SXSW Startups: Node
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 28, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Hyper-Connected Communities, which will pitch at 5 pm Saturday, March 9, NODE’s patent-pending technology and platform makes the most sustainable and healthy homes affordable. They slash time and cost by turning construction into assembly, activating a new workforce to assemble their flexible system that results in high quality, zero emission homes.
CEO Don Bunnell answered some questions about the Seattle, Wash.-based company.
What is your competitive advantage?
NODE’s purpose: deeply sustainable homes for the masses, through a uniquely scalable platform, which solves the biggest problem in construction: the labor shortage — a system engineered for simple assembly so that just about anyone, with minimal training, can put it together, unlocking a flexible labor pool to assemble homes, and leveraging a capital efficient approach. Our assembly system will give us the highest margins so that we can layer other tech above a below to reinvent how new homes are acquired.
What are your goals for NODE in 2019?
Our key goal is to complete our full system so that we can begin to scale our business. We are planning six builds over the next 12 months using our Slide-Click-Lock technology. We are doing this with real clients and with increasingly complex buildings.
Walk us through your mission of building homes that give back more than what they take.
We believe that everyone deserves a healthy, sustainable, well built home. We believe that new housing is generally very low quality — yet is the thing that we work hardest to pay for. We believe that by changing the way we build, that we can deliver carbon negative, healthy, beautifully designed homes to people at all income levels — at a lower cost than conventional construction.
Walk us through some of the features of NODE’s homes.
We use the moonshot standard for building in terms of energy, non-toxic materials, rainwater capture, and the use of sustainable materials.
Radical Sustainability is one of NODE’s central terms. Tell us what it means to you.
We start by using the most sustainable inputs, then focus on efficiency through our proprietary building envelope that ensures our homes sip energy. We then take efficiency one step further by integrating all the building’s systems. All of this comes standard. All of our buildings come with a “carbon negative” option (producing more renewable energy than is consumed), for capturing, treating and recycling rainwater, and for treating waste. If you don’t want or need solar panels or energy storage for example, we won’t include them. But we always design with these things in mind — so that if you want the most sustainable building — it’s ready.
NODE is inspired by the moonshot approach — reaching for the stars. We are inspired by the hardest building standard out there — the Living Building Challenge (the “LBC”), “not because it’s easy — but because it is hard.” We follow the LBC’s guidance and, if for reasons of cost or material availability, we can’t meet one of their criteria — we will tell our customers.
What are the key benefits of pre-fabrication installation?
We don’t intend to compete with any of the new players in “pre-fab” — which means different things to different people, or with traditional general contractors. We intend to create a new product category and a new way to deliver by turning construction into assembly. We are solving the biggest problem in the industry: labor. Labor is 65 percent of building cost — so when we take it from 75 skilled workers to four workers the economics are totally different.
Are the homes able to withstand diverse weather conditions?
Yes — our homes will also be designed to meet, and in almost all cases, exceed local building standards. By using a system of components, quality increases.
How and when did your team come together and please fill us in on any relevant startup experience?
In 2003, I co-founded Synthesis Energy Systems, Inc., a NASDAQ-listed clean energy company. I also have been on the boards of other companies and co-founded a non-profit focused on bringing market-based solutions to refuges in situations of long-term confinement.
Bec Chapin, our COO and co-founder, was the number 3 person at Method Homes, a prominent Pacific Northwest prefab home and light commercial manufacturer, during the years of their biggest growth and their pilot expansion to the East Coast. She worked at Green Canopy Homes, a Seattle based infill development company that is pushing the residential home market to demand more green product, as the VP of Construction Operations, and guided them through a reorganization that helped the company achieve its cost prediction and control goals as well as lean the operations.
We met through a mutual friend working on another sustainable housing startup. We had both had had negative experiences with toxic personalities in our previous start-ups — so we co-founder dated for six months before we formally agreed to be co-founders.
Looking at the entire tech industry, what trend is your team most excited about?
Carbon-free energy and the electrification of everything.
Looking at the entire tech industry, what technology would you call the Myspace of 2019…in other words, something we won’t be thinking so much about in 2020 and beyond?
Electric scooters.
What do you like most and least about the startup experience?
Creating something from nothing and building the team is most satisfying. Capital raising is the most difficult.
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
Perseverance, grit, good idea — in that order — decides who wins/loses.
What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d had that you’d give to others wanting to join the startup journey?
It’s hard. Only do it if you have a deep, deep desire to make a real change that improves peoples’ lives.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
