#1 How to Understand Space Using VR with Shane Scranton
How IrisVR is helping companies save money building… Buildings.
Shane Scranton and his co-founder Nate Beatty, originally founded IrisVR to help architects visualize space while taking advantage of new VR technologies. Since they’ve launched they gotten a ton of incredible feedback from architects, construction companies, and engineers.
Shane and I discuss what it was like making the initial pitches to construction companies, what it was like being a VR centric company in Techstars, and what the atmosphere is like raising money from Venture Capitalists — and why West Coast VCs might be more accommodating than East Coast VCs.
Shane and Nate were just announced to be part of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Enterprise Tech.
Click on any of the links on the left to listen to my talk with Shane on your favorite podcasting platform or scroll down for our interview text!
Thanks so much for joining me Shane. Why don’t we just start off with how IrisVR came to be?
SS: Yeah absolutely. I got my hands on the early Oculus Development Kit 1 (DK1) and wanted to see how architecture firms would react. So, I began to bring it into architecture and construction firms that I knew of and I showed some of those really early VR demos, and what was amazing, even some years ago with the DK1, is that all of these firms immediately said “I would buy this. It is such an amazing way to understand space”.
It’s such an amazing way to understand the layout of a building and really allows you to communicate how the space feels. We have never seen a medium where you can actually move through a space and inhabit it visually so we saw this amazing excitement in the industry.
“We have never seen a medium where you can actually move through a space and inhabit it visually so we saw this amazing excitement in the industry”
We are pretty surprised by it because typically, the construction industry is famous for being the slowest adopter, they just don’t adapt to technology. The fact that we were going into these old school business and convincing them in one sitting is proof in itself of the power of this technology.
I went back and showed it all to my co-founder Nate, and we were talking about the potential of it, and from that day, we were talking about the issue with VR is that the entire building industry is now using 3D models. Everything that’s out there uses these 3D modeling formats and we were talking about the dream scenario was to get existing 3D models into VR in one click where they can very easily send an existing work into VR.
If you were to do that by hand, it would take $100 to $200 dollars, and you have to manually process that file. You have to do all the lighting, interface and build the VR applications. You need someone who’s incredibly specialized in getting designs and it just takes a ton of time.
The idea was that we build software that automates that process and really allows the industry to use VR in an effective way so that it fits into their workflows.
That was about three years ago. We then got some early funding which allowed us to get some interns over the summer out in Vermont, and then we were fortunate enough to get into Techstars here in New York. In that time, we built a few proof of concepts and a data prototype and started shipping that data out to early customers.
That was about a year ago, and after that early beta, we closed our first round of true funding. We were able to scale out the beta, scale out the team a little bit and by about the Summer of this year, we had about 15,000–20,000 beta users. We had a workable prototype of one click VR interface and a large following in the architecture and construction industry.
You mentioned that the construction industry is generally very resistant to change. Does that include architecture firms or exclusively construction companies?
SS: Yeah this is a very interesting. My background is architecture and when we were getting started, we thought, “This is will be great for architects”. But when we looked at the data, we saw very quickly that there was a ton of engagement on the engineering and construction side of things. And not surprisingly, all three of them started to use it for different things. Architects really love it for design innovation and being able to understand space. And they can communicate what they’re designing to their clients and what’s on their mind.
Construction, on the other hand, is much more about coordination and looking at the phasing and sequencing of projects. Looking at ways to coordinate their team so it’s a much more processed orientation. If I’m on a job site and I have a 3D model from the architect, I want to be able to put the goggles on my subcontractors and explain to them, “This is what you’re building” or “Here’s the sequence of events”, so they’re using it for very different things, but both are tremendously valuable in both time savings and cost savings.
If you’re catching change orders, you save ton of money there, you also reduce the number of meetings and travel time, so both these industries are already seeing returns on relatively small investments in VR.
What has your reception been from VCs?
SS: The climate is always changing. I’m curious how warm the industry is going to be with VR as we’re entering 2017. When we started raising in early 2016 for series A, we were hyper aware that we are an East Coast company pre-revenue raising in an 8-million-dollar round.
It was going to be, it was going to take us some time to get there, but at the same time, we are also aware VR is still a little bit of a wild card, especially on the East Coast, and we really need to find the right partners, so our Series Seed that we did almost two years ago was primarily East Coast VCs, and our Series A was West Coast VCs.
I don’t want to generalize too much but we found that when we were raising funds over the summer, the New York climate was a little bit more conservative around VR. There were a lot of headsets that had just been released, and there weren’t these explosive sales in the consumer world that some people had predicted.
What it was it like being a VR centric company in Techstars?
SS: Techstars was a big old stamp of approval because we made the cut and we had the tech to show for it. We apparently had the team to show for it and they were energized by us one whole component of that was the validation.
I think another wonderful thing about Techstars is that it got us into the New York community, and I think it’s a very hard community to get into organically without quite a lot of leverage.
So just by going through that program, it opened the doors to a whole bunch of advisers and a whole bunch of investors. The other great part about Techstars was us being able to be alongside a few other founding teams that we could really relate to, and you’re working side by side with other companies that are very similar stage as you. There’s many opportunities to emphasize and share the burden of growing a company.
What’s holding you back as a founder and as a CEO?
SS: Just hiring as fast as possible so it’s manpower. After our raiser, we did have the capital to scale and now it’s building the right team and building it quickly.
Recruiting is just the absolute hardest thing, to find the right fit. But it is also the most essential.
A very good problem to have and definitely the largest challenge that most founders face.
SS: Well in this problem, throwing more heads doesn’t always solve it so it’s not necessarily trying to bring a volume of people on, it’s trying to find the right people that strategically fit and that can work very efficiently. Ideally if you hire, you actually hire fewer people.
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