187: ‘It’s Just Poly’s on a Map’, with Rob Asher and James Blackwood

187: ‘It’s Just Poly’s on a Map’, with Rob Asher and James Blackwood

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in today's episode I welcome Rob Asher and James Blackwood. Rob and James are co-founders of Giraffe, an incredibly powerful web-based 3D platform that combines design, mapping and financial tools to reimagine integrated design and development. In this episode, we explore the topics of rethinking data process and innovation and discuss the challenges of redundant work, the myth of spontaneous innovation inside firms, the value of knowledge retention and how purpose-built tools like Giraffe are transforming how architects access information during the design process. Rob and James share their personal journeys. Rob, coming from architecture and James bringing his data and analytics expertise to becoming tech founders, offering insights into software design, user behavior, what it really takes to build a more sustainable and creative architecture practice. A key theme from this conversation, which connects to many other TRXL podcast episodes is the need for technology that integrates design across commercial, technological, governance, and cultural dimensions.

Too often our tools force separation between these aspects, making it nearly impossible to design in a way that reflects real world complexity, that not only influences and constrains the design of a project, but also exists beyond the property lines of a site. Rob and James are working to change that, and their vision is one that could reshape how we think about integrated design and delivery at scale because Giraffe is not just another design app. It's a tool that builds tools.

And as you'll hear in the conversation today, it's a pretty clever and simple way to implement and scale distributed computational design. And the timing couldn't be better because they've just launched a new core product for single users of the Giraffe platform, which makes it incredibly accessible at 45 bucks a month.

As usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes, so be sure to check those out. You can find them directly in your podcast app if you are a paid supporter of TRXL+, and if you're a free member, you can find them on the website, which is again TRXL.Co. Lastly, you can really help the podcast by sharing the episodes with your colleagues and by commenting and sharing my LinkedIn posts You can also leave a comment over on YouTube and engage with me and the other listeners there, and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this episode. So now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Rob Asher and James Blackwood.

I'm very excited to have team Giraffe here on the podcast today. I'm joined by Rob and James. Welcome to the show, Rob. Great to have you back and I'm glad to talk to you on the podcast officially. James, this is gonna be fun.

Rob Asher: Thanks for

James Blackwood: Thanks Evan.

Evan Troxel: Rob, us your story to kind of set the stage here, because this is, I, I think it's emblematic of a lot of people in the industry and a lot, I, I don't, I don't know how to put a number to that, but at least people who listen to this podcast, I think are very much going to be able to see a, a commonality, a common thread in their lives to what you've gone through.

But I would love it if you could give everybody that story so that, that gives us kind of the jumping off point for this conversation.

Rob Asher: Yeah. So I started, uh, as an architect, um, at a tier one, sort of a classic big office in Sydney, um, which was called FJMT at the time, which was a de a design driven office. I think the year after I there, they won the World Architectural Forum Building of the year for this museum in, in Auckland. I think last year they won it again for a school. So design excellence and. And in Australia we do a lot of design competition. There's a sort of, you get a, an FAR bonus if you go to competition. And so you do these, uh, three-way like head-to-head competitions, very short, intense, um, sort of six to 12 week design competitions, which, you know, no sleeping classic architecture, which I, I really enjoyed.

Exactly. Yeah. Um, so big ego design excellence, highly intense going for the big prize. Normally in core markets are doing towers or museums or something very, yeah, right in the city center. That was, you know, a lot of eyes on it. A lot of, you know, the, the, the city and the officials and the client and everyone had really high expectations. basically the reason I got into the design sort of excellence competition side was because of grasshopper. So I did a maths degree well as my, my architecture degree. so very shortly after starting,

Evan Troxel: wait, wait,

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: What?

Rob Asher: Yes. I didn't know what to do at leaving school, so I did, I did maths, so pure maths, which has actually turned out to be amazing because

Evan Troxel: I

Rob Asher: that, that way of

Evan Troxel: time, like, okay, so everybody who was in, uh, high school, or I don't, I don't know if this is still the case, but every counselor always said, oh yeah, you gotta have a lot of math if you wanna go into

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Evan Troxel: was engineering, they had no idea

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: they were actually talking to some, they didn't know what an architecture degree was.

They just made these kind

Rob Asher: yeah. They like, it's left brain or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: so did you take their advice, or, or you were just good at it, or, or this was just something, like you said, you just didn't know what you wanted to be kind of a thing. You didn't know

Rob Asher: And my family is very mathematical, so it's kind of like I had to, you know what I mean? So my, my dad and my two brothers, I sort of, not, not, not, not, yeah, as in, yeah, I was like always the English guy, like the artsy guy. But, um. But no, so I did the maths was, I did a very high level of maths, which, which, so you start off maths, very concrete, like, you know, like vectors and, and things you can actually visualize.

And very quickly, like by year two and year three, you're talking about spaces and operations and it's so abstracted you don't, and I was not good at that. Like I actually really like the, the concrete space, like, you know, the, the dimensional stuff. So I wasn't, I wasn't particularly, I, I could get through, but just, but that, that, that process and that way of thinking about how do you abstract a problem, how do you make it as simple and as general as possible? Is, is essentially like, you know, you can see that in Giraffe. Like that's basically what we're doing. And it's like, you know, it's almost the opposite of, of where software normally goes. Like if we think of. People talk about digital twin, it's always funny to me. I just sort of, this is an aside, but the mesh models are more complicated.

There's more polygons, there's more features, there's more, there's more, there's more, there's more. And like, what are you describing? Whereas in mathematics or physics, like a whole branch of physics will collapse down into like e equals mc squared, and there's four other equations. And once you've got that, you've got it all.

Like we've, we've made it simpler and more abstract. And so it's, it's more useful. Whereas we

Evan Troxel: maybe

Rob Asher: It's more Exactly. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: far as the concepts and the foundations go.

Rob Asher: And they, yeah. So the, the better, you know, something, the simpler it should be, the more lightweight. Whereas so often, and software like version 20 of the software as opposed to version one is like more cumbersome, more features, more boltons.

Do you know what I mean? It's like the other way. So, so trying to really get to simplicity. Is basically what, like what maths is. It's simplicity. The other side of complexity, you can't sort of, you know what I mean? It's very, it's not like you can ignore the complexity, but when you really get your head across it, can find simplicity. So I did the maths and I, I sort of got into the profession probably about 2011 it was a Mac, there was generative components at the time, which I think was coming out of the Foster's computational design group, or at least Allied. And so I spent one summer holidays learning that. I absolutely like clicked on that. Um, I think that was on Microstation. It was very old school looking, got back and, you know, had to battle with Got Grasshopper and then basically just, you know, my mind exploded. Loved it. And, and basically then grasshopper on design excellence teams, like as in Grasshopper for design. So not doing sort of engineering interop stuff that sort of came later. As in beams and, and parabolas and you know, these complex geometries, but more it sometimes doing that if it was gonna help us win the competition. But sometimes just doing area schedules or, or much more Giraffe looking stuff. You know, very simple stuff.

Evan Troxel: and so I, I'm just curious to, to drag this out a little bit more, like what was your experience moving into the profession? I mean, it sounds like you were able to pursue kind of that trajectory because is it because you were doing competition based projects, or, or is it really like, and then I'm just curious, like where did that lead you to in, in the profession and kind of your overall feeling about it?

Rob Asher: I, I would say I have design ability, but really the reason I was on those teams was 'cause I could do the complex geometry. So if the design director was like, we need the roof to just do that, then I could make it do that. Do you know what I mean? And then he, you know, and especially, you know, with the sliders in Grasshopper where you, you're changing a parameter and then seeing a change in real time, it's a very, you know, it's, it's, it's like a drug for a design director because they can see the thing working, right?

Evan Troxel: sitting there and they're like, a

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: a little bit that, you know,

Rob Asher: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: out there where it's like the guy's telling, sitting over the shoulder and

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: the toilet, you

Rob Asher: exactly.

Evan Troxel: a time.

Rob Asher: Exactly.

Evan Troxel: it's, it is a drug

Rob Asher: Yeah. But, but, but what was really good is the design director I was working for. As he was doing, uh, uh, I learned a lot around what the actual job is because he would sit over my shoulder and he would be practicing the story that he would have

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Rob Asher: the jury, the design jury.

And he'd be like, okay, so what we'll say to the cost guy is this, and if he says this, we'll say this. And then what we're gonna say to the city is that, and okay, can you move it like that? So then if he asks about that view, then we, he was building an argument with,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Rob Asher: he was building a narrative and he was,

Evan Troxel: audiences.

Rob Asher: exactly.

And, and not only one, but he had like levels of response, as in he'd war gamed out every, you know, little eddy that he could get trapped in. And just knowing, again, coming back to the simplicity, he wasn't gonna tell that whole story like from notes, but he had the whole story there. He was just gonna show the pictures and if he got blocked and, and seeing how profoundly import narrative and concept is to the actual business of architecture.

It was very, very cool. So I was working on my computer coding away and then getting the narrative over the top of my head. Um, and that was a great, yeah. Intro to the,

Evan Troxel: curious because before, before we move on to James here, like, like that experience for you. I'm curious how that worked. Its way back into like the tooling, because the, like flexibility in those early stages are so, so, so important. Right? And, and it's like you don't wanna have to remodel stuff all the time.

Rob Asher: no,

Evan Troxel: of those things independently from scratch or, or the pain staking process of, you know, because if you're just brute force modeling, right?

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: gotta remodel or you've,

Rob Asher: yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: likely to break something if you have to modify it. And so kind of going back to this idea of describing intent

Rob Asher: Yes. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and storytelling and narrative that actually being possible through the tools is, I mean that's,

Rob Asher: That's the thing. Yeah. And, and, and that's why like the, the sketch pad, this, I like to talk about this integration. So I often in my, you know, if you go to a very good doctor or an any good professional, they are more calm, They don't come in and they're like, okay, we're gonna do this test and this test and this test and blah, we're like, CAT scan and we'll, 3D scan, whatever.

They're like, okay, right. This is what's gonna happen. We're gonna do this test and we're gonna get the results. Then we're gonna do, you know what I mean? And, and, and they, and they slow it down for you and they see the whole journey and they may, you know, have their worries and, but they don't like hit you with it, with this complexity and they stagger it out.

Right. And I think

Evan Troxel: would be crippling. Right?

Rob Asher: it would totally be crippling and the, and the number of times, early stage where like when I was a younger architect and you're drawing and suddenly you're trying to get a core, right. Like get it efficient or something like that. Or your fire escape's not working and then the director comes in and he's like. Ah, yeah. We're not building a residential tower anymore. It's now it's an aquarium. Do you know what I mean? It's like, you know, it's be because it's not sequenced and you haven't fully understood how fluid that early stage of design is, and so you've really gotta match you are. So just take it, take it easy if it's a half a meter out or half a foot there, or

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: worry, we don't even know if there's a scheme yet.

You know what I mean? Like, let's just relax. Um,

Evan Troxel: you'll see architects sketching on trace with

Rob Asher: exactly.

Evan Troxel: in

Rob Asher: Exactly. Exactly.

Evan Troxel: uh, how thick is that? Who cares? Right?

Rob Asher: Yeah. Don't think about that. If you think about that, you're not thinking about the right thing, which will actually cost you. So think that the trace technology, like an internal challenge for us is when does our software become better than trace?

Because trace is still the premium technology for that early stage, I think. Do you know what I mean? It's so good. It's, it's intimate.

Evan Troxel: loose.

Rob Asher: around it, it's fast. You can give the pen to someone and say, we will show me. So in terms of building. Consensus, building that narrative, getting the principles.

It's an unbelievable technology, which is why senior design directors use it to run you, to run their businesses, and you've gotta respect it. It's a superpower. Absolutely. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: and not, there's so many, and, and I think sketching nowadays could mean a lot of things to, to, if, if you surveyed a hundred different architects from

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: to seasoned architects, you would get a lot of different answers. For some people, sketching is grasshopper.

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: sketching is cad. For some people, sketching is 3D modeling, you know, and there's very, there's a lot of different, ver some, for some people it's AI now,

Rob Asher: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: but, but like that really simple, fundamental writing implement. On a

Rob Asher: Yes, exactly.

Evan Troxel: and, and like that is captivating for people to actually sit on the other side of the table and watch

Rob Asher: percent.

Evan Troxel: and unfold.

And you're right, you can hand that writing, implement over to somebody

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: how to use it.

Rob Asher: totally. Exactly.

Evan Troxel: no, I don't know how to sketch.

Rob Asher: No.

Evan Troxel: It's

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I don't care. Like

Rob Asher: That's right.

Evan Troxel: steering wheel drive for a

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: communicate. That's, that's really what we're asking for in those, in those.

It's really

Rob Asher: We we're asking exactly. And, and what it does is it reveals a mind that understands, like if the, if the person takes the page and he says, all right, the most important thing is this, and he starts diagramming, and then we're gonna do that, and then, and it, that, it just reveals a mind with expertise. It's very, it's very hard to hide, you know what I mean?

It, it shows so, so Giraffe trying to be, that, that is like our gold star. And, and

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Rob Asher: the one thing the sketch doesn't do, it doesn't do the numbers. It doesn't calculate. And I think computers,

Evan Troxel: inherently, right?

Rob Asher: that's right.

Evan Troxel: you have a ton of experience and it's like, what scale is that? It's like, I don't know, seventh scale. I don't,

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. So, but, but, but, but the guys with the ton of like the directors that, that, you know, that have that experience, they know it's very interesting. It, it's very interesting when you watch of someone very good and you'll sketch and they'll be like, what scale are you working at?

Like, isn't the scale in your blood yet? Like, what are you doing? So it, it's funny what you can learn, but it doesn't do the, it doesn't do the numbers. And so where I got to is I was building these clusters in Grasshopper. I would say probably what distinguished me from most of the people around me, like computationally designed, was I would just cluster and I would iterate on my clusters. Uh, or, or like, kind of like an Andrew Heumann, you know, where you like write your own code and you have version 1, 2, 3.

Evan Troxel: reusable tools. Is

Rob Asher: Correct. Exactly. Reusable tools because it's very boring. It's not as fun, but man, it's sort of, and it's slow initially, but man, it gets fast. So I would have like Fiso 11 and I had this tool the funny things about being an architect.

Like I could pull the area out. in 30% of meetings, people would say, I don't wanna know the actual area. I actually just want you to say that this is 800 square feet. Like

Evan Troxel: yeah,

Rob Asher: a, so I had this deemed area parameter, which is like, you tell me what the area is and I'll put it in. And it's not the area, but you know, but that's so critical because they're like, we'll get the area right later,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Rob Asher: but if we change the shape of the building to a true area, now what's gonna happen is, you know.

Evan Troxel: focus on that.

Rob Asher: Exactly. And so it's this whole thing around actually sequencing the information. So anyways, I had those and I would sit, the way it ended up was I would sit with the design director in a meeting with a client and the design director would sketch and I would sketch digitally model next to it. I was about half a se, you know, maybe 30 seconds slower. And then the numbers would come out. And after about 20 minutes of that, we'd have a workable 3D model. And then everyone would start looking at the 3D model. then we would be like trying to get the areas right, you know, so they would go concept to model, to, to refinement and, and I was like the offsider and of the design director it was incredible way of running meetings and the client buy-in was, you know, 'cause then the client was, oh, just move that and you do it.

And they see the areas change and they go, Ooh, okay, it's not the ROI need or whatever it is. And, but then by the end, you've done 20 or 30 iterations and you're not doing this thing of, of going back to the office and optioneering and then coming back with options. there we saw, or I learned just the power of sketch, the digital sketch or a 3D model that can actually tell you stuff is, is also an incredibly valuable And I guess that was probably the first time we got some of the essence of the sketchpad into the computer where it's literally you have to use it in front of the client and we still say it.

Evan Troxel: super user to do that, right? Like in real time, 30 seconds behind the DI design director, like you had

Rob Asher: I was a beast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if I was gone, it was dead. It was finished. That's right. And it was 'cause, and there was so much processing there in Rhino in terms of like cleaning up the lines and, and making sure that like, you know, degenerate geo, like there was just all this stuff to make sure it was quick. Um, but, but, and it wasn't even, yeah, if you didn't know Rhino, if you weren't very facile with Rhino, it wasn't that, it wasn't that quick and it was trapped within me. As in I would try and get people to use my clusters and they just, like, my clusters had like 25 inputs, you know, and four outputs. They were just like, no, nah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: So what it meant was I could become my career, sort of did two things. I was like, then by then an associate, so client facing, so I could start, run my own projects, you know, little ones. so rather than going the tech route, I went the client facing route. So used the tech, but I. Design first. And then the other thing I did is started moving with Lucy, who's the one of our other founders into urban planning, strategic planning.

So sort of one step bigger, um, master planning. And that's when you're doing infrastructure and, and rezonings and you're thinking about the city in a much more holistic way. And there you're abstracted over the building. You're like, don't even worry about what the is like, we're just doing like a blob.

Right. And that'll be a school, um,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: which was really fun and, and

Evan Troxel: the property line of like a project. It's

Rob Asher: Correct. It's like multi, it's like, what if we do this one and this one? And they're, the questions of are like, well, what if we bought both properties? Or what if we put a road through the middle of them or, or what if this train station went there?

So it's much more, it's like, it's more Sim City-ish in a way. I mean, you've got these political overlays. It is not, there's huge constraints and challenges, but it's. Amazing to do, and I recommend architects do it just because the code which they're operating within distilled out of this design, you know, urban process. then it falls down into code and then that falls down into the buildings that they're designing. And I think seeing that full stack is very helpful.

Evan Troxel: Rob, do you think we've made James wait long enough?

Rob Asher: I think so. Yeah. I can see him just absolutely desperate to climb it.

Evan Troxel: He's antsy. He's, he is over here

James Blackwood: Oh, I'm loving it. I love, I love listening to Rob talk and it reminds me of, um, when we start, when I first got intro to Giraffe, you know, Rob and I actually know each other from, uh, when I was working at Tableau and Salesforce and I was doing these large. Enterprise data transformations with, you know, big Australian clients, which to me, with massive companies, but you know, on a global scale aren't, I guess aren't that big.

But, um, we all lived in this house together and Rob's brother John, who is a part of Giraffe, we were all living together. And I remember a lot of those conversations had this element to them where it's, the conversation's fascinating. And I love listening to Rob think because he has this first principles brain, uh, and everything is an interesting observation to Rob.

So people are fascinating to Rob and I as a friend of Rob, you're like, oh, it's very stimulating. So it's like a nice, um, culture to be a part of. And I remember when Rob first showed me Giraffe, it was that thing you were describing earlier of looking at a master plan and talking through it live. And Rob was just doing a little demo of drawing on a map.

I mean so simple and drawing like lines of, um, corridors that you wanna preserve or view access that you wanna preserve. And then drawing and seeing the data update. And my brain went like. Holy moly, I understand this completely. 'cause what I was doing at Dr at, uh, Tableau was that for massive organizations, but with these huge data sets that they had no idea how to get any value out of.

And they need a visual, concrete way to tell the story about what's in that data. And when they have that within their organization, it's crazy what it does for culture totally transforms their culture and explaining to themselves what's already happening in the business. You know, there is like a intuition that good business people have about what's happening, but their ability to tell the story with good facts is totally limited by their ability to process huge amounts of data.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

James Blackwood: you give them a tool that's easy to use, that's visual, it lights people up. And so when I saw Rob do that with Giraffe, I was like, I get it. I mean, you need to give me a job, basically. And that was the genesis of this. And you know, I'm the last, really, the last founder I guess, or the first employee, however you want to describe it.

The last one in. Um, so to speak. But man, I, I am the, uh, I got so excited about it. I remember my first kind of, uh, conversations with clients were totally overwhelming 'cause I didn't really know the sector very well. I know data and I know I knew, um, I know the power of being able to tell a good story, but

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: learning the the sector was a real challenge for me.

And, uh, you know, that's a whole story in of itself. But I've become a huge fan of architecture. And so even as a kid, I wanted to be an architect and, uh, a civil engineer is what I started studying at university. But data is really the unlock for me, and I love watching what data does for, um, our clients.

And seeing Giraffe as a data tool is really, I think, the essence of what it actually is. It's a giant database. So that's, that's what, how we got started. And I guess it's been five years

Evan Troxel: I would love to hear just that you explain, because maybe there's people out there who don't know what Tableau and Salesforce are from like, a, a nuts and bolts, kind of like knows Power BI most

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it's, it's, there's a lot of Microsoft shops out there. I'll just

Rob Asher: Oh, Evan,

Evan Troxel: But.

Rob Asher: how could you

James Blackwood: Oh yeah.

Rob Asher: beer?

James Blackwood: Power bi. It's just offensive.

Evan Troxel: talk about what

James Blackwood: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: so that people understand where you're coming from.

James Blackwood: yeah, sure. Okay, so Tableau, oh gosh, you're, take me back. I need to remember my elevator pitches, but,

Rob Asher: got it James.

James Blackwood: okay. So before Tableau I was building, uh, Excel models as a consultant for. Anyone who needed one. And my last job was a, uh, looking at a commission statement for a financial advisor. And I'd build these massive pivot tables, which would then say, you know, if the legislation changes with X, what's that gonna do to our trailing revenue stream?

And that Excel model took me probably two weeks of solid thinking to build and what the outcome of that was. A, uh, messy table that would break every time. You know, we needed to put a new data dump into it. Um, but it was functional.

Rob Asher: Yes,

James Blackwood: Yeah, exactly.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Yeah. Or, or like any master plan area schedule where you have that much data coming out of the model and then you have to like figure and then.

As soon as you have to do any different kind of question, you're like, oh crap, I have to re-engineer this whole thing from the get go. You know? Any different question you had? So what Tableau was, and Tableau's pre power bi, and there's a whole thing we can talk about there that, you know, power BI gives me sort of the sweats late at night.

Yeah, that's right. Tableau was first and uh, uh, basically what it is, it's a piece of technology that looks at a data set, breaks it down into its, um, smallest components, and then allows you to reassemble it as a graph first, as a visual. They invented a language called VisQL. It's basically just SQL that turns, uh, drag and drop functionality into a, into a graph that can help you explain the dataset.

So finding trends becomes a visual exercise as opposed to a,

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: a coding exercise or a writing.

Evan Troxel: incredible, right? Be for, for people who are, I mean, people are amazing at pattern recognition

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: be able to assign sizes and shapes and colors and have things triggered by different variables. You know, conditional kind of formatting stuff, but, but very visually, not just changing the color of a cell right.

James Blackwood: Yes, exactly

Evan Troxel: But man, like what a, it's like, I, I imagine like when, when, Rob showed you Giraffe, like you probably had a similar moment when you went from like excel to Tableau.

James Blackwood: I did. Yeah. And actually that, that was my sort of other software aha moment, where I was like, I need to work for a software company. 'cause this is unbelievable. What's happening here is game changing and yeah, it's exactly right. I had, I plugged in the, the, Tableau, 'cause it's a desktop tool, you know, super old school, uh, to the dataset that I'd done with that.

Financial advisor on their commission plan. And I was like, oh man, I could have answered that question in an hour, and then I could have answered a hundred other questions that the guy even had didn't ask me that would've been massively, you know, value add to his business. And so I thought, I don't wanna do spreadsheets anymore.

I wanna go work for that company. And so, like I did for Rob, I, I called them and was like, I wanna come work for you. And I chased them down for a job, um, which they eventually gave me. So that was a, and I loved that job. I loved that company. And I saw the same thing with, uh, with Giraffe and what, what Rob's done and, and the guys had done.

Evan Troxel: Well, Rob, maybe now we can shift into your shift of the profession and your experiences that you got up to that point to becoming a software developer, basically. Right? Like you turned into a startup. I, I mean, that story again, kind of a common thread probably, or at least a, a, a thought, maybe a fleeting thought for many audience listeners who are hearing your story like they, you

Rob Asher: They're like, I'll do it. I'll do it.

Evan Troxel: Well,

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: architecture isn't quite what we all thought it was gonna be when we were in school, right? Like

Rob Asher: No,

Evan Troxel: so, so anyway, I, I want you to tell that,

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: bit of the story.

Rob Asher: Yeah, I think, I think that's exactly right. Architecture is, it's a, it's hard, it's a hard profession and it's a profession that I think is, it's not lost in the modern world, but it's, it's changing so quickly in terms of the fees are gonna, the contractors and the da da and it's just, it's just a very, it's very, it's very hard.

I think it's one of the most important professions in the world, as in, because we're, we are living on an urban planet and we're urbanizing the planet. It's like we're terraforming earth

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Rob Asher: architects are basically doing that. And if we do that badly, like that's earth, terraformed, um, and if we do it well, that's, you know, that's incredible.

So I, and architects hold, I think, an absolutely critical function of like, how do you make design, how do you make this human centered? How do you do this well? the profession is so overwhelmed with like, just doing area schedules and yeah. Blah, blah. And so it's, it's,

Evan Troxel: Busy

Rob Asher: I sort of looked at it as systems problem. Was going, could do say 10 great buildings or precincts or something, I could set up a firm. not, you know, as I'm very, I dunno, after my maths degree, I'm more comfortable with the computer than with like, client facing work. So, so you go, okay, strengths are, I see this systemic issue, this problem, and I want to make city making better.

And I think the tooling is, is one area where we can contribute. you know, it's not like we're gonna change the, the entire thing. It's not like Giraffe will solve the problems, but this is where we can work really hard and really well and do something really good. knew that was, I, I could feel that. And I had this, you know, I was speaking to clients, I was using my, like my Rhino version of Giraffe to do gigs and deliver them in, in ways that were just blowing people's minds. And so I had this strong feedback that what we were doing was new as and, and people were loving it. And so I thought, okay, let's do it.

And we went and we, we went through a startup accelerator, which was really good because it gives you this whole kind of, just a different paradigm, like this kind of vc, you know, hype machine paradigm, which we didn't fully buy into, um, but was very helpful, um, and very useful. Uh, we, we'd never taken VC because I think property, I think property's too slow for vc, fundamentally, like, you know, you can go to like a property company and, and like someone's made their career on two deals, you know what I mean?

It's taken 'em 10 years to do that, and then, whereas vc like they, you know, it's much quicker. So, but it was really useful seeing that that ambition and that kind of, that whole sector is like they, they're ready to like smash things and just do stuff and then, and, and started the business so that, that was happening.

But the fundamental thesis was that the tooling is broken, right? Is that, that the, the architectural stack is broken we need to build something. That is, is better. And it's very hard to explain. 'cause at the same time, I'm talking to James and I'm getting this kind of down enterprise view of what data is and how decision making works within corporates and what's a corporate, just a large body of people.

Right. then I've got my bottom up, like art, black t-shirt architecture, sketchpad kind of artist's view of the world. And it's all kind of stewing. And we're making a product that is very, very disparate, as in, it's a database, it's on the map, it's a sketch tool, it's an areas tool. We, we want, we're trying to, we're trying to basically put in grasshopper in there as well so that people can code on top of it.

And so technically it's, it's very challenging. And so we sort of hit the market with this kind of hot mess as in, it's, it's cool, what

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Rob Asher: not, not

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Rob Asher: Um, and I mean, and it's really cool. Like you can tell, because like even the word I'd use now is integrated, integrates so many factors. As in if you don't, know, there's that Sarinnen quote like design a door handle in a room, in a building, in a city.

Like just expand your scales. And then people open Rhino and it's just a gray box. And then they're like gonna Google maps and like screenshotting and then like scaling in a satellite image or, or even the newer tools or like sketch up, you click and it cuts like a square out. Whereas we were like, let's just put it on the map.

Let's just get everything in. Let's turn that inside out. So you're always on planet earth. And wouldn't it be cool if you could see all of your projects all of the time? 'cause you know, even like in in the design firms I worked, it's like. the projects are just in the, in the p drive or whatever it is.

Like they, you know what I mean? And, and people would be like, oh, didn't we do a project in Parramatta two years ago where someone actually got this survey? Like, where's that? Was it 2 1 9 4 4 3? You like, I, I dunno, that data's gone. It's finished. Whereas we were like, all the projects in Giraffe on the map.

So you just, you're like, where's that Paramatta project? You just go to Paramatta and you see that project. There it is. And you grab the stuff and come back. So we were like reconceptualizing at a very fundamental level, how, how you interact with the, the database. 'cause it's just a database. At the end of the day, it's just polygons.

It doesn't matter if you're Rev, it doesn't matter who you are, it's just polygons on a database. you've gotta come up with a special name for BIM 2.0, whatever. It's, but it's just that, you know, and so, so, so I don't know. There was all this potential. And basically what happened then we, we thought, okay, let's take this to the architects.

And the architects were like, we. We've got so much software we are not getting anymore. Um, but we have this insight mainly coming from James around, the actual, the corporate problem of actually pulling this information apart in an a EC space, when you're talking about property is unsolved, like 'cause Power BI and, and Tableau, there's all these, there's massive amounts of capital in invested in software that helps corporates pull their data apart, but not in AEC. And, and the opportunity is that all the BIM vendors like Autodesk and Nemetschek are on the technical side of the fence. And so they're going more and more deeper and deeper and further away from the corporate. As you know, the tools are more complex and heavier, whereas there's some person, and I tell you right now, somewhere on planet Earth, someone is doing a billion dollar deal.

I. And they're doing it on if you are lucky, Bluebeam and a hand calculator. Do you know what I mean? They're going, I can fit a rectangle this big on this site. I haven't spoken to an architect and I'm gonna option that site up right now. As I said, they're so thin and there's no tools to support them. And we realized that, you know what we'd had built over here in techno land, you could sort of sling out into enterprise

James Blackwood: actually.

Rob Asher: It is

James Blackwood: I, yeah, I was, you know, we, in that first year, we probably did, I don't know, hundreds of conversations with people, architects, engineers, developers, government people, and I could not believe how underserved that. Um, corporate side of the fence was in terms of technology and it's amazing.

Like there's not much they need to do great deals. They've been doing great deals for a while, but there's still so much risk at that top end of the

Rob Asher: Mm-hmm.

James Blackwood: and very little digital tools to do it. And at Bluebeam, you know, I was fascinated, I listened to your Bluebeam episode 'cause it's so fascinated by that tool is for sure, uh, used.

And so there's this kind of stigma of I don't wanna draw. But then if you actually double click on what they're doing, they're all drawing something at some point somewhere. 'cause if they have to think about it spatially, 'cause it's a spatial problem first and foremost, it's like where am I gonna put my 70 by, you know, 150 box and it needs to fit here or here or here or here or whatever.

And so it actually is like, uh, uh, the same problem just to a different audience and early. So when we struggle to like get, um, penetration with architects who've got great tools and there's a lot of Robs out there who think like Rob and are building their own tools. Because we were a bootstrap company and we were trying to, um, you know, make ends meet, we went to where the opportunity was.

And that was our first kind of big traction of, um, funding the, the business via actually making sales for the first couple of years.

Rob Asher: And that's just zoomed up. I think it's like zoomed out and almost reinforced our. Systemic understanding of the problem. Like if you look at the problem is the planet, or, or, or we say city making, it's such a, such an abstract problem. We, we dunno how to tell it to the market. It's not design because design is actually one step on like a 10 step process. and gotta think about the policy and the financial and the da, da da. And only when you get a full integration of all of those considerations, are you gonna get a good outcome? Are you gonna get a human place? 'cause if it, know, if anything falls over the designer could be excellent, da da da da da, but the code doesn't allow x, it's not gonna happen.

And so I love watching like, you know, these guys trying to get, uh, point loaded stairs allowed and state of Seattle or in America where you have the double stair. And that bit of code has been the most profound designer of, you know, of, of multifamily in America. To change that code, you have to hop out of the, the design bucket and you have to go up the policy bucket

Evan Troxel: Right.

Rob Asher: and it's, and you have to do that like 20 times.

You can't just be like, Hey, I'm a designer. I wait for a brief and when the brief comes, I do great design and then my designers build because that's just, it's just disintegrated thinking. As in, if you wanted to actually do really well, you need to somehow bring all of it together. And the fragmentation, like, so we are crossing this boundary, like you imagine Giraffe, we came as architects and now we're selling to corporates, and we're slowly starting to sort of build this bridge conceptually between these two kind of islands.

And we're finding actually, it's like a whole series of islands and everyone's very fragmented and the opportunity suddenly emerges, like with more clarity of once you bring this stuff together, it's crazy, you know? And it's, it's, there's so much you can do for good design. Like, it doesn't matter what your actual, like, do you wanna make heaps of money?

Do you wanna do great design? Are you go like, whatever your kind of motive is. the things together allows you to do that thing.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: so that's sort of where we, and it's kind of like BIM interoperability. It's like, oh, I've got this file. I need to get it in a Revit, and then I need to put it into ion or whatever.

It's the same kind of thing, except it's just zoomed out. And the difference, I think, is that the, the mental paradigms that people have are, are not, not always commensurate in that way. Like Lumion and Revit and Archicad and whatever, Rhino, they're all describing geometry, building geometry of some in some way.

Whereas a financial analyst and a urban planning policy person and an architect and a retail specialist, they may actually have a different mental model about what the building and the development is like. It may be a cash flow to someone, a building to someone, a piece of, you know, opex, like maintenance problem to someone else. And if you can stitch those. So, so it's like an interoperability problem overlaid with a paradigm split, you know? So you've gotta somehow bring paradigms together and do the data interop at the same time. So again, you can imagine we are two years into this, we're talking this kind of language, which is very mathematical.

You're abstracting it. The market's not understanding what we're, what we're

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: all

Evan Troxel: I, I mean this, this concept of zooming out right is really, really important because what you're talking about as an architect, potentially having a seat at that table,

Rob Asher: a hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: So that they can be part of actually having a chance at changing the world. Because I think, I think if you really were to just generalize and put this across, it's like really hard to do that with one project,

Rob Asher: can't do it with one project. It's possible. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: and for your example of you've gotta do it 20 times to work your way up the policy ladder to actually get the code to change, to do that thing, you actually have to zoom out and be at that

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: of where all of that is being taken into consideration.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: what you're talking about Giraffe doing right, is integrating, becoming the common glue between, or the potential to become the glue at that level so that Really amazing things can happen. Right? Like that's

Rob Asher: that's the point. That's and and that's exactly a hundred percent right. That's so well put. it's, and the re we we're sort of urgent about it because we see it's having such an impact. And also there's just, it's not done at the moment. As in, if you go in an architectural office and you say, show me your projects that will show you the P drive, or, or worse, they'll show you their website with these like 25 megabyte images and you're like, no, just on a map. So and so, you can't go to a policymaker and say, Hey, I've done 45 multi-families in this corridor and I'm gonna show you that the average area is this and if we did this, da da. that's the kind of evidence language that a policymaker would say, oh, I'll do the code change for you now, which is kind of impossible.

The tooling just doesn't allow it. And so. And so the tragedy unfolds because it now, it takes 15 years to change that code. And, and there's 15 years of, of potentially compromised buildings. Do you know what I mean? I'm not saying every code is terrible, I'm just saying when there's things that, so, yeah.

So it's an urgent and we, we, we spotted this void, and it's such a weird void because it's so complicated. That's where we're sort of building software into that void. it's, and what we've found, so now we're sort of, we've done this big journey. We've spoken to the capital deployers. People want an architect at the table, as in everyone really recognizes the value of design and they see, and they don't wanna carry design risk. there's a whole bunch of reasons why they want, you know, and, and the, it's almost like a structural reason not to have one, because it's slow to procure and da da da da da. And so if we could get this common glue, we can actually integrate. And so some of our developer clients now. Especially the ones who are operating at scale are saying to their consultants, do it in Giraffe.

And the reason you gotta do it in Giraffe is because I've configured Giraffe, my finance team, my investment committee, my spatial data team, my enterprise data team are in Giraffe. And so if you draw in Giraffe, all the data automatically flows to those guys. So my life is, as a corporate, is easier. I can now plug Tableau into it or power BI and, and I can see what's going on.

Right. If you must, if you will. And, and, and it's impossible if you send me PDFs or if you, if you, you know, publish a drawing set. 'cause then I have to ingest it and then it doesn't happen. But if you do this in this like big digital twin, then I can get your design in a format that it sits on the data structure and it works. And that to me is unbelievably exciting because it means that we're. We're succeeding in our goal of kind of meshing these paradigms together in a true, like, true interop, deep interop. um, and that's where we are now. And so that's why we, we think now we can come back to the architects and say, actually there is something valuable here.

You know, so overwhelmed by choice. There's like, there's all the old ones, sketch up, Revit, you know, there's the new ones, there's Arcol Snaptrude and like, you know, so this new gen, old gen, you gotta choose. But I think we've got something here that is definitely worth considering. So here

James Blackwood: I would say it's, you know, it sounds complex, but. It's not that complex. There's like three fundamental tools you, you need, if you want to be the translator between all these stakeholders, which is maps, drawing, tools, and a calculator like Rob, exactly what Rob described. And if you have those three things in one place, then you can be the Rubik's cube or the, you know, whatever the, the translator is between those elements.

Because I can log in as a numbers guy and I can just see the numbers or I can log in as a drawing guy and I can just focus on drawing or I can log in as a policy person and just look at maps and do spatial analysis. And we haven't even touched on that. But when those three things come together, that's the magic, the maps, the pencil and the calculator.

And that was my byline for describing what is Giraffe for so long, it's map pencil calculator. Um, then that's the opportunity I think is this, each one of those tools. And where, what I think Rob's about to get to is I think our drawing tools are actually good now. You know,

Rob Asher: they, they're actually good.

James Blackwood: I think it takes. Yeah.

Rob Asher: man, holy moly. Like, but to get Control z done, do you know what I mean? Woo.

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Rob Asher: it's just implementing a, a good drawing tool like this is where like, Rhino is still probably like my gold star of software in terms of just how, you know, point to line to surface, to solid.

Like it's just such a beautiful thing. Um, but to get back, I dunno how many person years of development on Rhino, but it would be probably of millennium. you need to spend years and years and years to get something good. And so it's taken us years and years

Evan Troxel: but

Rob Asher: you can actually draw quick

Evan Troxel: demand, right? And, and, and so

Rob Asher: and it's kind of They should, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Well, yeah, I mean the

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah,

Evan Troxel: have to be something I I, I, especially in the, like the new class of tools,

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: you want to use because we all use stuff we don't wanna use and we don't want any more of that.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So,

Rob Asher: percent. A hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: I think, you know, it's really interesting to kind of think about, you know, James, with these kind of three different buckets and how interconnected they actually are and how when you are making changes and observations in one and tweaking, say tweaking the drawing and seeing all that stuff update, like that's super powerful and informative and part of the decision making process and the more disconnected that is, like the slower it goes.

And, and the thing I keep thinking of as you guys are describing, what, what's going on here is like, there's that, that old saying like, work smarter, not harder. And architects are like. We do hard work. That's what we do. So

Rob Asher: That's right. I'm here for it. That's it.

Evan Troxel: and we're not, we're not allergic to hard work.

Like that's, that's

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: the job requires. it is so hard to say, what do you mean? Like, look over here at this new thing coming because I'm so busy

Rob Asher: Mm,

Evan Troxel: thing right here. And so you really have to create basically a world class product, you

Rob Asher: exactly.

Evan Troxel: to, to even get them to look at it.

Because, I mean, I'm sure you have stories upon stories

Rob Asher: so no, and, and we, and we do, and, and I think it's fair, as in why would you, if you're doing a high risk job, you're personally liable. You've got a, you know, why would you chance it on something that, that didn't feel good?

James Blackwood: Yeah, it's totally reasonable. The uh, yeah, we.

Rob Asher: I wouldn't, so, and the offerings are good and they're cheap.

As in Rhino, like, it's like unbelievable. You know, you pay a thousand bucks, whatever it is, and you get it for eight years. It's like, it's so good and so cheap. And I think the, the, the thing that we've been trying to push, as in the, the message we're trying to get is, it's almost, you're not talking to Giraffe for the drawing tool.

Like this kind of, it's kind of table stakes now. Everyone's doing it where you like, you know, everyone started doing feasibility tools. I dunno why. So like, you draw a colored box, you see the area great, right? It's good. It's, it was missing. So it's good that it's being done, the collaboration now, everyone's doing collaboration.

Everyone, can you see your cursors, right? Yeah. The, the true thing that you're wanting to try and get to is, uh, like technological empathy with what your client needs. And I think that is, it's a problem as in it's difficult knotty education piece that's uncomfortable for an architect. But I think it's the right discomfort, as in, if you're not doing that, if you're not saying, okay, hang on, let me just take some time, look at my deliverables, look at what my client's problem set is, and actually design a way of working around this reality, right? Then you do a disservice to yourself, because the reality is here, and I would say I see, I see that a lot because it's just, you know, I think it's so new. So I would say there's a couple of layers that that Giraffe has. So drawing calculator maps does that, but there's two more layers which are critical.

The first is it's actually on the internet, and it's properly like ontologically on the internet. There's a lot of things, which it's like, it's a desktop tool on the internet, as in you open it in Chrome, right? But Giraffe is a database and APIs, that's all it is, as in it's Postgres with Django and JavaScript, that's exposed to the user. So if you want to use the SDK or iframe in some REACT or do something that's internety, and when I say internet as first principles, like you can make HTTP requests and you can do all this stuff, and that kind of clarity of this is just an internet tool, it's just polygons on a map using internet technology on a database that is up and down the tool.

So it's, it's very, uh, what would I say?

James Blackwood: This, this,

Rob Asher: yeah,

James Blackwood: this first principles thing used to drive me insane because I'm like a front end sales guy, and I would be talking to clients. They'd be like, what we need is this one thing. We need a button that does X and or we need a tool that does financial feasibility. I'm like, okay, great. So I go to the develop team.

We need a financial tool, feasibility tool, and what our team would do is say, what we should do is build a tool that builds a financial feasibility tool. And my brain would explode 'cause I'd be like, oh my God, now I have to sell services to the client to configure it. but it was actually the true genius of Giraffe.

And every time I struggle with it, I know that it's actually for the benefit of the company long term and for the clients. Because what is true about real estate that's different to banks, it's different to telcos, is that it is a very unique problem set for every client that we talk to. The way you design in Orlando, Florida is so different to how you design in Sydney, just a different set of problems.

And so the way they underwrite deals in, in, uh, Orlando is different to how they underwrite them in Sydney. So if you wanna build a platform that speaks to all of the users and truly stitches them together, then you can't just build the financial model that I wanted to build. You have to build the first principles tool, and that goes all the way down to.

The technology stack, which is what Rob's saying, which is actually if you really wanted to, you could just build your own software on Giraffe,

Rob Asher: Yeah,

James Blackwood: know, like the SD K is exposed. And I think, um, you know, I would often say to, to Rob like, Hey, can we do this? And he's like, yeah, you do this, you pop open the the JSON and you change it here.

And you know, again, my brain would explode 'cause I'm like, how am I supposed to sell that to people? Uh, but the true thing about architects and why I think architects love our software 'cause they love the way that works. They are first principles thinkers. And when you put that thinking inside of a developer, you get some real power.

And what Rob's saying, I think, to circle this all back to, uh, the story that we were telling a few minutes ago, is our clients are seeing the value of that level of thinking and the value of design in that kind of first principles workflow when they have a design thinker in the room, and it's pretty cool.

So then you can go and build a. Unique tool that does the proforma or it does the floor plan, or it does whatever the specific job is, but it's elevating it up to the right level of, uh, zoom, if you will, to the business problem that the developer needs to solve. So it's really cool. I think it like brings it back full circle to where the storytelling is the actual issue again, and the architect can build the unique tool for the unique job that needs to get sold.

Rob Asher: so like a concrete example, 'cause this is pretty abstracted, like, because it's like, it's there, it's so open. It's like inside out software. You can see how it works. A way it, it often pays out for us is because we're API first, we can connect to spatial data. So you can go to basically any city in the world, you can go to London and like within 20 minutes because you're on the internet. Their data's on the internet. You just pull their data in in an open format, and anyone could do that. If you're building a website, it's not like we're it and making it closed source. It's literally just connect to the internet. You know, they're serving it via API read it. And so you can land in London and you can have climate risk zoning, protective view corridors, buses, census data, as in deep imagine a context site analysis for an architect. You can have so much site analysis that's gonna inform your design, that's gonna help your thinking and deepen and enrich your response to the client. You can just get that and you can get that through the technology. You don't have to copy paste the PDFs or do any of that stuff. And that's only possible in every city in the world because Giraffe is, takes the internet seriously. And so you're just navigating like terabytes and terabytes of data. because that's what the Internet's designed to do. And so as, as soon as you sort of say, okay, well let's really treat this internet thing seriously and actually like jack into the mainframe, you know, like Neo like, then it's like boom.

And, and I don't think people are logic. They're doing that in different ways, but there's still a gap there because That's the, and it's very, very exciting. So that's the, the first layer on top of those like map calculator box on the internet?

Evan Troxel: can I just like plug in here for a

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I think what a lot of people have experienced, my, myself included, and now this information's a few years old at this point for me, but it's like a lot of people have built what you're talking about for really specific

Rob Asher: Correct. Yes.

Evan Troxel: all of those scripts are broken now, right?

It's like over and over and over again is basically how that happens in firms. And obviously there's people who are super way more advanced and, and maybe they have the, the staff who can keep that stuff running. we're seeing more and more tools come out with, with some of the things you're talking about.

Maybe not all of them. You know, I, again, like feature sets are changing

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feature, feature, feature, exactly.

Evan Troxel: but this idea of using a tool that, okay, I I, and I'm, I'm sure you kind of took a little bit of inspiration from the Rhino team and just make, making it

Rob Asher: A hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: to

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: inside your

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: Right. But, but number one, like you don't have to build tools like you be, and a lot of people, like, they just don't have the staff for that.

They can't retain the staff for that.

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: know where to find the staff for that. Uh, you know, and, and so there, there's a lot of problematics. Is that a

Rob Asher: yes. Yeah, yeah. No, it is, yeah, definitely. That's an architect's word. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So like this, this idea of, of making a tool that gives people that power that they don't have to maintain is a big deal.

And like you say, they can, they can just go anywhere in the world because one of the guiding principle is location, right?

Rob Asher: Hundred percent

Evan Troxel: are put

Rob Asher: on planet Earth. They are.

Evan Troxel: So,

Rob Asher: weird.

Evan Troxel: it's, it's, it's like, like just really, again, kind of going back to your idea of abstracting this and, and like distilling, let's call it

Rob Asher: Yes. Yes.

Evan Troxel: down to this, this fundamental level. I mean, that sounds like too good to be true.

Rob Asher: Well, and it it, yeah. I mean, I'm telling you, I'm telling you it's real, Evan. Trust me. No, it's because it's the pro, the, the, the, okay. I think to that, like people wanna build tools. This is the other big reason I started Giraffe as opposed to using Rhino. Like Rhino is basically like 9.9 out of 10. Like Grasshop is so good. If you don't like ra, you can do Python. If you don't like that, you can do C#. It's solid as heck. It's like robust. It's cheap. Like what's wrong with it? It's not on the internet. It's basically your only problem. And something that is critical to the internet is distribution. Like distribution is out of the box of the, the internet is essentially distribution. It's this distributed network. And you know, it was designed so that as the nukes take out this line and that line and that line, that the distribution of data will still find a way through the network to where it needs to be. It was literally designed to withstand nuclear attack. So it's so robust in terms of distribution and it's like, let's use that.

That sounds like a good idea. You know, why, why change it? So Giraffe is around the distribution of this knowledge. So I can write a script. Something that's different between like Rhino and Giraffe is the scripts actually sit on the geometries. So rather than in a document, you sit on the geometry. 'cause in Giraffe you don't actually have a document. have every single geometry you've ever drawn on an inter on a, a database. And we just say, oh, for those projects, we'll get that project geometry. But at any point you can say, Hey, that other geometry, just me. So it's a completely different paradigm around what the data is. And the script sits on the geometry.

So I can have, I can just copy paste geometries into my project that comes with the script, and then that script then runs and executes on those geometries. And this solves the distribution problem because if someone says, Hey, I need to do an apartment. Like, do you, didn't you have a core script? Or like, didn't you have a script that did that?

Angled the windows to the view? It's like, yep, copy paste that in. And it comes. And then the way we've done it is the script is hidden until you open it. Like a, like Steve Jobs, like with the macOS is the, is the gold standard on this? Where it's like, it looks super simple, but there's always like deeper, deeper, deeper shortcuts.

Like if you're a power user, you can go in. Same with Giraffe, we want it to be like one big button. But then if you want to, you double click and then double click twice. And then you're actually editing the JSON like you're in code land. And so we've solved, like we've been working on solving this distribution thing, which is basically how do you get the computational designer out of their bubble?

'cause the problem now is they do the work and then because they can't distribute it, there's no distribution, they have to, they build the tool and then they do the work. And so they turn from a tool maker to like, like a trench digger. They've like designed the spade and now they've gotta dig the hole.

And that was like probably the thing that killed me at at work when I was an architect was like, I'd done all this work building these scripts, but then I had to run them. So people would come to me and say like, Hey, can you just quickly do this master plan and tell me what the areas are? And I'm like, can't you?

And they're like, no, we've tried. And I would train them and they would forget and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so then I was like, I'm not doing this anymore. And I think that's a universal problem. And I think that's distribution. I have this code, I have this logic, I have this ip, this insight, this design thinking, and I want to get it into your hands in a way that's robust to a nuclear attack and that's gonna work when you need it in front of your client. that's that's what we've, that's what we've done. I actually think we've done the reason I know we've done this is because we have people building scripts and distributing them that are not experts and they're doing it in anger. And look, every now and then there's a bug. Someone gets really upset, but no more or less than like Excel because it's complex. But they are people using scripts that we wrote that I would never have imagined would be technically proficient enough to use those scripts. But they're there in the client base and they love it and it's, it's crazy. It's so satisfying. Oh my goodness. It's satisfying.

Evan Troxel: you, you totally missed your opportunity here though. I mean, surviving nuclear attacks, a Giraffe is not going to do that. I mean, you, this is obviously a, a roach.

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Yeah,

James Blackwood: Yeah, that's a good point, cockroach.

Rob Asher: Our marketing people made us change it

James Blackwood: That's.

Evan Troxel: I, I get it. It's not as, yeah, it's the aesthetics. Uh, there may be

Rob Asher: there. Yeah. Cockroach. I mean, yeah. We should have, yeah, it's good. It's good.

Evan Troxel: it's, it's interesting to think about how kind of trapped architects feel with their tools

Rob Asher: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: kind of, again, the, the new. The new version of tools that are coming out and what's possible.

And it was possible because you built it from scratch, right? Like, and you lived through things that you're solving

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you're continually evolving by talking to people, getting feedback, and, and watching the tools they're building. And I mean, to me that, that just seems like that to me, that's a real message here is, you don't have to be trapped in the

Rob Asher: And, and I would say, I would say it's like it's urgent as in it's in I think an imperative. As in if you're not thinking about your software tools, lemme just tell you this, there, there's this thing very influential to me called the the infernal bicycle or the satanic bicycle. Have you heard this? This's A UI concept.

Evan Troxel: I don't think so.

Rob Asher: Okay, so the bicycle, the gearing system, there's the front and the rear and the number of teeth, right? That is how much power goes from the pedal. And you need to understand that when you do easy, you just change the front and the rear gears. You go down in the snow uphill, downhill. Imagine someone designed a bicycle where they hid the gears and then they had gravel mode, uphill mode, downhill mode, snow mode, right? Which is what modern cars do. You know, like in my Mitsubishi, it's like I'm in tarmac mode and I'm like, what is tarmac mode? You know, it's, it's just, well, it's like 50% of the power goes to the rear and 50 to the front, or it's something simple, but they don't tell you what it is.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Rob Asher: And that's the feral bicycle, because it would be impossible to learn that because now I want to go gravel uphill, but there's only like two modes, like which do I choose? So you, the user needs to see, you should trust the user that they are gonna learn how the tool works, right? And they're gonna figure out how gearing works on a bicycle and use it. And when they do, they're free. And until they do, they're kind of like actually underserved. Like if you've got the modes, and that's why it's the Satanic or the infernal bicycle, whatever it's called, right? And it's a UI concept. You, you wanna expose the workings of the tool to the user. as a designer, as an architect, you want the workings of your tool exposed to you. Because in this age, with the ai, where it is, where the internet, the data infrastructure, where it is, if you're not. Making the tool, like taking ownership of the, of your software and using it to divine and build and create. I feel like the world is moving very rapidly past you because that's just so fundamental and important. Um, you know, it's like an electrician not having, imagine an electrician just had a big machine that he put over things. He didn't know what it did, you know what I mean? He's clearly, you know, you need to be very first principled and so out, out, that's where we talk and talk and, and have a belief that there's always a space for that.

That there's always people that are ingenious and want to think from first principles and wanna build their own stuff and like love it. And Giraffe is basically a tool for that kind of a user. Um, and it's, and it's, and then it's very humble because it just, it's just polygons on a map, on a database if you understand that. You understand Giraffe, you know what I mean? And, and so it's very, it's very aligning.

Evan Troxel: This, this concept of like, trusting your users are gonna learn how to use a tool, and then there's kind of this, you know, different steepness to different learning curves.

Rob Asher: Yes.

Evan Troxel: talk about kind of the, the, the steepness of your learning curve for this? Because I, I assume there's probably different levels of approach that you could come in and use a tool like this, but, but like, because that's one of the, the kickbacks, right?

That's one of the, the, this is, this is where I have an issue with software. It's like, oh my god, I can see. long it's

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: me to become even, let's just call it proficient, not, not a master, not a power user, just proficient enough to use this on a day-to-day basis. Like, that's just another objection that you'll hear all the time because there's so much

Rob Asher: Total, eh?

Evan Troxel: sunk cost in the existing software. But we have all seen examples on our phones especially, right, where it's like, oh, you, you already know how to use it. You

Rob Asher: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: just downloaded it. You already know how to use it. Because the paradigms are different in modern tooling

Rob Asher: True tone.

Evan Troxel: in tooling. That's been around forever.

Rob Asher: got, I got two stories on that. And James, I'd like to you to sell the one about you building an app for the client. The

James Blackwood: Oh yeah.

Rob Asher: site search. But I'll tell first. So first Giraffe, it's just Polygon editor on a map. So you just draw a polygon and then you tell Giraffe, Hey, this has three levels and you should classify it as classroom. All Giraffe is doing is calculating those areas and then allowing you to do Excel with them. So if you know how to use anything, Adobe or Revit or any drafting package, Giraffe is like, it's just a drafting package. And if you know how to use Excel, it's just Excel. So at the most basic level, it's a very familiar thing and it's on a map, but it looks like Google Map, it's Mapbox, you know everyone you know.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Rob Asher: it is under the hood though. Goes, you can go, you can go further, but you may not need to. Like, if you're a developer, you could be very happy just doing shapes on a map. If you're a design director, you could be telling narrative with the shapes on the map. We've got lots of hot keys, lots of speed, lots of, lots of ways of manipulating the information.

So it works in a meeting, like at that speed, but it's just shapes on a map. And then it does everything automatically. The, the, the fact that it makes a portfolio of your data, of all your projects, the fact that it, you know, you can access any geometry, that's all that we do, as in the geo, the, the database is just architected to do that. So it's easy on that level, but then it goes very deep and, and this is where the thing that's, that's really exciting to me is like, is this story that James will tell you where a non-expert user, as in a, not a professional coder or computational designer, can take that very basic shapes on a map. magic with it. Mainly using the LLMs to write code. 'cause this is the other thing used to have to like do grasshopper to tell Rhino what to do. Now you can go to ChatGPT and say, Hey, write me a function that takes this square and puts a window on the three shortest and a door on the longest side and ChatGPT will one shot that thing done.

And you copy paste that into Giraffe and that code is executed and it'll work. It's crazy. And

James Blackwood: Oh, it is

Rob Asher: uh, it's a whole new world

James Blackwood: definitely. And you know, um, before I tell that story, the, the rectangles on a map thing is actually profound in that the, the first learning hurdle is how do you draw a rectangle on the map? But that fundamental concept, I think is the most valuable part of our product in that it's, there's infinite context.

You can come to the map at any scale and draw a rectangle and understand immediately the areas and start moving them around. And it is amazing what that does for your brain. And it actually changes the way you think about space. So anytime I have a, like even a question about my house, the first place that goes Giraffe, and I draw a rectangle and I start moving it around, like, what's the setback on the rear fence?

Can I fit in a DUI go straight to Giraffe, I can see the boundary, I draw the rectangle city of Orlando's 10 foot, if you have an A DU, no, I can't move on. You know? Right. That's, it's, it's so simple. It's like a really complex comp question,

Evan Troxel: Uh, a

James Blackwood: but hyper valuable.

Evan Troxel: answer. Yeah.

Rob Asher: yeah,

James Blackwood: Yeah. Yeah. But all I did was draw, you know, a five foot by five foot rectangle problem solved.

Rob Asher: yeah.

James Blackwood: um, so, and I've heard one of our clients describe, you know, HKS, um, are a client of ours in, uh, the cities and communities team, and they describe it as a thinking tool. And I just think that is the best way to describe what Giraffe actually is. It's a way of thinking spatially with infinite context, and it's addictive.

Like, once you start thinking about it, you're like, ooh. Oh, maybe I'll do this problem or that problem. And the, the, uh, problem that a different client, uh, developer client came to me with was, you know, we make available this, the problem Rob's describing of go to any city in the world and connect to its data is, um, truly cool.

And then the market is doing this job of consolidating all that data with, you know, AI is helping these companies spin up and build these data sets of, uh, governed data, parcel data, probably being the fundamental, you know, asset class that we're all thinking about here. ReGrid in the US have a, um, API database of every parcel in the u in the United States.

Now it's, uh, most of Canada as well, along with all of its zoning information. And it's incredible. And they're building that data set as a service, which we then provide to our users as a optional extra if they want it. And the client needs to be able to search that data set more than just look at it.

And so I was like, okay, well have an API. It's a really well documented API, Giraffe has an SDK, it's a really well documented SDK. I don't have time to wait for the development team to build this feature. I'm gonna see if I can build it. And so I jump into ChatGPT, and I dump the docs in there. And then I say, teach me how to write this thing.

So, you know, I download Visual Studio Code, I download the GitHub repository of Giraffe. Two hours later I built it. And it is unbelievable. It works. You know where you can and, and it starts, that also gets your will spinning.

Evan Troxel: I thought you were

Rob Asher: No, no, no, no. It's two hours. It's

James Blackwood: Now I built it in two hours.

Rob Asher: And then,

James Blackwood: It was, um,

Rob Asher: And once it's built, because it's on the

James Blackwood: Hey,

Rob Asher: you literally

James Blackwood: I can just publish it

Rob Asher: user there. They get it. It's like they don't need to download an E XE and then update like whatever it is. It's just, boom.

There it is. It's cr, it's

James Blackwood: and it

Rob Asher: When, when that

James Blackwood: it,

Rob Asher: like, oh, whoa, this is crazy.

Evan Troxel: If James can do it.

Rob Asher: If Jet

James Blackwood: yeah, no, for real.

Evan Troxel: so cool.

James Blackwood: And I think, uh, that's the thing that gets me super excited is like a lot, most software is built to be the form, you know, for that problem. Like the building that form took me two hours to build a form. It's like, I want to search Florida for, you know, multifamily parcels greater than 10 acres.

It's three inputs. And it took me, you know, two hours to write that form. The purpose of the software used to be to build that form, but if you can build the form in two hours or quicker, if you know what you're doing, like now I know what I'm doing, I can build those in 10 minutes. Um, then the software actually needs to be the thing behind the form.

And that's what Giraffe has always been. And it's been difficult to explain to people.

Rob Asher: guess

James Blackwood: Yeah. It's,

Rob Asher: yeah.

James Blackwood: the, the underlying problem, which is I need to be able to take bespoke logic and stick it on a map so I can actually understand what I'm doing.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Draft built that in 2018 and we've been building these little modules ourselves, and at the same time building this layer of.

You know what the, um, AI guys are calling MPCs or whatever they are, MCP's, uh, model context protocols. Basically, if you write a JavaScript SDK, you've pretty much written an MCP because you're exposing to the internet the logic of what your app is doing, and then the LLM can go read it, build code on your, like working code on your application.

Rob Asher: It's crazy. It's

James Blackwood: It's super cool.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: we're building like bespoke little stuff for clients all the time now, and it's, uh, it's super addictive.

Evan Troxel: Nice. I, I feel like we've told a pretty compelling story, but I think we need kind of a call to action here at the end. And I've been thinking of two things as we've been talking. Number one is like, people have to go check out Giraffe. and I know you're really focused on architects right now.

You've, you went, you started somewhere else because you

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: to

Rob Asher: do like that. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: but you've made it back to

Rob Asher: We've made it back. We're home. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I feel like that's, that's not an uncommon story in today's day and age with, with new tools. I mean, it's

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: because of the things that I kind of outlined earlier, it's like, what do you mean another tool?

Like

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: there's no room for another tool and, and maybe it isn't another tool in this case, maybe it's replacing tools,

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: so it might be another tool for a short time, but I think it does start to replace tools. But the second, like, call to action here, and I know that's kind of a, like a weird marketing, you know, maybe architects are a little bit allergic to that, but it's like. You need to support like this idea

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: audience members, you need to go and check it out, but also understand the passion for our profession that is being put out there as a, as a true useful, valuable. if you can't tell through this conversation, Rob and team, deeply care about this and these are the tools for the current and next generations that are coming into that are part of this profession.

And I, 'cause I don't wanna say coming in, I, I want to, this isn't for the next generations. this solves real problems right now. And yeah, this is going to be the kind of tool that the next generations use. They will not use the same tools we do for good reasons, right? Because. Of the kinds of things that are possible nowadays.

So like, really my hope by having this conversation is number one, that you will go check out Giraffe, but that you will also have this kind of appreciation of what's happening in this space and how amazing it actually is to be on the receiving end of this. Um, it's not a free product, but think of the value that it actually delivers and how quickly it delivers that value. And then you start to understand how this could actually replace so that you can work smarter instead of harder. So we will have links in the show notes for where to go to check it out. share this episode with people who you feel like need to hear this from a conceptual level, but also from like a tool use level. And I wanna give Rob and James the opportunity to tell you where to go visit if you're driving right now and you don't have time to stop and click on a link, right? But tell us where, where people can go to find out more about Giraffe.

Rob Asher: So our website's best, which is Giraffe Build, B-U-I-L-D. Um, and then we're very active on LinkedIn, so you can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm posting gifs most days of the week

Evan Troxel: Yes you are. And they're beautiful. They're beau. It is like, oh my gosh, I can't believe Giraffe can. Oh, it can do that too. It can do that. And that, I mean, that, it just kind of shows. you do it so simply and they're short, right? They, they

Rob Asher: for sure.

Evan Troxel: but it's like, oh wow, that, like,

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: that,

Rob Asher: fun, it's creative. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and it is polygons on a map, right? Like that, that's what it, it,

Rob Asher: Don't tell anyone. Sh sh sh sh. It's, yeah.

Evan Troxel: story too late, I think. I think that's the title of this episode.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Uh,

Evan Troxel: just

James Blackwood: title.

Evan Troxel: on a,

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Definitely.

Evan Troxel: well, well, James, any final thoughts that you wanna, you wanna share before we jump off this call?

James Blackwood: Uh, do we wanna share our pricing strategy, Rob, and what we're thinking about in terms of

Rob Asher: can put that

James Blackwood: the

Rob Asher: So, yeah, so, so we we're selling at three grand per year per user for the, the developers that are mainly leveraging the enterprise as in it, the value there is sitting when you have many users doing an enterprise thing, whereas architects are much more individual as in the, the designer is bringing themselves and that pricing doesn't make sense. So we are introducing a Giraffe, like a core tier, which is $45 a month, and it's month by month by month.

Evan Troxel: that just sounds kind of, kind of crazy low, right? I, I think you said before, like if you're an architect, 45 bucks a month is, is probably less than your coffee budget, right? For,

Rob Asher: Oh, should it? I, I mean, yeah, it depends how much coffee you drink, but yeah, it's, I I think it's like 20 minutes of billable time.

Evan Troxel: There you go.

Rob Asher: And I think, and I think it's, think it's fair because Giraffe is a vessel, but like we've been saying, a lot of the value is how you, it's like a piano. It, you need a player as in, it's a good piano, but you need someone who real to make music with it. And so it's, it's not like a, it's not your job for you. Right. It's like a hammer. So it's gotta be high quality. You pay for it, it works. But most of the skill resides with the user.

James Blackwood: Totally and 45 bucks for polygons on a map, you know? That makes sense.

Rob Asher: Ultimately it's Polygon. We can't charge much more than 45 a month.

James Blackwood: this is well put though, because like you say, architects have so much software already and so much, um, operating costs just to keep that software and a lot of vendors look at, um. How can we charge more? And the whole time we'd been going, how can we charge less? How can we charge less?

How can we charge less? And I think we're finally there where we can do it. And so it's super exciting where not only is the tool, you know, the most sophisticated and competent it's ever been for designers, but it is now the cheapest it's ever been. And, uh, so we're, we're really excited and you know, we're the first, you're the first person we've we're telling about them.

Um, so yeah, obviously our enterprise clients will have a different set of features that are specific to their enterprise needs, but the designer doesn't need all that stuff. The designer needs the things we've talked about on this call and all of the good stuff is exposed at that price. You know, being able to draw polygons on map, being able to do generative workflows, being able to build your own calculations, being able to, uh, write apps and if, and dump LLM code into the browser, you know, that's all at that tier.

So I'm super excited about it and I think it's the right way for a vendor to be going and. 2025 is

Rob Asher: Mm.

James Blackwood: prices, not increasing prices, as technology's basically getting commoditized and the hero of the story is the architect. Um, and so I think the value ratio is correct.

Evan Troxel: I mean you saved that till the end, James, but that, that's a pretty, pretty cool kind of concept that the hero is the architect here. And, and I think what you're bringing to the market for, I mean, uh, let's just say it like a lot of people are hearing about this for the first time, right? Or maybe they've seen glimpses of Rob's GIFs on LinkedIn before and, and it's like, oh yeah, Giraffe.

just seriously take a step back and just say, is a really featured tool set for an affordable price to get some serious work done. I mean, to me. That's kind of what we're talking about here. We're

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: about a toy, we're not talking about a, a nascent tool or nascent, nascent,

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: know, like we're not, this thing is, you, you've been working on this.

It comes from this pedigree of what you talked about, like a, a 9.9 out 10 kind of a tool. that's where

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: is being fed from and the passion and the, the, the overlay of experience in the profession and going and, and working with developers and enterprises at really large scales to make really impactful decisions in urban planning and, and space making and place making and all these things.

And then coming back to the architect after have learning all that and just saying, here's a tool that you can use today. Like, it is gonna take very little time for you to get up and running. that's a huge deal. So, uh, kudos to you guys for, for doing this and thank you for coming on the show to tell everybody about it.

Rob Asher: Thanks for having us. I really

James Blackwood: Yeah. Thanks for having us.

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