How Construction Disrupted Katerra - A ConTech Identity Crisis.

Owning a construction company is a lot like owning a venomous pet snake. The minute you take your thumb off its neck, it will bite you. Of contractors both large and small, this analogy rings true and the best I’ve heard.

In recent weeks Katerra has fallen from its Silicon Valley perch sending a reverberating thud across startup land. Only as bankruptcy proceedings have come to reveal, it seems not soon enough.

Destined to be the future of construction, selling its story to investors, governments and developers that eagerly bought in. With good reason. Using mass manufacturing coupled with technology, Katerra’s model was positioned to produce magnitudes of efficiency to the slow, inefficient, sometimes obsolete and always costly construction process.

Its attempt at being a ConTech, or a construction + technology company, missed the mark in that it forgot to be a construction company first. Instead it bet on the tech, or more so a ‘tech-y’, ‘startup-y’ framework, to help accelerate gaining enough critical mass within construction that it would fade out its deficiencies in favor of tech’s new, better way.

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