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Key Takeaways Real-world observations and close communication with your customers allows you to create solutions addressing genuine needs rather than hypothetical problems.
Staying close to the workflow and customer experience is a proven tactic for effective problem-solving and innovation in business.
Every founder I know has a story about the moment things finally clicked.
For Airbnb, that moment came when the founders realized their struggling platform didn’t have a business problem — it had a customer problem. They stopped coding, flew to New York and started visiting hosts in person. What they found wasn’t surprising in hindsight: Hosts struggled to photograph their spaces and communicate clearly with guests. So the founders picked up cameras, took better photos and helped hosts tell better stories. Revenue doubled in a month.
That story has always stuck with me — not because it’s about hospitality, but because it’s about humility. The moment they stopped guessing and started listening, everything changed.
I recognized that truth because I’d seen the same pattern play out in a very different place. Before founding BuildOps, I spent years in construction and real estate development, managing large projects, walking job sites and working shoulder to shoulder with contractors. I saw how much of the economy depends on their work. But when I began running projects myself, I also saw how far most technology had drifted from the realities of the field.
These weren’t small operations. Many were doing tens of millions of dollars a year — keeping hospitals running, schools open and power flowing to critical facilities. Yet they were coordinating all of it through text messages, spreadsheets and aging software. Dispatchers juggled constant calls while technicians waited for updates. Invoices lagged for weeks. Critical data lived across half a dozen tools that didn’t talk to each other.
That disconnect between the importance of the work and the limits of the tools was the spark for BuildOps.
The leaders of these companies weren’t asking for flashier technology. They wanted clarity. They wanted systems that helped them see their business clearly, communicate faster and stop losing time to the noise between teams. So we started where the work happens.
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