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From Industry Insight to Category Leadership: How Northspyre is Transforming Real Estate Development

Most startup origin stories begin with founders spotting an opportunity from the outside. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, William Sankey shared how his journey to founding Northspyre emerged from years of firsthand frustration as a real estate developer.

The insight came while working on Madison Square Garden’s billion-dollar renovation. Despite being surrounded by industry veterans, William noticed a critical inefficiency: “these people are the very best at what they do, some of the very best in the industry, but they spend a lot of their time doing a lot of tedious administrative work.”

This wasn’t an isolated problem. As William moved between development firms, from family offices to private equity-backed companies, he discovered a universal truth: “all these companies looked completely different on the outside, but on the inside, in terms of how projects were delivered, everybody was leveraging convoluted, error prone spreadsheets.”

Rather than immediately launching a startup, William took an unusual approach. He spent three years learning to code at night while continuing his day job in real estate development. This dual perspective proved invaluable when building the initial prototype that would become Northspyre.

The market validation came from an unexpected source. The Museum of Modern Art in New York became their first customer, taking a chance on Northspyre for their $400 million expansion project. As William recalls, their champion at MoMA said “I was just getting ready to hire a couple of people because this project is pretty massive… but you know what? I’ll give this a shot and if it doesn’t work, I’ll hire those people.”

This early win validated their core hypothesis: real estate developers were ready for technological transformation if the solution truly understood their needs. William credits their success to maintaining deep industry expertise within the company: “we have quite a few people on our staff that have actual hands-on experience running and delivering projects. They really get it. They haven’t just done a few user interviews.”

The approach wasn’t immediately obvious to Silicon Valley. William recalls being “ejected twice by Y Combinator” in the early days, “back before it was obvious that vertical SaaS was going to exist in every major industry.” Even smart technologists were skeptical, believing real estate developers were too wedded to their spreadsheets.

But Northspyre’s traction has proved the skeptics wrong. From their New York beginnings, they’ve expanded to manage over $125 billion worth of projects nationwide. Their platform now helps deliver everything from massive sports arenas to affordable housing developments.

The future vision extends beyond just replacing spreadsheets. As William explains, “I hope five years from now that we’re leveraging that platform that we built to do these other incredibly ambitious things around data.” They’ve already begun this evolution, recently launching a product that analyzes $125 billion worth of project data to help developers better understand market costs and vendor performance.

This expansion into market intelligence addresses what William identifies as the two core reasons projects go over budget: “One is execution error… we can fix that with the product as it exists, but with data around the market that we’re going to feed back to you, we can also help you make the right assumptions because the other reason is the budget was wrong to start with.”

William’s journey offers a powerful lesson for founders targeting enterprise markets: sometimes the most valuable startups don’t emerge from spotting an opportunity from the outside, but from living the problem and having the technical capability to solve it. As he puts it, “I hope that we’re in that position, but that we’re leveraging that platform that we built to do these other incredibly ambitious things.”

For an industry that builds our cities and shapes our environment, that ambition could transform not just how projects are delivered, but the very nature of our built environment.