Interview with Erez Dror: Pt 2 - What problems does Genda solve?
Erez Dror:
So personally it was a longer process. It wasn't a Eureka moment... it's nice to envision. But when that happened, I decided that I'm going to take everything I just described when I was doing my bachelor's, to be a structural engineer, but I was mostly interested in the work in the field, to be a project engineer eventually. But after that experience, I said, okay, there must be a better way. It's the kind of person I am. I'm always looking for a better way to do things. If I think they're wrong, kind of, and decided to go for my masters. And that's when I try to figure out who can I learn from?
Erez Dror:
And I found professor Rafael Sacks, which is one of the leading researchers related to BIM management and lean construction... reach out to him, told him I like what you're studying. And I want to do my master's with you. Convinced him to take me in as a master student, which was challenging because he is fully booked for a few years in advance, and got to choose the topic for my master thesis, which was about how do we improve the workflow infrastruction sites. How we identify the waste, first of all, and how can we understand the unproductive time from the data that we can generate?
Erez Dror:
And when I was doing my literature review and learning more papers of other people before me, and I can follow a few names, but the brightest minds, which are not me, but the people I read from, I figure out that there might be a solution. It might be quite simple. I didn't figure out that opening a company would be that challenging, but the solution was quite straightforward. We tracked the location of resources. We identified the activities, and then we optimized them. And that's a bit of what I was doing in my research...that was a taste of it. And then I said, okay, this can work. If I want to dedicate all of my life to that, we might solve the problem, which is huge, because if we look at the industry, numbers of productivity, waste, labor related waste, not only material waste, the numbers are crazy. And if you save a beep of it, you're selling tons of money. And at the end of the day, you get a better result, which is why I'm here. I don't care about the money. That's not what leads me as a person, but the fact that we can build better buildings for people to live in or to work in or to fly through or whatever we do, that's that's the thing that drives me.
Erez Dror:
And then it took me three months from there... moment I understood that I might be opening a startup, until I decided, okay, I'm going to open. I going to quit my job, which I was working then for one... the biggest probably, developer builder in Israel, which is a company with an amazing name. I was working on their two biggest projects, which are quite big, even in portion to the US project. But I said I had a mission and then I've been doing that for over three years now, since that moment.
