CEO and he's kind of what some people call like a sales grandmaster. think is like an appropriate way to put it. Meaning if you're the CEO of a company, ultimately what you're trying to do is it's really glorified sales, right? You're selling the company to investors. You're selling the company to employees to come join you on your mission. You're selling the company to potential buyers of the product.

Speaker 2 (16:05)
Quite a title. I like that.

Speaker 1 (16:22)
And so like the thing that you have to be like, you know, best at arguably is, is sales. And so I think Jason is like uniquely gifted at that. And it has been just like, you know, yeah, year in and year out. He's a master killing it on that front. Yeah. Sales grand master. And then Evan is, you know, I think one of, you know, people will say like, who, is like the informal, like mayor of Austin, you could arguably say that Evan's one of these like people you could vote for it to be like,

informal mayor of Austin. like knows everyone. But even outside of Austin, he's got like a tremendous network, which is something that's very helpful when you're starting a company, you know, making calls to, you know, potential VCs, you know, getting your foot in the door. He was super helpful on that front. But then also, you know, when it came to like thinking through winning certain contracts, you know, you could, you know, I know that guy, you know, this particular company, I can help us set that up. He was like very instrumental, I'd say, like on that front.

Yeah. And then I tried to like hold things down on like the technology and product front and like try to build out a team and cool.

Speaker 2 (17:27)
So I think on that topic, your area of expertise from a high level, what is the argument for 3D printing housing communities?

Speaker 1 (17:37)
It's a handful of things, but if you walk onto a construction site today, what you'll see pretty quickly is very little technology. So you've got, you know, people swing hammers in one hand and they got a measuring tape in the other. Arguably like the biggest piece of technology that you have on a construction site today is like a nail gun, right? Which is pretty mind boggling. If you compare that to the way you're building a car, right? Or your shoes or most anything nowadays, right? There's like technology embedded in the production.

And so the result is what you might expect, know, costs are much higher than they should be. Waste is very high. It's very inefficient. And that's particularly an issue because housing is something that we all need. Right. We need housing to be affordable.

Speaker 2 (18:23)
I

think just to rattle off back to it, I read the other day, think, I think there's a 3 million house gap in California.

Speaker 1 (18:30)
California?

Yeah, yeah, shortage shortage. Yeah, and within the United States people say the numbers somewhere between seven and eight million Yeah, and so ultimately it's it's pretty simple, you know supply and demand if your supply is really low But you have high demand, know prices are going up. And so really we have to like build our way out of this housing crisis we have to build a lot of houses really quickly and What's the best way to build something very quickly giant robots? Mm-hmm. And so that's what we built at icon was, you know giant robots that you could bring to the

construction site and build houses in some cases if they're very small within 24 hours and then you bigger houses within a couple days with very little labor required. Right. And so you know there's like an efficiency and cost efficiency you know piece of this. That's one argument especially as like labor becomes tighter and tighter in construction. A lot of people working in construction today are about to retire and tends to be a pretty elder.

Speaker 2 (19:25)
Yeah, isolation. Yes.

Speaker 1 (19:26)
A lot

of young folks don't want to go into the trades. Right. Exactly. Yeah. You the younger folks, they want to go work on, you know, some computer job, right?

Speaker 2 (19:35)
irony is that being electrician is probably the most in demand and pretty lucrative job in the country right now. ⁓

Speaker 1 (19:43)
Totally.

Yeah, it's quite lucrative because there aren't a lot of these folks out there, right? So, know, affordability is like a big piece of why we started the company. I think that's like the main driver. But then if you kind of look at the other benefits that, or maybe I wouldn't say like not fully appreciated at the beginning, but like have become more appreciated with time, resiliency and the way you build is also very important. So if you look at, you know, the Gulf Coast of Texas,

or what happened with Katrina or Florida or the fires in California. You've got houses across the country that are just getting demolished because of these natural disasters. And that's largely because we're building with these very unresilient building materials. Whereas concrete in comparison is very resilient. Our walls, you can throw two by fours at them at 200 miles per hour. We've done this test. They'll hold up just fine.

Speaker 2 (20:37)
We are fun data

Speaker 1 (20:39)
Yeah, those videos are quite neat. you can put these, our wall system within, you can apply fire to them for, I forget the exact stat, but like a ridiculous amount of time. And so that just ends up with a much more resilient process.

Speaker 2 (20:56)
Let me take this point one further, which is, like, of course we have these natural disasters that are coming at us more more frequently. However, to your point also, the building materials, it feels like have gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as it goes. So I have close friends that have bought a house in Austin over the last couple of years, and they're complaining about basic, you know, cracks in walls.

Speaker 1 (21:26)
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:27)
Basic

stuff where, and you know, the home we're in is a 1960s home, different story. mean, built to last. It's almost like the houses that are being built in and around Austin just like aren't really built to last. It's frustrating. mean, that's being a new homeowner, your first home.

Speaker 1 (21:43)
Yeah, exactly.

For sure. Frustrating. Yeah, and there's like so many like layers that you kind of kind of add on to this. Another issue that a lot of people have is like mold, right? Whereas like concrete doesn't mold, ⁓ right? The way like, you know, wood does, you know, concrete doesn't deal with like termites the way wood does. So there's all these like other sort of arguments for this, which is quite interesting. And then the last one I'll just like close on in terms of like, you know, why you might consider doing this. If you have a 3D printer,

building your house, the architectural possibilities are essentially limitless. If you go to the suburbs outside of most of these major cities in Texas, it looks like something out of the Truman Show. Literally. Literally, yeah. lot of people say it's pretty depressing. Some people like it, but by and large, people are looking for something with more character in their home. A home's a little different than a car in that it's somehow like you want it to be unique to your particular

situation and 3D printing allows mass customization, right? That's kind of what it does. Um, you know, on a small scale and it kind of does the same thing on, on our scale as well where, know, you can have each house in a neighborhood look quite different without, you know, additional costs, right? Right. Customization so easy.

Speaker 2 (23:02)
Yeah, and I really encourage anyone that's listening or watching to go check out your website or you got, think you have a YouTube channel. Like it is remarkable what you guys have done. And I didn't know exactly what to expect as far as the architectural design for the houses. They have kind of an organic feel, a lot of them almost. And, ⁓ you know, the interior design has modern touches that you would expect. ⁓ and it's really something to behold. And then needless to say,

when you're watching the 3D printer, I mean, it looks like like a tube of toothpaste.

Speaker 1 (23:38)
It's like almost hypnotic,

Speaker 2 (23:42)
Right.

Yeah. So I was really pulled up the website, did some homework a couple of nights ago and was just wowed. And another plug for the 60 minutes spot. Cause that, that was really neat. I think there's a real case to be made for these concrete homes in the heat. Have you guys tested the cold yet as well?

Speaker 1 (24:03)
Yeah, so printing in the cold is a little harder. Okay. Right, because concrete, you know, it sets based on like the temperature. And so if it's extremely cold, the concrete won't set quite as quickly. So that's like, you know, a technical challenge that the team's working through. The good news is there's plenty of people who want homes in, you know, the Southern Hemisphere, you know, the warmer parts of the U.S. But, you know, when we start thinking about, you know, printing in Alaska, you know, it's that that's a little more challenging. But in terms of like the thermal performance of the wall system itself.

We've done all sorts of analytical tests and experimental tests to validate that the wall actually performs a lot better than a traditionally built wall.

Speaker 2 (24:40)
And this is another interesting topic. So my understanding is that you kind of print the outer wall and the inner wall and then leave grooves for wiring and plucking.

Speaker 1 (24:49)
Yeah,

yeah, this is something that, you know, sometimes people struggle to understand. We print an exterior bead is what we call it and then an interior bead and then within the wall, that's where you place your insulation, your electrical wiring, your MEP, all that good stuff goes inside the wall. Got it.

Speaker 2 (25:05)
So you basically just stuff the installation, insulation in like you would. Exactly. The second question I have is about carbon footprint and, and materials, you know, mostly concrete. I think this would probably be a pretty, we could do a whole other podcast on how you measure that compared to traditional, you know, housing construction materials. How do you look, look at the carbon footprint?

Speaker 1 (25:27)
Yeah, so concrete gets a bad name and this is like one of the things, you know, people sometimes want to ding us on. The problem is like, if you look at this from like, you know, and it's like entirety, what you realize is that, you know, wood's not, ⁓ you know, without its issues. So number one, wood houses don't last as long as concrete houses. So that plays into this. If you need to replace your house, you know, after 50 years instead of after a hundred years, like a concrete built house that plays into it.

the carbon footprint. The second, the waste of material that's used, that you have when you're building a stick frame house, that also is a big

Speaker 2 (26:07)
Like

literally the, that was in the 60 minute bit, literally the waste on site that you need to dispose of while you're building.

Speaker 1 (26:14)
Right. Yeah, because you you got people cutting these two by fours into the right pieces, right? Whereas with 3D printing, one of the benefits is that, you know, for project is going well and you know, machines, ⁓ you know, working as it should, you print what you need and then you're done printing, right? And so waste is reduced, which again, kind of factors into it as well. And so, you know, I won't kind of belabor the whole calculus on this. On an operational carbon basis, so in terms of like your energy bill, every

⁓ month, we are actually a little bit cheaper. So energy consumption is lower on that front. Just because of like the way our wall system is designed with so much insulation. that's like quite, quite neat.

Yeah, that's right. And then on a what we call embodied carbon basis. So this is like the the carbon footprint of building the house in the first place, the amount of carbon that's actually like stuck in the walls, right? Just due to like transportation of the materials and all that good stuff. We're about even.

Speaker 2 (27:17)
And is that because ⁓ creating concrete is energy intensive?

Speaker 1 (27:22)
Yeah, that's right. mean, the way you make cement, which is like the glue in concrete is you have to basically burn limestone. You crush limestone up and then you burn it. And then the output is cement. And that chemical reaction, you know, through burning does release some CO2. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, but what you realize is like no material is perfect. Every material has like its issues. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:39)
did not know that's what cement is.

Speaker 1 (27:50)
⁓ But we think that like on a whole home basis, know, these 3D printed houses actually like perform quite well.

Speaker 2 (27:56)
One that we didn't talk about is repairs, right? ⁓ So, you know, if you're a homeowner and yeah, it's a little bit different than carbon footprint, but you're looking at the investment, you would think concrete is gonna perform better over the course of ⁓ a 30 year.

Speaker 1 (28:14)
Yeah, that's right. I mean, if people are interested, this is where like they should go like to the icon website and learn learn all about that. You know, there's all sorts of videos that show kind of like how to, you know, repair these walls, ⁓ you know, if you need to do that. And, you know, it's actually quite quite easy.

Speaker 2 (28:33)
What was it like? mean, were you literally sort of getting an R &D team together to build these machines? Can you tell us about that?

Speaker 1 (28:40)
My main job at the very beginning was like, let's build out a team. I had a rough technical strategy. It's like, this is roughly what the printer is gonna look like. This is what it needs to do here, the product requirements. But you need a team to help build out the product.

Speaker 2 (28:55)
And how did fundraising come? it challenging or did it go?

Speaker 1 (29:01)
Yeah, yeah. maybe kind of backing up even more. know, the way we got our start was we built a very small house on the east side of Austin, a house we call the Chaconne House, 350 square foot house. So a little bigger than the shed, but still like, you know, at this point, like a proper house, which you'd call a tiny house. And that house, when we built it, was the first permanent 3D printed home in what we thought the United States, but actually turned out to be the entire world at the time. And that

When we put out information on that and these YouTube videos, the videos went viral and that kind of helped us fundraise pretty quickly based on the momentum that we had. Got some funding from that and then we got a warehouse space in South Austin and then I started calling up engineers that I knew and tried to recruit folks to the team and built out a really amazing team. The team back then was just absolutely killer. ⁓ Team is still great today but reflecting on the time that

Speaker 2 (30:00)
And are we talking like a handful of engineers? Like how many?

Speaker 1 (30:03)
I think, you know, at very beginning, almost like, we built up to like a team of like roughly 10. And I think 10 folks built like the initial version of that machine, you know, software engineer, materials engineer, electrical engineer, and some other disciplines. But that was like the core team at the time.

Speaker 2 (30:20)
You

guys built, I think, quite a strong company culture, ⁓ with a really strong work ethic. And I know this from, from being friends with Franco and I mean, he was, he was really committed to that. ⁓ and that, that company mission and Franco, think was like, was a project manager. he was literally working on site with the machines and, and, ⁓ a big part of the job I think was like,

making sure they were pouring accurately, right? And it was a dynamic, it was fascinating because the weather and all of these different elements factored into the accuracy of the machine. was like, my point is an all encompassing job. How did you go about building a company culture like that where people were so in

Speaker 1 (31:10)
So bought in. There's a few things I think we did pretty well. Number one, by like pointing the technology at something that like really mattered, which was like really trying to address housing affordability. I think that attracted the right people in the first place. You know, this mission was like quite grand, quite, ⁓ you know, profound. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, the right people actually applied in the first place. This was not like B2B SaaS, so to speak. Right. That's correct. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:29)
ambitious.

No problem with B2B.

Speaker 1 (31:40)
That's right. And nothing, nothing wrong with it. ⁓ but I think we had the right sort of, you know, people applying in the first place and then, you know, if people weren't a good fit, you know, we tried to like, you know, be upfront with that, you know, if, that was the case, yeah, just trying to be upfront whenever possible before people got there around like the reality of, the work itself. Yeah. You know, it can be very easy to like sell someone when they're still on the other side of the fence, like, you know, cause you want them to work for you. Yeah.

But the challenge with that approach is like, you know, the second they're on the other side of the fence, you know, they get wide eyed and then you're going to want to like, know, or whatever.

Speaker 2 (32:16)
I bet that happened, you know, a couple of times, right? You, you hire someone and they didn't, they didn't really fully understand what they were signing up for.

Speaker 1 (32:23)
Yeah,

yeah. And so, you know, this has like become, you know, almost like I think people do this a good bit more now in Silicon Valley and like in like the startup world around just like being like almost like brutally, you know, honest about like every sort of painful detail that you're going to run into. Right. And I think that's really like the right approach is just like full transparency and, you know, trying to like filter out the right people and or filter out the wrong people and filter the right people through.

Speaker 2 (32:53)
What were some of your favorite challenges, experiences as an early stage co-founder? If you've got one or two that, that you really didn't like.

Speaker 1 (33:02)
One of my fondest memories was when we went to a very remote part of Mexico to build housing for those who really just were living in just deplorable conditions. You couldn't even say that they're living in houses. They were living in, you've got like a piece of woods holding up a tarp. Yeah, it's just really quite awful. ⁓ to get to build houses for those people and then see them move into those houses.

Speaker 2 (33:22)
into

Speaker 1 (33:30)
We partnered with an incredible nonprofit called New Story, who helped fund that work. And that was just, you know, I think I'll be proud about that project for the rest of my life. Yeah. ⁓

Speaker 2 (33:41)
One of the soundbites from Jason, the CEO was that he wouldn't be doing the company if he was only building houses for rich people. It had to be somewhat sort of ⁓ mission driven as far as delivering housing for folks ⁓ that really need it. Absolutely. And by the way, I was going to tie that back to what we were talking about previously about the culture. It's like,

Speaker 1 (34:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:10)
Jason clearly had the vision and communication skills to, to create the entire, the entire vision, the entire package.

Speaker 1 (34:19)
Yeah, so I think that project we did in Mexico was like really quite neat. We got to like, you know, do a little bit more of that in, Austin now. So we built, ⁓ it were in the process of building a hundred homes for the homeless at community first village, which is like a really incredible projects. That's just like an amazing organization and that's been so cool to be part of.

Speaker 2 (34:40)
So Community First for those that are not familiar is I guess kind of like Northeast of Austin a little bit and actually decent bike riding out on that area. But it's this remarkable, essentially a village for people that have been homeless. it's more or less been kind of like a nice trailer park. And there's community aspects like I think there's an outdoor movie theater and

Speaker 1 (35:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:10)
There's transportation that takes folks to and from, you know, work and.

Speaker 1 (35:15)
Yeah, yeah. mean, sometimes you'd think that like an encampment for, you know, homeless people might be, maybe that's not the right term. It's, ⁓ you might think it's not. It's like a village. Yeah. I mean, it's a proper village. That's like super well run, very well organized people. are provided ⁓ jobs, you know, if they need them, they can work within, you know, this village community. If they need a job or if they have a job in Austin, they can commute back and forth. It's like,

really amazing what they've done with that. Yeah. Really tremendous. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (35:47)
And you guys are building a hundred houses.

yeah. Are there, ⁓ I guess challenges that you would call out or, or any, anything about the startup experience that, that, ⁓ yeah, you made it.

Speaker 1 (35:59)
I could

go on for days about like, you know, all the challenges and trials and tribulations. One of the more challenging times was really trying to build up like our initial like fleet of printers and get them like, you know, reliable enough to take on a project, you know, of a hundred homes. That time was quite difficult. We were quite literally like, you know, trying to build like the plane while it's like going down the runway, know, upgrading machines while they're getting deployed to sites, you know, learning on the fly.

trying to take those learnings and like loop them back into the next machine that's going to get built. That breeds a lot of like chaos and ⁓ that was quite tough. Now thankfully things from what I hear are starting to stabilize and they've got like a product that's quite solid. those times which like trying to scale up was quite tough.

Speaker 2 (36:54)
and what were some of the factors that made you want to kind of transition into whatever's coming next.

Speaker 1 (37:01)
Yeah. So, you know, really started working on this project when I was like 22. And just recently when I was 32, I was like, you know, it's now been a decade plus of doing this. It's time for me to like, you know, perhaps think about like what's next. Like this has been a super fun journey, but there are some super competent people at Icon who can take the wheel and, you know, I should, you know, feel like I can pass a baton if that's like what's best for the company. And so, you know, I've been really itching to get back to building.

So like, you know, in the weeds. so, yeah, roughly six months ago, nine months ago, decided to move on to kind of, you know, start my next chapter. And now I'm trying to figure out exactly what that's going to look like, but you know, working on a few things and you know, the folks that Icon are continuing to kill it, you know, continue to like root for them and ensure them on from afar.

Speaker 2 (37:50)
And there's a whole, whole topic that maybe we'll do another show on, ⁓ of icon in space exploration, ⁓ and, and slash military. And I just don't think we have time to get into it. ⁓

Speaker 1 (38:02)
Yeah,

it's all very analogous to like the mainline work. Yeah, it's essentially the same principles. So what you realize like the the approach that's used there is like very extensible to other applications. Super exciting stuff.

Speaker 2 (38:13)
Yeah. And

winning government contracts and, and, ⁓ it's just, it's pretty cool. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:21)
Yeah, yeah, totally. We've now built barracks on six or seven different military bases across the country in a couple of different states. So, you know, it's becoming like, you know, just super exciting on all these fronts.

Speaker 2 (38:34)
your legacy here with pioneering 3D printing homes and then the applications for space exploration, for military, that's a tough act to follow. And how do you feel about being still a young ⁓ man ⁓ stepping into the next phase of your life, the next phase of your career? How has that hit you over the last six or nine months since you've stepped away?

Speaker 1 (39:02)
I there's maybe this thinking that like I have to like do something better, you know, but it's like, where is that coming from? Is that like, you know, the ego inside of me? Like the next thing needs to be bigger and badder in some way. I'm trying to like reject that sort of thinking as much as possible and just really think about like, what do I enjoy doing? What does the world need for me?

Speaker 2 (39:22)
Yeah. Are you thinking about going after another big societal problem? that how you're thinking about this?

Speaker 1 (39:31)
Yeah,

perhaps. ⁓ There's like a few ideas I'm working through. know, the big ambitious goals are definitely like the ones that are easier to get up and work on in mornings. And so probably end up in that direction. But you know, time will tell.

Speaker 2 (39:48)
Do you have any kind of taste of what direction you might, what category, what industry?

Speaker 1 (39:54)
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot more like unpacking construction. If you just look at like, you know, productivity, you know, continues to lag behind all the other industries. There's different ways of like measuring productivity, but however you measure it, construction lags behind by a good margin. I think there's just more to unpack there. Yeah, maybe there'll be the next episode to like, all right, what's next?

Speaker 2 (40:15)
Yeah. Awesome. Well, I also wanted to touch on, we talked about sort of ambition and career, and I wanted to talk about the more personal side of the experience having, you know, created this company where there was a hard charging culture and it's all encompassing. And all of a sudden you have time on your hands and you can, you have more time to yourself and explore whatever.

it is you want to explore and spend your time on. How has that felt? mean, is it mostly positive being like, wow, you know, I've got a full day and I can spend it however I want or what's that like day to day?

Speaker 1 (40:59)
I have not had any issues staying busy. ⁓ I'm the kind of person who needs a little project, needs something to be working on. So I'm not twirling my thumbs, ⁓ playing video games all day or anything like that. I'm definitely learning and prototyping things and building and having a blast doing it. And I'll try to sneak in some cycling whenever possible too.

Speaker 2 (41:21)
Well,

yeah, that's a little, I think, window into your psyche and that makes a lot of sense. So yeah, I mean, we talked about bikes and getting into riding five years ago. What role has that played in the transition out of Icon?

Speaker 1 (41:39)
Yeah, well, you know, I think I ran into the issue that a lot of people run into when they are like really deep into their career and you know, like laser focused on something for a long time, their health just ends up going to the wayside for a little bit. You know, nothing inherently wrong with that, you know, different times of life, you got to prioritize different things. But looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, wow, I need to get into shape. so cycling has been like a great outlet to just pour myself into and getting faster and seeing progress and has been like a ton of fun. So.

Yeah, I'll try to like get some sort of workout either cycling or running in, you know, most every day.

Speaker 2 (42:12)
You've got a race coming up this weekend. You've actually been racing driveway. Can you tell us just a little bit about your racing habit and...

Speaker 1 (42:20)
Yeah, Discover Driveway at the beginning of the year, it's like the coolest thing ever.

Speaker 2 (42:24)
You've been living here for how long?

Speaker 1 (42:26)
Yeah. It's got a couple of years. Yeah. Uh, well I had known about it for a while, but only just recently joined. But yeah, crit racing is, uh, you know, super like, uh, intense and like, you know, it requires your full attention and it was like just an incredible workout as well. Um, so I've been doing a little bit of that and, um, yeah, started, you know, in the very, you know, uh, not as five. Yeah. And then it was a four, um, now I'm a three. So like slowly moving up, um,

Speaker 2 (42:44)
What category are you?

Speaker 1 (42:55)
And, ⁓ you know, we'll, we'll see where I end up plateauing, but, it's been a fun journey.

Speaker 2 (43:01)
What kind of results are in now? Now I'm curious. What kind of results are you getting?

Speaker 1 (43:04)
I've won a couple four or five races. Alright. I didn't know that. Yeah, one won four or five race, is like, which is fun. And then have like done pretty well in some of the three, four races finished like top five and a couple of those.

Speaker 2 (43:18)
That's a quick trajectory for those results.

Speaker 1 (43:22)
Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ but, ⁓ yeah, still more work to be done. There, there are some folks who can really sprint, ⁓ and I just don't have the legs to go with them. Seems to be like, yeah, where I struggle with the most.

Speaker 2 (43:30)
Is that what you're what you're starting to work?

That's interesting and I'm always putting plugs in for Zwift. So literally there's a, there's a race. It's a series of races. It's four races in an hour on, on Saturday and Zwift Insider promotes it. So if you want to get your reps in with sprinting, that's

Speaker 1 (43:54)
That's what I recommend. Yeah. Okay. I'll have to look into it.

Speaker 2 (43:56)
Have

you gotten into Zwift or?

Speaker 1 (43:59)
Yeah, I do is we have to get bit not the races. ⁓

Speaker 2 (44:02)
So I'm glad we bring this up. Zwift Race League starts this fall. And it's at 6.35 on Tuesday nights. So open invitation if you'd like to start Zwift racing. It's a teams of six and we're more or less in like an American division. So you're racing other American teams. Yeah, man, come join us.

Speaker 1 (44:26)
Yeah, okay. Alright, I'll have to look into that. That could be fun.

Speaker 2 (44:33)
What role do you think Austin has played in, I don't know, the success of Icon and your life? ⁓

Speaker 1 (44:44)
It's an interesting question because I think Icon was like, or Austin was a perfect place to start Icon. Like we need land to like prototype things. You got giant robots, you need warehouse facilities. Like, you know, it's, so much easier to build a hardware product, I think here than frankly in San Francisco or the Bay area where like, you know, people maybe like would have started a company like this, the cost of land, cost of warehouses. I think just, but then also like Austin has a little bit of like,

⁓ It's starting to now really have like a pretty impressive number of companies and, you know, ⁓ people working at the intersection of like hardware and robotics. Part of that's because of Elon with, you know, Tesla and SpaceX now kind of being, ⁓ you know, headquartered here. But yeah, I think Austin's been great. you know, personally on my front, you Austin's got like that cool thing where it's like, you can start great companies, do impressive things with your career, but at the same time,

You know, there's great cycling, you know, there's great trails. You know, can be healthy and happy. Yeah. You know, on the personal front, you know, your career doesn't need a, it's not in conflict with the personal. Exactly. Yeah. And so like trying to find a way to marry these two things whenever possible, I think is a possibility.

Speaker 2 (45:45)
Yeah.

doesn't always have to be center stage.

Yeah,

I tend to agree with you on those fronts. And that's a great insight with starting a manufacturing centric business and real estate not being at as much of a premium as it is in New York or in Francisco. Totally, totally. So yeah, I mean, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for being an open book with me. And I almost always end with the same question, which is, have you considered

some of the parallels between bike racing and what it takes to train and, Excel, ⁓ and entrepreneurship and icon.

Speaker 1 (46:43)
Yeah, I think there certainly are parallels. It's not like a question I've explored super deeply, but I think some of the things that come to mind with training for a marathon or, you know, a bike race, it's like consistency matters so much. Like sometimes like all you have to do is just like show up and keep moving the ball forward, you know? It's like just get in the gym and get a workout in. Even if that workout isn't perfect, the same thing kind of happens with like entrepreneurship where it's like

You know, I'm really stuck on this particular problem. You know, it's quite hairy, but it's like today I'm just going to show up and try to move this thing forward and, know, keep my morale, keep my spirits up because it's so dang difficult. You know, if you let the negativity get to you, you know, it's going to be tough. You know, if it's like you're telling yourself, it's like five in the morning and I'm out here on a run and it's kind of cold and it's like, you know, a million excuses to like, to whine about the situation. It's not going to be very helpful. you know, finding ways to like,

Speaker 2 (47:38)
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:40)
stay happy in the middle of like chaos and misery. You know, think there, there's some parallels there between the two.

Speaker 2 (47:47)
I think that's a great one. And I can share, you know, just with the podcast and constantly being on the hamster wheel of turning content around and needing to do it, you know, nights and weekends. Momentum plays a huge role, which is similar to a workout or training. It's like, rarely do I regret doing a workout when like maybe I wasn't feeling up to it.

Or just cracking my laptop and getting 45 minutes of work done. rarely do I regret either one. So I think that's a great call out.

Speaker 1 (48:18)
Totally.

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (48:27)
Alright man, well thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it and I appreciate you coming out to ride with us too. for sure.

Speaker 1 (48:35)
For sure, it's been a lot of fun. Yeah. for the invite.