The following interview is a conversation we had with Jack Oslan,CEO&Co-Founder of Diamond Age, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $58 Million Raised to Build the Future of 3D Printed Homes
Jack Oslan
Appreciate you having me out, Brett.
Brett
Not a problem at all. So, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Jack Oslan
Oh yeah, I’m originally from a small town outside of Chicago. I got lucky. I got to split my childhood between the Midwest and Southern California. My father finally got sick of those winters, so we got a reprieve and got the beach instead. After college I landed in Silicon Valley. I was working in the packaging industry and that’s really where I fell in love with factory automation, watching millions of things get built with machines. It was super know in my tenure in Silicon Valley I was watching all these amazing companies being born and becoming enormous businesses and I wanted to be a part of that. So took me a long time to find the right thing. But I finally found something after about 25 years in the Valley that I was really passionate about. And actually what I found was a problem that really pissed me off.
Jack Oslan
Brett truth be told, I don’t think anybody knows a startup willingly who knows everything that’s involved. So you got to have enough intestinal, fortitude and emotional commitment to stay with it. So I started a company called Plenty back in 2012 in the vertical indoor agriculture space. So that was really my entree into technology. And today after going through the Plenty experience, which by the way, Plenty is doing amazing now scaling the business and probably the leaders in the clubhouse, if you will, in that space. But housing affordability problem found me and so here I am today in a robotic startup, fortunately with a bunch of ridiculously talented people, and we’re driving towards the American dream of hauling ownership for the missing middle class.
Brett
And I saw on LinkedIn that it was the mid nineties. I think that you first made your way to Silicon Valley. Could you paint a picture for us? What was that like in the 90s in Silicon Valley?
Jack Oslan
It was actually earlier than that, Brett. I got there in the mid eighty s and my most fond memory of Silicon Valley back in those days is that you could actually drive up and down the freeways as fast as you wanted to because there just weren’t that many people. You know, these were the days when Hewlett Packard was the company that everybody was talking about, know, their standard bearer and goal was just starting out. So those were super exciting know, like I said, I watched a bunch of really amazing companies be born and then become Bret B2Bincredibly immense businesses and that’s what was super exciting about it. It was really kind of the wild west of technology back in those days. Super fun.
Brett
Yeah, I can imagine. Now a few questions that we like to ask and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder first one. What Founder and CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Jack Oslan
So this may be a little off the beaten path for your audience, but the guy that I found to be super interesting early on was Wayne Heizinga. Wayne Heizinga is famous for starting three incredibly massive businesses without actually inventing anything. So what he did was he perfected the concept of consolidation. He wrote a playbook and he ran it over and over again. He started Waste Management and then took that public and cashed out for a billion dollars. Then he started Blockbuster, grew that, cashed out for a billion dollars and then started automation and then took that public. And the guy was just a remarkable businessman from understanding the dynamics of the industry and how to kind of wash, wrench and repeat a successful model. He was sort of the North Star for me when I built the Pledkate playbook. It was to bring automation to a labor constrained industry, agriculture, and then decentralize it to localize the supply chain.
Jack Oslan
And that’s what we’re doing with Dividage. We’re putting our system in the field to build houses and local communities. So if you got a good playbook, just keep running it over and over again.
Brett
As soon as you said that name, I’m like, I’ve heard that very recently and I figured it out. We’re having a conversation now with his son. I believe his name is Tegan and I think the company’s Energy X or something along those lines and he’ll be joining the Pod. And I was doing my research and I came across his dad and I was reading through that list on his Wikipedia and it was like, holy shit, he started some big companies.
Jack Oslan
Yeah, the guy’s a monster. It’s fantastic.
Brett
What about book? Are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you as a Founder? And sometimes here we talk about business books, but I think the ones that are always really exciting are the personal books that influence how you think about the world. Do any books like that come to mind?
Jack Oslan
Oh yeah. Well, you could have said business books and I’d have given you the same answer. So I actually read this book every single year. It’s by Viktor Frankl. It’s called man’s search for meaning. Frankel was a therapist who survived the Nazi concentration camp and he developed a treatment based on the concept that you can have everything in life taken away from you. But the one freedom that all people possess is the ability to choose their attitude in a given set of circumstances. And I’m not saying that startup life in any way compares to a concentration camp, but starting a company, any company, is fraught with extreme highs and lows and mostly grinding right on the journey, which can be really discouraging and is certainly full of personal sacrifice. So your attitude can be the difference between success and failure. And for me, my attitude is the thing that gives meaning to my life.
Jack Oslan
So this is the book that I share with everybody.
Brett
I have so many genres that come on, who talk about that book. Whenever I take away the option of like, believing startup or the hard thing about hard things, I feel like everyone recommend Edge, this book and people listening are probably annoyed by now because I said the same thing. That’s a book I read like ten years ago. But I need to go back to it because I remember reading it at that time and I was like 22 years old. I remember just reading it thinking like, maybe my life doesn’t suck as bad as I think it does. It really in perspective and really helps you develop the mindset, I think.
Jack Oslan
Yeah, it is all about a Founder mindset.
Brett
Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive into Diamond Age. So I was doing my research for this last night and I threw my computer in front of my fiance and said, look at this is really cool stuff. We talked to a lot of companies that aren’t cybersecurity or SaaS companies, but you’re not a SaaS company. There’s some serious technology here and you’re doing some awesome stuff. So how do you describe what you do to someone?
Jack Oslan
Yeah, so clearly you know that what we do can be complex but really boiling it down. Diamond Age used with robotics to build affordable, energy efficient, single family homes with less labor. We’re bringing affordability to first time home buyers and that was really what inspires everybody at Diamond Age is this is not just domestic, but a worldwide social problem. So we happen to have a bunch of guys in the business who grew up in factory automation and around robotics. And we’re really taking a holistic approach to home building with automation because quite frankly, we want everybody who wants to own a home to be able to afford one.
Brett
And do you help us visualize what that looks like? So let’s just imagine I buy some land and I come to you and I say, okay, I want a home. What happens from there? Yeah.
Jack Oslan
So the first thing that happens is I tell you I can’t do that for you, Brett. Because we work for the production housing industry. So there are all kinds of different products in housing and people don’t understand that. And so really to be successful, you have to sort of pick one and then best in class at it. And because we want to impact as many people as fast as we possibly can, we decided to align with production housing and for more simply that translates to track housing. So companies that build houses in volume, because that’s really the problem today with affordability is there’s not enough supply, too much demand, not enough supply. So that’s what we’re trying to do is get more houses into the market. So we work with companies like Century Communities and BR Horton and Lennar and Pulte and such because these guys build hundreds of thousands of homes and that’s the fastest way to help the market is to go faster.
Brett
And what type of savings are they seeing when they build with Diamond Age versus if they go the traditional route.
Jack Oslan
Of building a home? Yeah, so we’re still pretty early in our development. I tell people that if Diamond Age was a baseball game, we’d be the top of the fifth inning. So we have about 25% of our robotic tools in the field. We’ve pretty much nailed our platform, which is what carries all the robotic tools. And the immediate value that we bring these home builders is speed. So in 2022, when we started building homes for Century Communities, we proved right off the bat that we could build four times faster than they could using conventional construction techniques. That’s a big deal because the cost of capital is super expensive. And if we can reduce the cycle time, give them more turns on their capital, those are real financial leverage that people can pull to make money while still bringing affordability to the market. And that’s our goal.
Jack Oslan
We want to help home builders make more money while lowering the price of homes.
Brett
And is there a cost savings because of labor or is it also in materials? Are there different materials that you’re using or is it just about all about labor?
Jack Oslan
Yeah, so there will be some in materials, but I will call that the appreciable difference. For us, it’s really about driving labor out of the process. So today takes about 3000 man hours to build a house. We believe we can get to 1200, and that includes the people running all the automation, 1200 hours total. So that’s one and then certainly the cycle time reduction are really key to this thing because be able to do this reliably and predictably makes a big difference, especially if your customer is a publicly traded company.
Brett
I was just looking online earlier today and I saw in San Francisco there’s a group called the Safe Road Group and they’re going around and they’re putting cones on all of the self driving cars because that disables the cars. So they’re anti technology. They do it as these self driving cars are going to put them out of work, going to take away jobs. So I would assume you don’t have people putting cones on your machines, but I have to imagine you’re prepared for some type of pushback from people to say, hey, this is going to take away jobs.
Jack Oslan
Yeah. So that is a super interesting point. And fundamentally what we’re doing here is changing jobs in the construction industry. Today, construction is physically demanding work. And if you look at what the world’s economy has become since 1980, we’ve really become a service economy. People don’t want to swing hammers and hold drywall over their head anymore. So by changing that work, by giving that physically demanding work to robots, we’re accomplishing two things. We’re taking that work off of people, but then we’re turning that job actually into a job that is desirable for people. Secondarily, there’s already a massive labor shortage in the home construction space and there has been since 2011. So nobody in home building is going to lose their job. We really need a bunch more labor. And because people don’t want to do the work as it exists today, we’re changing the job to make it more technology focused because that’s what younger people are interested in.
Brett
So I guess there’s two components to that.
Jack Oslan
Right?
Brett
One, it sounds like would be upskilling the existing people that are in the job market or in construction. And then it’s doing everything you can to try to encourage young people to pursue a career in construction as well.
Jack Oslan
Is that right?
Brett
Yeah.
Jack Oslan
So it’s actually, we’re trying to make it even easier than that. So the way we think about this is for us to be successful, we need to make the interfaces for our systems so intuitive that I could take a young person out of an Amazon warehouse and bring them to a job site, hand them a tablet and then just let them start to engage with it, just like they would engage with their phone. And that’s really the objective here, is take someone who’s making, let’s call it seventeen dollars to twenty dollars an hour, and give them an opportunity to come into a career path that will pay them significantly higher than that without having a super rigorous training site to it. Right. It’s tap into their natural curiosity and then really it makes finding the right people come down to good attitudes, good work ethic, and cultural fit.
Jack Oslan
Today those people are controls engineers. Right. We need that level of skill set to operate. But as we advance every single day, the software interface gets simpler and simpler. So we’re really trying to create better jobs in the low skilled space that are just better for people and lead to more halts.
Brett
And something you mentioned there is, this was a problem that really pissed you off. So what was that like for you? And I’m sure there’s probably other problems that you were frustrated by. What was it about this problem specifically that you said, no, enough. I’m going to go and start another company to tackle this problem?
Jack Oslan
Oh, yeah, dude, let me tell you. So I had no interest in starting another company, right? It is hard. But my son came to me and told me that he and his family were thinking about moving because they couldn’t afford to buy a home. And I might have understood that if he was a car mechanic and his wife was a school teacher, but he leads executive recruiting at Waymo and she’s a pediatric cardiology nurse practitioner at Stanford Children’s Hospital. They make enough money. But it turns out that I was completely disconnected from the problem because I hadn’t bought a house in 30 years. So when I looked at the problem, it became clear that, like a lot of industries on manual labor, the only solution was automation. And that’s when I developed the business thesis and went out and recruited my Co-Founder, Russell Barone, to see if he’d be interested in tackling the technical thesis.
Jack Oslan
So that was back in 2017, and we spent six months driving around Northern California in the Delta area, talking to people in the industry, quite frankly, looking for someone to talk us out of it because we knew it was going to be art and we couldn’t find them. As a matter of fact, the very last guy we talked to was an architect, and he told me, he looked me straight in the face and he said, you have a moral obligation to do this. If you don’t do this, we’re definitely not going to have enough homes in this country. So Russell and I went back and decided were going to give it a go. We rolled up some of our own money, and in February of 2018, we took a small building down the street from Tesla where Russell was working, and went to work. And here we are, five years later, building homes for the 9th largest home builder in the country.
Brett
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Jack Oslan
That can be built.
Brett
Am I understanding that correct? Is there a regulatory element here that’s.
Jack Oslan
Homes from being built. Yeah. So it’s not a regulatory problem per se, it’s a NIMBY problem. Right. N-I-M-B-Y. That stands for not in my backyard. And what that happens is people who are established and have developed significant equity in their homes, they don’t want other people coming in and impacting their area. It’s a super selfish way to look at it. Now there’s ways to solve that people just are not willing to be open minded to. San Francisco and the Bay Area in general is an acute version of that. You’ve got Palo Alto, which has tons and tons of land as you go west. But the area doesn’t even want Stanford to build more student housing because they don’t want more people in their area. So what happens is the production home building industry, big volume home builders, they’re building in areas called excurbs. So you think about it like this.
Jack Oslan
You’ve got a metropolitan area, right? Cities, then we develop the suburbs. And that started when tracked housing started to become popular. Back in the once all the suburbs outside the major metros were pretty well impacted. They had to go out a little further. And now they call this the excerpts and the excurbs generally are defined by about an hour commute from a major metro area. The industry calls it drive till you qualify for a loan because the further away you get from a metro area, the cheaper the housing gets because you accept the commute. So regulatory isn’t really the issue. We know how to build houses, we know how to build all kinds of different housing products here. But it’s really the impacted areas, it’s the existing demographics, if you will, getting in the way.
Brett
Yeah, I think this was the last year it came out and I don’t want to bash him because I’m a big fan of Mark Andreessen, but I think he was being criticized a lot in the know. He had his big thing come out during COVID of it’s time to build and kind of build America again. And then they were trying to build housing in Atherton, where he lives and he was know all these letters to make sure that houses didn’t get built there and I think there are a lot of people criticizing that move. So it sounds like it’s very similar to what you just described. Right? They don’t want yard. Yeah.
Jack Oslan
That is NIMBYism at its super interesting.
Brett
Now let’s talk a little bit about traction. So you mentioned there you’re working with I think was the number nine biggest builder in America, is that correct? Yep.
Jack Oslan
Century communities.
Brett
What other type of traction and growth are you seeing? Are there any numbers that you can share with our audience? They always love to hear about numbers and metrics.
Jack Oslan
Yeah, so let me talk about it in terms of the market size. So the way that the housing industry decides how many homes they should be building. They look at the census data around new household formation. That’s a super easy number to get out on the census gov website. But it basically points to that we need to be building on average about one and a half million brand new single family homes in the US every single year just to keep up with new household formation, right. Multifamily apartments, condos, all that stuff that’s even separate. So there you go. There’s a number of million and a half homes a year. The industry has only been building about half of that on average 700 800,000 houses for like the last 15 years. It’s only in the last couple of years that the industry has really sort of beared down and built over a million homes a year.
Jack Oslan
So we’ve got two problems. The first one is we don’t build enough homes annually. So that unmet demand is now piling up. So the aggregate unmet demand since 2001 is about 7 million homes. We’re 7 million homes short in this country. And that’s got a street value of about $2 trillion, maybe a little more than that. So the annual pam, the annual demand for single family houses is just under a trillion dollars in the United States. And the portion of that the Diamond Age is aligned with is about $430,000,000,000 a year. So these are massive market because it’s a huge asset class, right? Housing is a huge asset class. So there’s a lot of work to do. We have built 15 homes today. We just started building homes last June. When Diamond Age scales here, probably the beginning of 2026, we will put about 12,000 homes worth of capacity into the market annually.
Jack Oslan
So 12,000 homes worth of capacity in 2020, 612 thousand in 2020, 712 thousand and 28. Well, now we got 36,000 homes a year of capacity that we can build. And we’re going to do that on annual basis. And you need those kind of numbers going forward because if you’re going to make up that unmet demand of, let’s call it 500,000 homes a year that were short, it’s a big lift.
Brett
Are there any critics of this approach? I think whenever there’s a really innovative idea, there’s always the laggards in the industry who they don’t want change. Are you facing any pressure in those terms of people in the industry who just don’t want to change, they don’t want to adopt new technologies, anything like that?
Jack Oslan
Well, so two things on that. The first one is every single home builder is experiencing the labor shortage. So everybody’s looking for a way to solve that problem to future proof their businesses. So to that extent they’re open to looking. What’s advantageous for Diamond Age is that we’ve already got the 9th largest home builder in the country as a customer. So we have a peer that is using our technology successfully and selling homes. So that’s really given know, kind of a running start, if you will. And we’ve been super fortunate if all the major home builders in the United States have come to Phoenix to look at what we’re know, the product that we’re building, how we’re building it, and quite frankly, to validate the fact that it looks just like the product that they build today. So what they like about it is that we’re not reinventing the home as a product, right.
Jack Oslan
We’re building a product that looks like a traditional home that they already built. We’re just reinventing the process for building that home. So from that respect, we’ve really lowered the barrier to adoption.
Brett
Well, it’s super smart, right? Because the end outcome is the exact same. Some of the other companies I’ve seen that have talked about the housing crisis, they’re selling like tiny homes or these modular homes. But I don’t want to live in a tiny home, really. I want a big bum. I want to have nice house. I want to have space. I don’t want to have hear everything that’s going on in the home. So I can see how that approach it’s tackling the problem in a different way. But because the end outcome is a completely different house than they’re used to, that’s going to require a lot of change in the industry. I can see why that’s going to be very difficult.
Jack Oslan
Yeah. So the thing that we did that I think is really critical to our success is the founding thesis of the business is that we had to deliver familiarity to all the stakeholders. And there’s three key stakeholders. There’s homebuyers, there’s home builders, and there’s regulatory agencies. So on the home buyer side, we build homes that look like a traditional house. There’s no architectural exploration here. We’re just delivering a home that looks and feels like the home you drew up there. For the home builders, we don’t try and sell them equipment, right? We’re not selling them technology to build the homes. We’re delivering the homes for them. This is a B to B robotics as a service plane. So home builders, their specialty, honestly, is acquiring land, outsourcing the building of the home, and then selling the home. So the problem we’re solving for them is the actual construction of the home on the land.
Jack Oslan
Right. That’s the labor shortage. That is their key constraint. So we’re just being accretive to the way they do business today, and they like that. And then finally, the regulatory people. When we developed our structural system, we knew that we couldn’t bring anything new. Otherwise there was going to be this huge adoption hurdle. So I’d like to say that it was super ingenious of us. It was really more of a happy accident of experimenting. And so even though our houses may be 3D printed and finished with robots, our wall system are easily identifiable in the building code. So we’re not asking anyone to adopt anything new. Everybody can just look at what we’re doing and they can find us in the building code and they go, great, we understand this. Here’s your permit, go build a house.
Brett
So smart and makes so much sense. And I think founders listening in can just learn a lot from the approach that you’re taking. Now, I’m going to move into the final couple of questions here before we wrap. So your last company, I saw you’d raised hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars today, diamond age, as I mentioned, you’re at 58 million. I’m sure you’ve learned a lot about fundraising and raising money. If you had to choose a couple of big lessons you’ve learned along the way that would be valuable for founders to know, what would those lessons be?
Jack Oslan
Oh, boy. So it’s a two part, it’s a numbers game, but you have to understand the numbers right. You can’t just take the spaghetti and throw it up against the wall and hope it sticks. You’ve got to find the right audience for what you’re doing and you have to identify what stage of investment they’re comfortable with. I mean, when I started raising money, there was no such thing as precede. Seed was the earliest you could go, and now you’ve got a plethora of precede. It’s almost like you’ve got to understand the stage of investing. And the other thing I would say is you really got to work hard on your network getting connected to people, because a warm introduction is goal. You can do it with cold calling if you’re really smart about it and make a compelling reason why the two of you should talk.
Jack Oslan
But if you can get somebody who knows your target to bring you forward, it’s just going to be a lot easier because VCs look at thousands of deals and quite frankly, they’re oriented to say no. They are not built to say yes. So those are a couple of things I think that would be good housekeeping things to keep in mind.
Brett
What do you think is the most important skill for a Founder to have to be successful?
Jack Oslan
Well, I mean, it’s to understand that you can’t do it yourself. It used to be that you could be an independent Founder and get funding like back pre 2000. And then it became you need a Co-Founder. And then it became, well, if you have more Co-Founders and you all have sort of disparate skill sets, that gave investors more confidence that the team came with the requisite skills. To run a good business, it’s not about just having a good idea. You have to execute. I have said this over and over again. There are a million good ideas out there, but there was only one 10th of 1% of execution. And it’s the other reason why you find VCs like Repeat, Fowder, even founders that have failed the first time, because that’s better than an MBA, because a good Founder will have taken all those.
Jack Oslan
Hard lessons and infertilized them and make damn sure they don’t repeat them. So it’s really having a good business Co-Founder and a good technical Co-Founder is really table stakes anymore. And then if you can expand on that even more, you’re embarrassed.
Brett
And final question, let’s zoom out ten years into the future, is there a big number you’re working towards? How many homes do you want to have built ten years from today?
Jack Oslan
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, look, we talked about the fact that annually we’re short a half a million homes in this country. We’d love to solve that. We’d love to go past that because as I mentioned, there’s this 7 million aggregate unmet demand and growing. So we’ve got to catch the annual unmet demand before we can start to tap into that. Today, the largest home builder in the country is Dior Horton, and they just had their largest year ever. In 2022, they built 82,000 homes. That’s a long way from 500,000 homes a year. So we think about Diamond Age not so much as a home builder, but a manufacturer of homes working with developers who sort of do the other parts of the component. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that Diamond Age could do 500,000 homes a year. If you get a technology platform that is scalable and deploy it for all the players in the space, that’s a win.
Brett
Amazing. I love it, Jack. This conversation has been so much fun. I’ve gotten so much value out of it. I’ve learned a lot and I know the audience is going to as well. If there’s any founders that are listening in and they want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Jack Oslan
Yeah, so diamondage3D.com, there’s some super interested stuff out there. If you go to the Diamond Age LinkedIn page, there are always new videos popping up there of robotic tools that are hitting the field or some new things we’re accomplishing in the sequence of construction. And certainly on the investor side, we’re raising now. Brett, and if anybody would like to chat, you can reach me at chat at diamondage3D.com. So happy to talk to folks.
Brett
Amazing. Jack, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Again, really love this conversation. It was so much fun.
Jack Oslan
Thank you, Brett.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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