Challenges with room-sized Lego block prefab construction

My guest this week is Alexis Rivas. Alexis is the co-founder and CEO of Cover, which is pioneering a new way of building homes. It’s no surprise to anyone that aspects of our housing market is broken. The market is undersupplied and littered with regulatory issues. The homebuilding process has also not changed for the better part of a century. Alexis is attacking the problem and has taken a leaf out of the car industry’s learnings to create a similar production process for home building. In our discussion, we talk about his idea of lego pieces for homes, how they’re refining production with backyard homes first, and how this may change the way people buy and sell homes in future. Please enjoy my conversation with Alexis Rivas.

Listen to Founders Podcast

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For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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Show Notes

(00:03:39) - (First question) - Supply and demand situation writ large for housing in the United States

(00:06:34) - Lack of workforce growth to meet housing development needs

(00:10:23) - Insight into “lego piece” style construction

(00:11:41) - The comparison to automotive manufacturing

(00:16:15) - Strategic description of a good “lego piece” from Cover

(00:20:08) - Utility continuity comparison between panels versus tradition construction

(00:21:05) - Potential criticism from skeptical contractors

(00:22:53) - The marginal cost for a typical home buyer

(00:25:59) - The role of software in the business

(00:28:47) - Insight into support model and “The Last Mile” theory in construction and possible solutions to combat errors during assembly

(00:30:46) - Support system integration for inevitable repairs

(00:32:17) - The changing reality of initial ideas as projects are completed

(00:34:27) - Building factories and streamlining production logistics

(00:37:28) - Focusing on constraints and an example relatable to real life scenarios

(00:38:37) - The value of moving slow to perfect processes early on versus an all in head first approach

(00:40:09) - The scope of ambition over the next several decades

(00:41:18) - The evolution of homes and how they could change based of consumer wants

(00:43:37) - Vertical capabilities of cover panels

(00:43:21) - Types of panels that could be introduced moving forward

(00:45:14) - Timeline for Cover expansion into new states

(00:46:06) - Advice for upcoming entrepreneurs when building similar business models

(00:47:58) - The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for Alexis