Vaissnavi Shukl
I had been looking forward to today’s conversation for two reasons. First, if you have ever worked on a construction project and had a hard time searching for and specifying building products, you will be relieved to know that somebody out there is trying to ease the workflow and make your life easier. But the second reason is that, as architects, we seldom see other architects branch out into the business world, let alone start a company in grad school. There seems to be this unspoken chord about how if you’ve studied design, you need to practise it. Because what are all those sleepless nights worrying about if you’re not going to deploy your design skills?In a nutshell, this episode is about technology, innovation and choosing a radical career path. So today, I’m in conversation with Mr. Vardhan Mehta, an architect, urban designer and the co-founder of Acelab Dries Carmeliet. They have founded Acelab, the world’s first vertically integrated platform where architects can get to know their building products.

My name is Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off- Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design practices and research projects that reflect the emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture of Center features conversations with exceptionally creative individuals who have extrapolated the traditional fields of Art, Architecture, Planning, landscape, and urban design.

Should we start? Let’s stop. You’re here today and Dries is not but let’s… let’s kind of rewind everything a little bit. So both of you kind of go to different schools, right? So you went to the GSB, you went to Harvard, and Dries went to MIT. But you both ended up kind of starting a company together. So tell me a little bit about your own background, but also the famous lash and famous story of how co-founders meet each other. And you know how they think about this company when they’re drunk, whatever. How did… How did you guys meet? And how did the idea of getting into the startup world come about for both of you?

Vardhan Mehta
So I’ll backtrack a little bit. And I’ll actually go to my childhood. I’m from a small town in central India, Indore. And growing up, I spent a lot of time in my dad’s office, and he had his startup also, which was his architecture office. And he used to spend a lot of time there after school usually, like once I was down. And I remember his architecture office very vividly, because he had these three rooms. That’s it. So he had like one small drafting room where like him and his team would just make drawings all day long. He had a meeting room where he would like meet with clients and have presentations. And then the third room was like this weird. I first thought it was a storage room, but I later found out that they call this a material library. And so it’s filled with these giant dossiers and folders full of brochures from manufacturers from years and years ago, I always had that age. Also, I found it very weird that when they were working with such limited real estate, they still decided to dedicate this entire room to this library space. But then it also kind of made sense, because I would see him and his team just running back and forth, all day long, between the drafting room and the library where they were trying to find the best products to use for their projects.

And I have this one very strange memory from when I was, I think, 12 years old, when I saw him just scream at this floor tile manufacturer on the phone. He was holding the brochure from that manufacturer in one hand, and he was screaming on the phone with them, essentially saying that the order that I placed was based on a brochure, but the one that reached the construction site is something totally different. And in that moment, I felt like overwhelmed with the amount of hard work and frustration that’s involved in being an architect. But still, I love it. Like I really like the excitement and energy I saw in his office and just like in his life. And I wanted to say so I told my dad that I also want to become an architect. And my dad said, that’s great. But in that case, you should actually go to the US. And learn about the innovative and technologically driven workflows of practice. Because things in India are just too old fashioned or too slow. And you won’t learn as much. So I was like, yeah, that sounds great. So then I came to Pratt Institute in New York, in 2013 for my Bachelor’s, and I had a great time of prep. Like, the thing that was the most exciting for me was actually organising teams with my friends at the school, who were also aspiring to become architects, and to enter international design competitions. And he used to love just organising these teams and competing and actually led three days, which won competitions in France, Germany, and China. And then, with all of this excitement about practising architecture, I graduated and started working at one of the best ones in the US, based out of New York. And things were great. Like I was working on design projects, like the new US Embassy in New Delhi, for the State Department. I was also working for Institutions projects for MIT. And everything was going fine. Until this one day in 2018, my PM had asked me to go to the back of the office, to the material library, which was massive. And he asked me to find this one brochure for this one stone that a manufacturer had handed to the office years ago. And I spent half of my day trying to find that one brochure from the vague material library. And in that moment, I felt cheated. Because I was told that you go to the US to learn the more innovative and technologically driven ways of practising. But that was simply not the case. There were still these redundancies in the workflows that even the best architecture firms were using in 2018. And I found that very frustrating. But also, I felt like 12 years ago, I had the same recollection with my dad on the phone arguing with the flow time manufacturer, how things has not changed anywhere in the world in the last 12 years. So with that, I started to feel like the impact I would… I was able to create through architecture was severely limited, due to be outdated workflows in the industry. And then, soon after that, I applied for grad school. I was accepted at Harvard and MIT. And I was attending open houses at both schools with all the accepted students into that programme. And that’s where I met Dries. He came in as a student after five years in practice. He also came from a small town, Logan in Belgium. And I remember the first night we met, we were just like talking about a workplace to understand like, the things that were radically different than the things that were the same. And everything about the way we practise was completely different, except for this frustration, which was exactly the same. And that was like this ‘aha’ moment of how can it be that architects around the world in India elfin and New York are struggling with the same exact thing across different times in the past, in the recent past actions. And so that’s what reason I started working on this idea of Acelab. It really actually started as a way to, to think of how can I architects be able to do more meaningful work, so that we’re spending our time doing things that we actually go to school for designing beautiful buildings, as opposed to spending time on administrative work or writing Word documents or compiling together product data inspections?

Vaissnavi Shukl
You said Acelab now so why don’t you tell us about Acelab and what is the big idea?

Vardhan Mehta
So Acelab is the world’s first vertically integrated building products platform to search, select and specify building products. The problem in this industry for a very long time has been due to the sheer size and the complexity of the construction and architectural industry. There has been no standardisation of product data. So for an architect to be able to communicate with a manufacturer or a distributor or a dealer installer, it’s a big mess. You usually have to go to crypto den trade shows to invite my factors or luncheons, you look at magazine ads, you aimlessly search on websites, you make countless phone calls. But even after all of that, you don’t really have all the information you need in your hands to be able to make an informed decision about which products end up in your project. So that’s what we’re doing with Acelab. We’re trying to reduce the two to three hours an architect has to spend right now, in order to find two or three very good options for products to include in a building by reducing that to a few minutes.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Everything you said, sounds like a reality I’m living in right now. Because I graduated last year. And then I moved back to India, and I like to call myself a practice and not a freelancer, I’m a one person office at the moment. But I’m working on, let’s say, four projects right now, right, different scales, different, different industries. So there’s a project I’m doing in the healthcare space, and there’s one that’s an office and do kind of separately, architecture, weekend houses, whatever, but I’m the one person who is doing the working drawings, trying to coordinate with different agencies on site, but also look for different products. And, you know, go through the whole thing that you only spent half a day in. I spent days Googling for products. Because I mean, say, for example, you want a door manufacturer, right? So this healthcare project I’m doing just want a door that has whatever antibacterial coating, and blah, blah, blah, and is everything that needs the NABH guidelines. And so I go girl, and then I reach out to the person, and then the person sends me a brochure on WhatsApp, not even on me. So I have to airdrop it to my Mac, I have to call him on site. And so the whole gamut, okay. And then once I find a product, I want to specify in my working drawings, I google again, and then you start hunting for the brochures, website goes on and on and on to the things actually find lies in the quotations done. So you can imagine as a one person operation, this gets very tedious for me, and I’m sure a lot of architects, project managers and interns face the same problem on a day to day basis. So what Acelab is trying to do is so simple and so essential, and so fundamental to the design and construction industry. Why do you think no one has done this before? I mean, I know the construction industry is notoriously resistant to like technological changes, especially in India, where we’re still fighting about whether we make the drawings in the Imperial or metric system. So it starts right from there. But there has to be something more than that. Right? Like, why has nobody done this?

Vardhan Mehta
Before answering that? I’ll actually add something to your frustrations, please do. I firmly believe that an architect’s role is to not know everything about everything. But to know something about everything. Like that’s a strength, right? But for junior architects, like I felt this tug of war, working in New York back in 2018. As a junior architect, you just don’t know enough. And you also don’t really have any place online, where you can just find the information you need, right in that moment, to be able to make an informed decision. Whether that is about very technical attributes or about sustainability, bridges, not enough. We sometimes just don’t have enough experience, to be able to know everything about everything.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Even in terms of economics, right, like in terms of pricing, also, I mean, I remember I interned in Sri Lanka, and there’s this one particular stretch ceiling product that we were looking for an auditorium and they didn’t have dealers for that in Sri Lanka. But I spent so much time just figuring out how it works. And once we found somebody to do it, just like in terms of cost, you’re trying to get the right products that fit the budget.

Vardhan Mehta
Yeah, absolutely. And, if you just Google for manufacturers, you go on their websites, that’s not really the best way to be able to understand how to make an informed decision since all of their five star reviews on the website are clearly biassed towards them being able to sell more through it. And so in this case, like having a tool, which has unbiased and transparent information, where you’re able to compare, let’s say three windows apples to apples. Exactly the way you would do on Amazon, if you’re trying to find a laptop, where you’re looking at the same technical attributes for all three window manufacturers and their product lines side by side, and then you can make a decision based on data not instinct or intuition. So that I think is really important. And then now to answer your question about why has no one done this? Well, the problem is, there have been people who’ve tried to do this before. In fact, there’s a big graveyard of companies that have tried to create a solution to this problem. But the problem is, it always came from an angle of media, not from the angle of product. And so by that I mean, Acelab secret sauce is that we spend a year doing our homework, and creating database structures for the first time, which attempt to standardise how a window is experienced, or how its information is relayed to an architect, an interior designer, or developer, and so on, essentially, anyone on the demand side of the house. And so far, like the big problem that exists in the industry is that there isn’t a language where a manufacturer or a distributor or dealer is able to communicate with an architect or an interior designer or a developer. And so that’s what we’re really focused on. And we build these database structures, which help our manufacturers relay absolute accurate information about their products to an architect in a very efficient way.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So while you’re talking about all of this, I’m almost thinking about you know, the audience that you have, it’s like would you say it’s a b2b marketplace? What is it b2c is it?

Vardhan Mehta
I would say it’s a b2b information. So we don’t sell anything, all we do is aggregate informations. We aggregate information. And then we influence the role of building products and how architects experience building products and how they’re funded through a platform. And on the platform we’ve also built back office functionality for both architects and for manufacturers. So for architects, for example, finding the right product is just the first step in the pipeline, right? Because after that, you have to actually fill out a spec sheet where you note all the details about the product and how it should be used on site or how it should be assembled, or how it should be installed. And since we work with highly structured, highly standardised information, we’re also able to automate the documentation. And so through a slab, an architect can actually make the selections for a billing product, save them into something like a shopping cart, or a digital project library. And then from there, they can actually share that with everybody, including the people on their internal team, the client, the contractor, etc, and also automate the documentation as the project goes further downstream.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So after all the short talk, I want to carve some time for some real talk. Now, you and Dries are both technically students today, because you haven’t graduated. But you both started his lab while he was still enrolled in a semester with a full course load. And I think everybody who’s listening probably knows how stressful architecture school can get. So you guys, started Acelab while just starting grad school plus, with the option studios sucking out all the living energy out of you, and with the seminars that have so many readings that is impossible to get through them. With all of this going on in your Academy life. What was it like to be an entrepreneur? Did it ever take a toll on your mental, physical, social well being?

Vardhan Mehta
That’s a great question. And like reflecting back both our experiences at Harvard and MIT, I think it’s fair to say that neither of us could have expected that the two years in grad school would go like that. And so by that I mean, at a certain time, my days look like this. We would be in studio reviews during the afternoons. We would have seminar courses in the evenings. And then trees would or I would like one of us would come essentially to the other with a six pack of beer. And we work on our pitch deck our business plan for like hours into the night. So at that point, I would say like we were living as architects by the day and entrepreneurs by the night, and it was amazing, it felt so good. Like the prime reason I think it felt so good was we both felt this frustration firsthand. And we knew that we’re doing something about it. We’re not waiting for MBAs from the business school that either of the two schools have come into our industry. See that it’s a Very big opportunity and try to create a half assed solution, we were actually doing something about it. So that felt really nice. And I think the support that we got along the way, like we just met the most amazing people as mentors, through the two schools, like we did all of these incubator programmes at Harvard Innovation Lab, MIT, Design x. And that just added, I think, like some kind of order to all this raw energy that the two of us had, and how willing we were to just drive a solution that actually makes a difference in the lives of arguments.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So for anyone who’s listening right now, anyone who’s studying architecture and wants to start their own venture, or anyone who has been told that architecture is a noble design profession, and that talking about business is bad, or is frowned upon in the architecture circles, how can they switch gears and carve a different career path for themselves like you do, because usually what happens is, especially if you’re right out of undergrad, you tend to go or if you want to branch out out of architecture, that is you tend to go into all the allied design fields, like you would probably take up photography, you would go into interior design, you would go into furniture design, you would kind of product design, but you’re rarely, I’m trying to think of any cases that I know of who have completely switched gears and turn something else. But what would be your advice for advice is the wrong word. What would you say to somebody who’s who’s wanting to, you know, get into the startup space data architecture school?

Vardhan Mehta
Well, I wouldn’t be comfortable offering advice of any kind, since we’re also doing this for the first time. We’re also from a non technical non business background, and we’re still at an early stage. And we’re just experimenting and trying things out as a way of learning to them. But I will say two things. Firstly, there’s two types of people that I’ve experienced in this profession. And actually, to backtrack, the problem with our profession now is that over the years, we have just relinquished all agency. And so at this point, it’s a borderline service based industry, where all we get paid for is our instruments of service. But some of the smartest people I know to date in my life are architects. And there should not be a cost attached to be able to do the type of work we do, where we have to make a sacrifice for. And so the two types of people I’ve noticed in this profession so far in my life, who are totally fine with the way things are, first, there’s this datascope, or the people who are just are totally happy with the way things are right now. Since it, it just helps them stay at the place where they are in their professional life. The second is people are just complacent, who know that something’s wrong in the system. But they just live with it. And I would say that, for any architecture student or architect out there, if you’ve experienced frustration, and if you have the drive to do something about it, then just start doing it. Yeah, like sooner than later you will find people who, like you, trust you and respect you, and who will take a chance. Like, from the 100 users we have so far 100 architecture and manufacturing firms, I would say 90% of them are working with us only because they decided to take a chance on us. Yeah, yeah. Like they saw that they would like we have this excitement and really this like power to do something that changes lives. And they wanted to join us on that journey.

Vaissnavi Shukl
But that’s such a nice thing to say, right? And that applies to anybody want to do anything in life is to say if you’re driven enough, and if you put in the hard work, I think that’s very important if you and researchers been sitting with that six pack of beer and not doing anything Acelab .So it’s, it’s also putting in the hard work, but also having that that drive and faith in what you’re doing right.

Vardhan Mehta
The only thing I’ll add to that really quickly is having mentors is so important. I remember just about the time that I started working on Acelab, I met this lady, Emily Ferber and she’s been our guiding light or North Star from that day on. She essentially showed us that apart from the technical aspects of everything that we’re doing, the most important thing is why? Why are we doing what we’re doing? Why is Acelab so important in our lives? And that question is just so important to be able to answer that I remember I had to answer that two or five times before I hit the nail on the head. So I started with, yeah, the problem is in architecture right now, you’ve just spent all of this time she was like, No, you start over. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Yeah, it’s actually a very good exercise. I kept going again, and again. And I remember at one point, I just said that, like, I felt like after that time in my life, I was not able to do meaningful work through architecture. And I had this like, deep like, need to be able to do meaningful work through architecture, or for architecture. And so that’s what’s, in my opinion, the most important thing like identifying the why of like, why do you want to do that? Why is that so important? Why you, and not someone else? Do you have an unfair advantage in that?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Oh, my God, I’m gonna think about everything I’m doing right now. Because the leadership programme that both of us were a part of was founded on and thrived on this question of, why do you do what you do? You know, why do we do what you do? But I don’t know. I will admit, some days, I just wake up. And I have absolutely no sense of purpose and some reason they driven and I get stuff done. But I think that’s a very nice thing to say. But so you and Dries are both graduating in a week?

Vardhan Mehta
Yes. Dries says like, the reason why he’s not here right now is he’s working very hard to complete his thesis for grad school. And so that, to me, is like the true example of how hard working my co-founder is, where he spends his all day on Acelab, but still is doing like a full form thesis at a really good architecture school.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, we missed you Dries. But both of you are graduating in a week and, and taking a full fledged plunge into Acelab. Doing it without any readings in any studio review. So what’s next for the both of you in terms of your entrepreneurial journey, and what’s next for Acelab?

Vardhan Mehta
So we just closed a seed investment round.

Vaissnavi Shukl
You did? Since we last spoke! Well, congratulations! I’m so happy.

Vardhan Mehta
Thank you. So now, like in the last year, we are very limited resources. And we were just very, very scrappy, I mean, bootstrap everything that we could. Now with more resources, our plan is to keep rapidly iterating on the design of the platform, to keep learning from feedback from our end users, being architects and manufacturers. And also expand the team and get more crazy and driven people on the team who are also aligned, and just so excited to solve this problem. Like, if you don’t, it will stay exactly the same way it has been for the last 35 years, and someone needs to do something about it. So yeah, that’s the plan. And I’ll actually invite to anyone who’s listening right now, please go on Acelab.com right now, sign up and play around with the platform, and write me an email. If you like things that you see on the platform, if you don’t like them, if you have any suggestions we would love to hear from you.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, and I’ll put the link for his lab and any other details you want to share in the show notes. So for anybody who wants to go just like click on show notes, and you can directly just jump onto what we’re talking about.

Vardhan Mehta
Yeah, absolutely. And we’ll be happy to just like learn from your input, since we’re not experts in this either. And we want to make sure that the tools that we’re creating, actually generating real value for you, in any way shape or form in your professional lives, and add to you being able to go on for at least one day we for dinner, instead of staying in the office, or the studio.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Ah, that’s such a nice thing to say. Okay, so before I end, I just want to make a big demand when and Well, I know I’m not gonna say if when you launch in India, can I be your 101st user, I hope you have 1000 before you go, but can I be like your 1st user in India?

Vardhan Mehta
Absolutely. We’ll reserve that spot for you. And that’s like when we’re trying to hit the critical mass in this year in the US and then we’ll also expand to India very very soon. So we’re very excited about that.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Can’t wait. Well, good luck, you guys. And I can’t wait to see all the cool things you do. And you know, you guys just like giving a TED talk on how you revolutionise the construction industry. See, I already have a title.

Vardhan Mehta
That sounds great. And we’d only be able to do that with the help of other architects who can join in and so that we also feel a sense of community. Like right now for architects, there isn’t really a place where you can assemble together and take pride in the work that we do together, in spite of all the obstacles that we face on a day to day basis, so that would be good.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, I can’t wait. Thank you so much for being here today. I hope we can all reconvene at some point in New York. Yeah, I can buy you both drinks.

Vardhan Mehta
Yes, that sounds great. We look forward to that.

Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.