- Today home building is really broken.
It's expensive, it's unpredictable,
and it's very time-consuming.
It just didn't make sense to me
there had to be a better way.
- Home construction hasn't changed in a hundred years,
it's done mostly by hand,
by a shrinking skilled labor force
using hammers and two-by-fours.
Each home made like a one-off prototype.
- And so I started asking the question
"well, what if homes were built
"like every other product in our lives?"
But then I realized that,
unlike car companies or electronic companies,
homes actually do have to be different
depending on what property they're on.
Every property is unique, right?
How do you do customization at skill?
- Alexis Reavis created cover
to upend traditional construction for
the ultimate goal of driving down the cost
of housing and proliferating high quality design.
- We're redesigning the entire home building process
from the ground up.
And we've created the first way to build custom homes
in a way that actually scales.
- This is a show about founders, challenging the status quo.
- What does home mean to you?
- It's a place where you belong.
- So where I met Alexis was an architecture school
in New York city at the Cooper union.
Alexis was trying to answer this question
of why isn't housing accessible to everyone.
I was actually moving towards becoming a software engineer
when we realized that the solution to the housing problem
was really an intersection of our interests
in the things that we had observed.
- So that we can get a sense for like,
what's out there and like pricing and all that.
- The biggest contributor to conventional construction
being expensive is the coordination
between all of the different parties involved
and the fact that it is fragmented.
We do everything from start to finish.
- We have some incoming and outgoing material over here.
We produce our own window frames,
which is really cool and unusual.
- Building homes in a factory is not a new idea.
What makes us different is that nobody has actually
developed a way to build custom homes in a way that scales.
And we're solving that with software,
we've taken a process that normally would be months
of design and engineering back and forth.
And we've compressed that into literally seconds
with our software so that we can go from here's what I want
to a design that we know down to the bolt,
exactly how it's going to be built.
- Mass produced customization means there's no room
for error.
If two pieces don't fit together during installation,
you can't use a saw on site to make adjustments like
in traditional construction.
- Making mass customizable components that get sent out from
the factory and then assembled on site easily.
That's actually never been done before.
- It wasn't possible to build the software
even 10, 20 years ago.
And a lot of companies have tried to do this,
but they've gone straight to trying to build, you know,
a hundred unit apartment buildings.
And so the part that we're doing differently is we're
starting off small,
solve one problem and then move on to
the next bigger problem.
- This is the first cover that we built.
And then this one, this one was very painful.
We were building this in the parking lot and we would have
an investor like drive into the parking lot and look at us
like those are the crazy cover guys,
just like on the roof of this and then with drills.
We did look kind of crazy, right?
- I think we made this wall, for example,
like five or six times before we got it right,
how the material looks in the CAD model and then how it
physically comes together.
You know, it's different, right?
Something might compress more than you expected it to.
And then that causes issues elsewhere.
- There are a ton of engineering, manufacturing,
software problems here to solve.
What is the optimal path to route electrical wiring or
plumbing through the home?
How do you make the kitchen install in a day instead of a
week, individually, all these problems aren't insanely hard,
but together you have a ton to solve.
- And the way we approach the problems we tackle first
is what solutions do we need in order to enable
other solutions to be possible?
- Silicon valley wants to disrupt the way construction has
always been done and cover is not the only startup trying
to do it, but they have attracted significant investment.
And with it questions about their ability
to customize mass produced housing.
- People, you know,
think that we're crazy to do what we're doing
because home-building has been done
the same way for a hundred years.
And a lot of people have tried to change this
and nobody's succeeded.
- There always be skeptics.
And so that's not something that we can solve for.
- People will say like,
why are you the right people to solve this?
I mean,
our response is usually just show us someone else is
actually doing it this way and not nobody is.
And we are doing it.
Every cover we build, including this one,
it's designed specifically for this customer and for
this property, one of the neat things here,
you can see just how close we were able to get to the tree.
All we've had to do is design a system that allows
for that flexibility.
- How do we make homes that are actually healthier,
that are more inspiring, that are stunning for living and,
and for everyone, right?
How do we take the kinds of homes that today are, you know,
$10 million and make that the new norm for everyone.
- Alexis is betting the future of cover on the notion that
homes can be mass produced like cars or computers,
if he's right,
how we live and who can afford a home of their own
could be completely transformed.
- We see a future where homes are stunning,
high-performing and affordable for everyone.
This is a problem that is very important
and needs to be solved.
And nobody has approached it in the way
that we've approached it ,before.
- Okay.
They're all set ceilings in light tracks are in
you are ready for your new home.