Meet Aaron Holm.
Only two years ago, Holm was working at Amazon on the Amazon Go grocery business and leading Amazon Books physical store product management when an idea struck him.
He’d been fixating in his mind about the mismatch between what he saw as the Seattle area’s need for affordable housing options for working people and what was available to them, which was almost nothing.
According to this blog entry
I kept thinking, ‘what if you could just design and order housing the way you design and order a car?’ Someone needed to build a housing product that people could just buy to simplify the process and unlock a stuck market. The same product could solve a giant market problem and create positive social impact.
So, he and one or two fellow Amazon mates developed the idea for Blokable, a purpose-driven technology business that produces and offers very affordable, prefabricated “bloks” or modules that can stack and connect to provide various living space options, ranging from single-family to multifamily communities. Homes, in other words.
Here’s a recent update on this start-up’s funding from GeekWire correspondent Nat Levy.
Investors are taking note of Blokable, a Seattle startup founded by a former Amazon manager that aims to cut costs for builders and residents alike through the construction of tech-powered manufactured housing.
According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Blokable has raised about $4.8 million out of a $5.5 million round. The document lists Jason Calacanis — prominent angel investor, one of the first investors in Uber and an entrepreneur known for the popular publishing site Weblogs that sold to AOL in 2005 — as director. Some of the company’s other investors include Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc.; Borealis Ventures, a New Hampshire investor that focuses on the built environment; Urban Us, a venture fund for startups aiming to improve cities; and an Oakland-based firm called Kapor Capital that invests in companies addressing social needs like affordable housing.
My guess is that the line of young people who’d like to join Aaron Holm and his team of industrial design-oriented tech entrepreneurs as that young, start-up company grows would wrap around the block for any job posted.
Too, as Menlo Park, Calif.-based technology company Katerra announces plans to open a new factory in Spokane Valley, Washington, where it will produce mass timber products including cross-laminated timber (CLT) and Glulam, my sense is that this tech company won’t have trouble recruiting 150 new workers for the new 250,000 square foot facility.
Now, why would that be?
Could it connect, maybe, with data Pew Research highlights here, that suggests that most of us older folks, who give advice to young high schoolers today, encourage them to pursue occupations in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)?
Here’s a couple of topline findings from the Pew analysis to ponder.
34% of Americans say they would encourage high school students to get jobs in a STEM-related field, such as medicine or health care (19% say they would suggest a health-related career) or technology (14%). Again, enthusiasm for this career choice varies by age – but in this instance, adults ages 30 and older are more likely than those younger than 30 to promote the virtues of STEM fields (36% vs. 23%).
Along with STEM fields, smaller shares of Americans would recommend going into the skilled trades (7%); getting a job in the public sector or a similar professional occupation (6%); or working in business, finance or entrepreneurship (5%).
Those recommendations, and that encouragement, and young people’s relative response to that kind of occupational guidance all point to a more and more robust stream of people seeking careers in science, technology, engineering, and medical fields, not in the least because those types of occupations future-proof these people from at least some of the economic swings that will come along as business cycles go up and down.
The same can’t be said for skilled trades, whose fortunes and fates tie directly to the ebb and flow of housing and construction cycles. So, even if a person who gets trained with skills as a carpenter can make good money, and is in great demand when the going is good, what happens to those people when the cycle turns and demand for trade crews dries up, as is known to happen, less and less predictably? Not to mention obsolescence when technology, automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics, etc. completely change what happens and who’s involved, how, and when on and off jobsites.
So, the idea would be to add to the force of appeal to skilled trades training, not only using the lever of hourly pay prospects but ensuring occupational security and continuity in the livelihoods of workers who enter the field. In other words, future proof skilled trade workers’ career paths and their ability to sustain a good livelihood by giving them training not only in a construction discipline, but in technological skills that can evolve over time.
Cross-train a carpenter to code, and that carpenter can work on-site or offsite, four seasons a year, year-in-year-out, in whatever market he or she chooses. What’s more, that carpenter’s career is now more resilient because he or she can continue training and sharpening the digital chops even as opportunity in construction may come and go, and the jobs economy evolves altogether as machine learning kicks in bigtime.
So, to add to the power of attraction when it comes to bringing fresh young people into the construction trades, the idea would be cross-training, in both the disciplines, craft, and pride in the trade, and in part of the STEM value chain.
The win-win here would be that this sort of cross-training would potentially accelerate each of these workers’ financial wherewithal trajectory to the point where they could become home buyers sooner than they would if they remainded low-wage earning day workers.
The root of a solution to today’s construction labor capacity crisis is STEM.
