On the show today, Apollo is joined by Julieta Moradei, Managing Partner of the recently launched Overlay Capital Build. Through optimizing the end-to-end value chain, reducing environmental impact, and implementing new technologies during the entire construction cycle, Julieta describes how she’s leaned into her Leverage orientation to re-imagine our built environment on earth.
On the show today, Apollo is joined by Julieta Moradei, Managing Partner of the recently launched Overlay Capital Build. Build is a consultancy working to accelerate the adoption of critical digital transformation technologies in the arena of construction and housing.
While most executives often score high in Prioritize on the PLE assessment, Julieta is Apollo’s first guest to score overwhelmingly high in Leverage. She guides us through her professional journey, highlighting her ability to automate organized work systems early in her career as an engineer.
As Julieta molds Overlay Capital Build, she tackles the question: “How can we shelter the 3 billion people who don't have adequate housing, by 2030?” Through optimizing the end-to-end value chain, reducing environmental impact, and implementing new technologies during the entire construction cycle, Julieta describes how she’s leaned into her Leverage orientation to re-imagine our built environment on earth.
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Guest Bio
Julieta Moradei is a structural engineer and architect turned social entrepreneur and venture capitalist, investing in early-stage startups and mitigating the biggest barriers in the built environment.
Julieta is the managing partner of the recently launched Overlay Capital Build, part of the asset manager Overlay Capital. Build is a consultancy working to accelerate the adoption of critical digital transformation technologies in the built environment by connecting innovative technologies with adopters.
Before joining Overlay Capital, Julieta was also a founding member and partner of Home Team Ventures, where she launched, fundraised, and managed operations of the venture fund investing in early-stage startups. She brought breakthrough technology to the world's largest, but least innovative industries: construction and housing.
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Guest PLE Score
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Guest Quote
“How do you leverage technology to make things easier? I'm not the kind of person that likes to hike up that mountain by myself. I never think that I'll be the smartest person in the room to do that. I wanna bring in the other mountaineers, that could do with me. When you're a VC, you're not an expert in one thing necessarily. Usually, you have a high-level understanding of a lot of different things and trends, and then you invest in those “geniuses”. You're investing in those people that will be actually creating this path, championing them, being optimistic, and helping them when you know there's barriers.” - Julieta Moradei
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Time Stamps
*(3:22) Julieta's Achievement Index
*(6:29) Julieta’s early career problem-solving as an engineer
*(12:04) Flipping your execute role into a prioritize and leverage experience
*(18:57) Innovating the “built environment” to address “the missing middle”
*(24:09) Introducing Overlay Capital Build
*(29:35) Can we repurpose the built environment to solve the housing crisis?
*(42:08) Apollo’s Takeaways
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Links
[00:00:00] Apollo Emeka: Improving your leadership skills will help you in every area of your life. But it's tough to know where to get started, and that's why we created the Achievement Index Assessment. You can take the assessment@theachievementindex.com. It takes about five minutes, and it's gonna generate a personalized report that breaks down how you prioritize, leverage and execute.
Go to the achievement index.com or find the link in the show notes.
[00:00:26] Julieta Moradei: All of a sudden, you've seen a huge surge of construction technologies. More appetite in the space. We have more VCs, we have more funds, but what's really lacking is the connection of these technologies to the builders, to these local partners that you need in order to actually implement the technology.
So, what I'm really excited for is addressing this missing middle and having a very clear view as to how do we actually scale this idea of demand. How do we increase the appetite for technology so that overall we have a more balanced system?
[00:00:59] Apollo Emeka: Welcome to The Achievement Index, a podcast designed to help you understand and accelerate the ways you perform. I'm Dr. Apollo Emeka. I created The Achievement Index based on my experience in the FBI, U. S. Army Special Forces, According to the Achievement Index, vibrant success is the result of doing well in three areas, or as we like to call them, orientations.
Prioritize, leverage, and execute. On this podcast, I'll be getting inside the minds of noteworthy leaders to explore how their unique orientations inform the successes and challenges they've navigated throughout their lives and careers. On the show today, I'll be speaking with Julieta Morede, a structural engineer and architect turned social entrepreneur and venture capitalist investing in early stage startups, mitigating the biggest barriers in the built environment.
Julieta is the managing partner of the recently launched Overlay Capital Build. Part of the asset manager, Overlay Capital. Build is a consultancy working to accelerate the adoption of critical digital transformation technologies in the built environment by connecting innovative technologies With adopters.
Before joining Overlay Capital, Julieta was also a founding member and partner of Home Team Ventures, where she launched, fundraised, and managed operations of the venture fund, investing in early stage startups, bringing breakthrough technology to the world's largest, but least innovative industries.
Construction. And housing. What's up, Julieta? How you doing? Good. How are you doing? Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:02:44] Julieta Moradei: Excited to be here. I feel like all of our conversations are just podcasting
[00:02:48] Apollo Emeka: themselves. I know. I'm kind of mad that all of our conversations up to this point haven't been recorded.
[00:02:54] Julieta Moradei: Maybe we just start doing that during every conversation, just record
[00:02:57] Apollo Emeka: ourselves. Yeah, maybe we should start our own podcast that's just like Juliet and Apollo on the phone. And that's what it's called. There's no intro. There's no editing. There's no nothing. It's just us talking. Amazing.
[00:03:08] Julieta Moradei: And just do like surprise calls, especially at airports.
Those are the best ones. Get some background noise.
[00:03:14] Apollo Emeka: Exactly. Just like, Hey, retrofitting office buildings. Go.
[00:03:18] Julieta Moradei: Ideas.
[00:03:19] Apollo Emeka: Go. With love. I love it. And so just like all of our other guests, you took the Achievement Index assessment before you came on the show. But unlike the other guests, you are super duper high leverage, which is really interesting because you're the first, actually, you're the first executive level leader that we've had on here that is primarily Leverage.
So, Julietta, your score was 60 percent leverage, so you're primarily leverage, 32 percent prioritize, and 8 percent execute. How does that score strike you?
[00:03:57] Julieta Moradei: It actually makes a lot of sense to me because one of my favorite values is to think really big, break down, and then execute. And my favorite part is the breakdown.
It's, all right, we know we have this massive problem, I already know what that red flag looks like because we've been talking about it for... decades, let's say. Mm hmm. I really find it interesting to think of the breakdown piece of the strategy towards how do you get to the top of that mountain, but in a way that others haven't.
And so when you say leverage, what I think of is 100 percent the first thing I think of whenever I try to solve any problem in thinking of that breakdown strategy is who do I know around me or who do I know that could connect me to other people around me that are geniuses in certain zones, connecting those people together, but then really how do you leverage technology to make things easier?
Versus, I'm not the kind of person who likes to hike up that mountain by myself. I never think that I'll be the smartest person in the room to do that. I want to bring in the other mountaineers, right, that could deal with me. And on the execute side, I think that, that actually aligns very well with the idea of being an investor.
When you're a VC, you're not an expert in one thing, necessarily. Usually you have understandings of high level of a lot of different things and trends. And then you are investing in those geniuses. You're investing in those people that will be, you know, actually creating this path and championing them and being optimistic and helping them when, you know, there's barriers.
So. It actually aligns very well to kind of how I align my goals and strategies and approaches.
[00:05:26] Apollo Emeka: I love that. It's so interesting, you know, most executives have super low execute, and we believe that it's necessary for executives to have a super low execute because really executive execution is, is strategizing and it's pulling those levers, right?
So it makes sense. One of the things that's really interesting about your background is that you are an engineer, right? And it reminds me of another guest that we had on the show. Her name is Carrie Colbert of Curate Capital. And she started out as an engineer, I think, petroleum engineer. And so she joined an oil company in Texas and was doing all the execute stuff, but then was able to make this transition.
But it's, it's always interesting how people navigate that journey, especially people with these. Technical, you know, specialties like you, and you're still pretty early in your career, right? Like you've got a lot of, you've got a lot of time left. So how were you able to make this leap from, I imagine, were you ever super execute as an engineer?
And then how did you transition?
[00:06:29] Julieta Moradei: That's an amazing question. I always love meeting other people who are engineers and then transitioned into VC or into completely different industries. I actually think there's two answers to that. One is. The engineering framework, all you learn in university and when you're working is you're given a problem and certain constraints, and then you create that breakdown.
You're creating those parameters and you have certain calculations in order. And so it's very much about the leverage piece of it. As an engineer, you have that mindset early on that's ingrained into you. So any problems thrown your way, the first thing you start asking is, okay, what are my constraints?
What are my parameters and what equations, what tools do I have in my toolbox to actually create a solution? And There can be very creative solutions because there's different tools in there. So when I think of another civil engineer, it's we're trained this way to think this way. And I've met several executives in my lifetime in very different industries who have that background and you think in a similar fashion, you kind of lead in that similar fashion.
I would say that the second piece of your question is, you know, how did I go from engineering to venture capital? And really my path is kind of wacky. I've gone in many different directions, but always based on this one passion for the built environment. So. I started off my career very early. The reason I'm, I'm still young, I guess, in my career is I started university at 16 years old.
So I started early academically. Yeah. So that, that's a whole other story for one of our next podcasts. When you go to an airport and you go, okay, university at 16, go.
[00:07:57] Apollo Emeka: I have to ask, is there some homeschooling involved here?
[00:08:01] Julieta Moradei: Not at all. Just a lot of moving. I mean, I'm, I'm from Argentina, but grew up moving around because my parents are cancer researchers.
So they're both medicinal chemists and. Back in the day, you weren't going on ChatGPT to look at the latest research, you're going to labs around the world to actually do that experimentation. So we moved every year, every two years growing up. And because of the educational systems in different countries, I just always kind of was early for that next grade.
And then during the 08 crash, basically all the pharma companies were in Montreal and they moved to Boston. So long story short, because of the difference between the Canadian system and the American system, I skipped year 12. So I went from 11th grade straight to university, and I was 15, applying, right?
So at 15 years old, you have to kind of put in your general application. What do you want to do when you're older? And at that time, I mean, how do you really know, right? So I was obsessed with architecture from a very young age. I think moving around made me very aware of city landscapes and how they're designed.
And so I knew that I wanted to do something artistic in the sense of designing buildings. I always loved how. Cities are shaped and how they make you feel based on how they're shaped. I mean, I was obsessed with Gaudí, probably at the age of six, right? How many kids are asking their parents to go to Park Güell in Barcelona?
It was something that I was always passionate about. So I also loved math and physics. I decided to actually do structural engineering within civil. I wanted to design buildings and do the physics behind them, but also the architecture. I wanted to do kind of the aesthetic and the engineering. And so. I did both and throughout my undergraduate, I did a co op program where basically you work for a semester and then you go back to school for a semester back and forth at Northeastern.
They have an amazing co op program. Anytime people ask me about undergrad, I, I always encourage internships and co ops. And that's where I got to really experiment with the execution, right? So the engineering day to day, I worked at Disney World and got to design super creative roller coasters and resorts and.
That's where I was really doing the execution side. And I think that any executive, any leader in any domain, you need to start off with doing the tasks yourself. You need to understand what every single role entails. And as an intern, Or even as an early, you know, leader, that path, I think it's a lot about doing anything that's thrown your way and not complaining about it, kind of seeing the upside, because the upside, even though many times they're tasks that are admin work, even the upside is you're learning, you're learning about the inefficiencies, you're learning about what you have to be.
telling people to do in the future, how do you actually delegate in a way that comes from empathy because you've done it?
[00:10:48] Apollo Emeka: Delegate in a way that comes from empathy because you've done it. Oof, I think that we just stumbled onto one of Julieta's secret superpowers. The thing that you don't know about Julieta up to this point is that she's 28 years old.
And this is the second time that she's been a managing partner for a fund, okay? So, how did she get there? She saw how the sausage was made, and she understood what it took to be efficient. She understood what could cause inefficiencies, and... Then she was able to delegate in a way that took all of that prior knowledge and experience into account, which means that she could accomplish bigger and bolder things because she's leveraging other people's expertise.
If you took the Achievement Index and you are really high execute, don't feel discouraged. Yeah, that's not how a lot of executives operate, but that execute knowledge. is going to come in handy when you have to plan out something big or delegate to folks. So if you are an execution master, stay on it, but start thinking about how you can flip that into leverage and prioritize experience.
[00:12:04] Julieta Moradei: So I went through that phase of being an engineer, right? Making a lot of spreadsheets, working late, late hours as a consultant. And throughout that experience, I learned that I absolutely love the built environment. I don't love doing the calculations every day. I don't like to plug and play. I like to really create and innovate.
And so, I think it was a lot about just not being complacent. I think it's easy to say, okay, well, I spent all these undergrad years and then I went to grad school and then I did the certification to be an engineer. I'm not going to throw that all away by leaving this industry. It's hard to have that identity crisis, but it's also this piece of me that says, okay, I don't want to be complacent.
I don't want to stay in this just because it's the path that's of least resistance. I am listening to my internal voice that's saying, I don't love coming in at 7 a. m. and doing the spreadsheet again. I want to figure out if there's something else that's related to my passion, but that it could be more innovative and creative.
So for me, what that looked like was just kind of expanding beyond my horizons and looking at, okay, with a structural engineering background. Based in San Francisco with Silicon Valley around me, what exists? So that looked like looking at Y Combinator and seeing what are all the different startups related to the built environment.
And at the time, there's only one that was a nonprofit for housing. And so I decided to actually join the nonprofit and launch an R& D team. So it was more serendipitous of just opening up a door that was interesting, kind of passion driven. Taking that leap, and then once you're kind of in yours out of uncomfort, that's when you start experimenting with what you like.
And that's what ultimately led me to go from, you know, launching an R& D team, almost an incubator program to then launching a VC, because it's a lot of the
[00:13:49] Apollo Emeka: same thing. You know, it's funny because you say, Oh, you know, like when you're down there in the execution, you get to learn, you know, inefficiencies and learn what's not working and whatnot.
But. I feel like that's not what everybody gets from the execution phase of their career. I think a lot of people stay in that where they don't even see those inefficiencies. It's just part of the system, right? And they develop their workarounds and they develop their, you know, their hacks. And they put a lot of elbow grease in to make things work despite a broken system.
But those people tend to be like the hit men and women of their technical specialty. Right? Like, they just know how to do it regardless of how kind of crappy their circumstances are, how crappy the system is. Did you kind of hit the ground like when you were in your internships in college? Did you already have that mind of like not only working in the things that you were working on, but also like kind of zooming out and evaluating the bigger picture?
[00:14:49] Julieta Moradei: I think I always had to kind of go with your terminology. I always had that leverage. bucket at the top of my mind, meaning I would do the dirty work, right? I would, I would do whatever was thrown my way. I'll give an example. You have to go to the strobe site, night shifts, you have to go midnight to 5am every day to go look at inspecting welds.
I'll go do it, and I'm going to learn, and I actually love talking to the welders that are And they're 60s and telling you about how they used to do it back in the day, but at the same time as I'm doing this, I'm starting to see, okay, I keep doing this repetitive task every single evening, and there is probably more efficient ways to do this.
So then coming back, you know, observing first, the first 30 days, observing, coming back and saying, okay, I built this spreadsheet automation thing to do this a little bit quicker. Can we do it this way? And then testing it and seeing if it works. I think I always had that itch for not always doing it the same way.
And to your point, the people who are amazing at working within the system, we need those people. We also need the people that are able to work in the things that are needed today. We can't have people that are constantly wanting to innovate everything because if we want to be reinventing the wheel all the time, nothing would get done.
But I think on every team, you need to have those workhorses, showhorses, and then kind of that hybrid ones as well. And you need to have the workhorses as the primary part of the team. Things need to get
[00:16:12] Apollo Emeka: done. Oh, man, that's so interesting. So going back to your path, you joined this nonprofit, launched an R& D team, and then launched a venture fund out of that?
Yeah.
[00:16:25] Julieta Moradei: So that kind of goes into the thesis of what I've been. Diving into in the past few years. So the reason for launching this R& D team and why I was even interested was this nonprofit was focused on how can we shelter the 3 billion people who don't have adequate housing by 2030. So how can we build housing in a way that's faster and cheaper?
So that to me means innovation right away. It's we can't do with current construction methods. So what I really loved about it was you have to identify the biggest problems in the design construction operation facing entire end to end value chain. And then dive in and not invent technology in house, there's no way that a small non profit could achieve that.
It's how do we look at external technologies and then bring them into these very specific pain points along that value chain. Creating partnership, it's leveraging people, connecting those dots, making it happen. And so what I started realizing was, okay, in my consulting engineering days, I realized our industry has a massive lack of technology.
Or at least the use of technology. So then I enter in the world of innovation. There's a lot of innovation out there. There's not a lack of. There's a lot of innovation there. There's a lack of kind of that connecting piece. And so we launched this R& D team, and it was amazing because we almost had these lab cases.
We, we had these test beds for innovation in our communities. We built housing in Central and South America. So we could bring these startups, these founders, these academic partners. To these communities and test their technology very quickly, efficiently, a little bit cheaper because you have less barrier to entry in these places.
And so it allows for massive catalytic pilot projects. But then what we realized, the big problem there was, okay, now we have the right technologies with the right problem statement. We're able to test quickly. What's missing is the capital. Unless you infuse capital in those early pilot projects it's impossible to actually start them and then scale them.
And that's what venture capital is, right? You're investing in early stage technologies. At the time, ask me what VC was, I had no idea. I had to learn very quickly, and the questions we were asking as we would bring these founders into our communities were questions that VCs ask about their technology, about their team, about their vision, about their go to market strategy.
So, It was a lot of the same thing without realizing it. And then the aha moment was really when we realized, okay, these startups, unless they have a pre seed stage round, they're not actually able to scale in the market. So the impact that we're creating in our communities can't scale to Communities all over the country
[00:18:56] Apollo Emeka: or the world.
Now, when we talk about the startups, are we talking about, because you talked about the supply chain, right, and then leveraging these existing technologies at different points in the supply chain to kind of ease bottlenecks and pinch points and make things more permissive for building, right? So when we talk about...
startups. What part of it are you talking about? Are you talking about the actual building? How does this work?
[00:19:19] Julieta Moradei: So when I say the end to end value chain, what I mean is kind of the entire A to Z of, let's say, building a home, right? When you're building a home at the very, very beginning, it's the concept design.
It's then the engineering design, the permitting of it, finding the materials, finding the labor, then the actual building. So everything I was talking about before is the pre construction. The construction is the actual building where there's massive inefficiencies. But 80 percent of the inefficiencies that happen on site are caused by issues during the design phase, miscommunication.
And so it's the pre construction is actually very important to digitize. And then post construction is really, okay, once you get people in there, how do you actually maintain the building or renovate it? Or after the lifespan of the building, how do you demolish it? How do you recycle those materials? The entire end to end, what happens to the building when it's designed, built, operated, and then after the lifespan.
So, these pain points along that whole value chain are, you know, very acute pain points in what our technologies need to implement. And then longer term, where are the connection points there too, for technologies that could kind of operate in different parts of these pain points? I'm
[00:20:25] Apollo Emeka: nerding out on this right now because like you and I talked about in our last conversation, something like 40 percent of the emissions come from the built environment, right?
It's not cars, it's concrete, it's cities, right? And so Looking at the impact on climate, but then, like you said, all of these unhoused people all over the world and right here in our own backyard, right? So when you look at this and you look at these pilots that you are running internationally, what part of it was?
Kind of established practice. And then what parts of it were, were your pilots impacting? You know, so you talk about pre-construction and construction, but what parts of the pilot were you impacting in? In what ways?
[00:21:09] Julieta Moradei: So what's fascinating, we have built environment is that it covers, you know, the pre-construction, construction post-construction are wildly different things.
So, the types of technologies themselves are hardware, so think about a 3D printer that prints a home, or think about modular construction or prefabricated homes. The software is anywhere from the design side, how to make that more automated, to during construction, how do you do invoicing quicker, to post construction, how do you get people into homes quicker, or how do you do renovations quicker, especially inspections.
I think that's really fascinating. And then material science. So material science being the actual material that you're bringing into the building, how can you make that more sustainable? So during pilots for housing, we did pilots from 3D printing a whole home, where you're talking about the superstructure, all the way to materials for roofing, of how do you actually cool down the entire temperature of the house with just a paint that you add onto the roof, especially when you're working in developing countries.
And
[00:22:08] Apollo Emeka: so you all were essentially the developer?
[00:22:11] Julieta Moradei: We would work with a developer, so it's, it's leveraging all these different points, right? So, we bring in the startup, we work with local developers and engineers and architects, local government, it's connecting all these pieces together. And that is what I have been calling the missing middle in our space, which is on one side, we have a lot of technology now.
We have a lot of startups that have come into the space since about 2017. All of a sudden, we've seen a huge surge of construction technologies, more appetite in the space. We have more VCs, we have more funds than ever that have been launching since 2017 for construction tech, for prop tech, which is real estate technology, for climate tech, for sustainability, all in the built environment.
But what's really lacking is the connection of these technologies to the builders, to these local partners that you need in order to actually implement the technology. So the missing middle is that imbalance of there is a massive supply of tech right now. And there's a massive lack of tech adopters. So we're seeing these early adopters, the people who are taking the big risks right now, usually larger firms that have more budget, but there's still a lot of resistance towards technology adoption and construction.
So what I love about these case studies, these pilots that I did on the nonprofit side was we have these test beds for technology. We have these places where we could actually say, let's group all these people together and test the technology. And sure, that worked really well with a non profit for housing, but how do we do that at scale in society?
How do we do that in a city like New York? It's very hard to have these kind of testbeds. And so the missing middle to me is kind of that, that bridge that does not exist right now between the technology and the adopters.
[00:23:53] Apollo Emeka: I love it. Well, I think this is a perfect time to dive into what at the time of this recording right now is super top secret, but now the world knows where you are and what you're doing to address this missing middle.
Can you talk a little bit about, yeah, what this next venture is?
[00:24:09] Julieta Moradei: Yeah. So like I was saying before, kind of the transition from nonprofit to DC was spinning out the R& D program into a fund, hyper focused on investing in construction tech. That's where I realized I love the world of venture capital because you could actually invest in these technologies and then help them scale.
But what I realized that I was missing was exactly this missing middle. How do we connect the technologies to the adopters? And so on September 7th, they'll be launching this, so super top secret right now. But by the time you all hear this, we would have launched Overlay Capital Build. And so Overlay Capital is a fund that's focused on sustainability in the built environment.
So, they invest in anything from energy to infrastructure, they have a fund to funds model for innovation in the built environment, all related back to decarbonization. And like you mentioned before, 40 percent of carbon emissions globally is caused by the built environment. So, we are the most responsible industry, we are also one of the largest industries in the world, yet the least digitized.
At the very, very bottom for at least digitized industries, we have farming and then right above that, construction. And so that heavily impacts how we build and how sustainable we are. Just cement alone, when we were talking about materials before, cement alone is causing 8 percent of carbon emissions.
And so massive, massive room for impact. And Like I said, kind of my entire thread of my path has been my passion for the built
[00:25:36] Apollo Emeka: environment. Julietta is clearly fueled by her passions. She chose this massive mountain to climb. And that is, I want to make the built environment sustainable for everybody.
That's a huge, huge undertaking. For us, here at Apollo Strategy Group, we have a vision of a world where everyone reaches their full potential for good. And so, it drives all of our activities on a day to day basis. It drives the types of programs and services that we offer. Do you have something like that?
Do you have a massive mountain in the distance that is so inspiring that you are willing to climb it no matter the kind of weather and challenges that you could face on your way up?
[00:26:25] Julieta Moradei: So, what I'm really excited for now is joining a fund like Overly Capital that's focused on the entire built environment, really the end to end.
value chain, but across the border between residential, commercial, infrastructure, energy, everything that surrounds our being, the entire built environment itself and how it's impacting sustainability, how it's really impacting climate change. And I've become increasingly passionate about this topic on one end because my entire master's thesis is around circular economy and how can we design in a more sustainable way.
So I've always been passionate about the topic itself, but. Recently, I read Bill Gates new book about climate disaster, and he kind of talks about this pie chart that he has where he kind of divides up industries based on their responsibility to carbon emission, and the biggest focus is the built environment.
And of course, they started Breakthrough Energy, an amazing fund, and they have a program that they just launched late last year called Catalyst, focused on, in a similar way, this missing middle. How can they help these startups actually scale? Through partnership and through capital. And so that's what I realized I want to hyper focus on within the built environment, which is how can we connect this massive supply of technology in the built environment to this lack of demand, meaning it's consulting on digital transformation.
So high level, the build fund underneath Overly Capital, so we have separate funds within Overly Capital. This will be called Overly Capital Built, will be focused on this missing middle and it's really creating a bridge. Between technologies to tech adopters, so contractors, developers, owners of real estate in any capacity that are eager to bring in technology.
They have a thirst for that. They just don't know how to necessarily. They don't know necessarily which technologies to bring in for their pain points. But then beyond that, how do you actually implement the technology? It's not just about saying, Hey, let me bring a 3D printer to my job site tomorrow.
It's really having to look at their entire end to end value chain and seeing. What processes do you need to change to bring in this technology? How do you adapt the technology for your needs? What stakeholders need to be part of this? So we're going to focus on really that consulting piece of digital transformation, but then also financing, right?
So on one end, it's project financing to help these startups create that first pilot project, but then it's also investing in them. How do they scale beyond that? So What I'm really excited for is addressing this missing middle and having a very clear view as to how do we actually scale this idea of demand?
How do we increase the appetite for technology so that overall we have a more balanced system?
[00:29:03] Apollo Emeka: I love that. And it's so clear to see where your leverage... comes in, right? Cause you're just like, literally, you can see the matrix. You can see the code in the matrix when it comes to all of these different, like you said, like a true engineer, you said problem statement and then these, these solutions, right?
Like I can, it's like, you can see all these problems and then you can see these individual solutions, but they're not talking or they're not connecting or the folks with the problems don't understand that there's a solution to it. Right. And so you're here to bring all of that together. You know, I, I really want to dive into something that I think about a lot and that I read articles about, you know, I, I live in Pasadena, which is just outside of Los Angeles.
And this year when Karen Bass took over as mayor, she just declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles around homelessness. And. In the last year, right before she declared the state of emergency, homelessness in LA City went up by 9 percent and in LA County went up by 10%, right? So we obviously, we don't know the true impact of these programs now in the state of emergency, but we do know that there are also these massive skyscrapers, 750 million dollars Mortgage that went into default and we're looking at historic vacancy rates in office in Los Angeles and around the country while, you know, three people are dying on the street.
Every single day here in Los Angeles, sleeping in the shadow of, of an empty skyscraper. And it feels like a vast majority of folks who say that, you know, no retrofitting, uh, retrofitting office buildings is just not a thing. It would be cheaper to knock down a 50... three story tower than it would be to retrofit it and to be able to move some people inside.
What are your thoughts on that? What's the code and the matrix around retrofitting office or any of these other, I mean, pick a space that is now not used, how is not, is not trafficked, right? Like malls or take your pick. What's your, what are your thoughts on, on retrofitting?
[00:31:10] Julieta Moradei: Well, my first thought is you have to quote that statement and put it on a big, big post board somewhere in LA.
Sleeping in the shadows of empty office buildings because right there is your solution. You just engineered that solution and it ties very well to sustainability. I think the number one thing we need to focus on to be more sustainable as cities is to actually retrofit vacant buildings, parking lots, there's so many vacant malls, into housing, which is the number one need in cities like LA.
There's very few cities that don't have a homelessness problem and what I mean by that, what I mean by retrofitting, renovating is. We could actually take these vacant office buildings that no one is going to be using for office. Again, there's so many people working remotely. A lot of tech firms have gone completely remote.
And how do we reuse these building components to use them for housing? That's the quickest way and the most sustainable way. And the reason is demolishing. We typically don't recycle any steel or any concrete. I think 2 percent of both materials get recycled and reused. Right? So, instead of demolishing, just revamp and reuse.
Take a mall and convert it into housing. And that's where government programs could come in. So, to me, it's not about building anew. If we were truly trying to build for 3 billion people by 2030, with new construction, we would destroy our planet. We would destroy our natural resources. We cannot build that much.
We need to use existing. It's about retrofitting. And that's where technology could come in. Because, you're correct, it's expensive to do renovations. It's expensive to do retrofits. Because you're changing the capacity of the building. When you're converting from an office building to housing, there's different regulations there.
But with technologies, you could find out ways to automate the design side to figure out how to go from office to residential, how to reuse that floor plan. There's so many new automation tools for that. And what I'm really excited about is technology that helps with inspections and retrofitting.
Inspections meaning, Instead of sending out surveyors to a job site and by hand they're looking at what needs to be renovated or retrofitted, they send out a drone, uses computer vision to look at all the different current issues in the building, and then how do you actually create the cheapest and most effective way to, to renovate it.
So I think that's really the most sustainable solution. And for a city like LA with a 10 percent increase of homelessness, it's about having something now. It's about urgency. People don't want to be sleeping in the shadows another night. So how do you do this quickly?
[00:33:42] Apollo Emeka: Well, it's, I, I love that you're saying this because this is, this is the stuff that I like shout from the mountaintops, but, um, I'm not an engineer or a construction person or a real estate person.
Well, you just engineered a
[00:33:55] Julieta Moradei: solution. So right
[00:33:57] Apollo Emeka: away. Sweet. Yes. All right. Now that I guess I'm an engineer now. No, I, um, but so when we hear people talking about the true challenges of this, where It feels like oftentimes it's coming from construction folks. What do you think is driving the resistance to the idea of retrofit and the narrative that it's actually just an impossibility, so we shouldn't even look at that as a potential solution?
[00:34:29] Julieta Moradei: A lot of it is red tape. A lot of it is the permitting side. So it's not impossible to do on a construction perspective, on an engineering perspective. You could retrofit any building if you want, converting it from residential to commercial or vice versa. Yeah. Yeah. It's really about how do you get it permitted, how do you get it for zoning policies, how do you get it for, you know, overcoming nimbyism, not in my backyard, so getting approval from the neighbors to do this, to do mixed use buildings.
It's really the policy side that's difficult, as well as the financing side, the financing side for who will give you a loan to do this kind of stuff, who's going to really take on the risk for you to do very innovative things. And so that's why I think leverage is the most important piece because the built environment has so many stakeholders.
It's a massive problem because we're dealing with dozens of stakeholders. You don't just have the architects, the engineers, the contractors, people building. You have the owners, you have the government for permitting, you have the financing piece.
[00:35:31] Apollo Emeka: That's a lot, right? I mean, think about just even buying a house, a house that's already been built.
The permits are already good to go. It's a complex process. Now, when you start talking about doing something complex, like. Retrofitting a high rise building and converting it from office to residential, it gets really, really complicated. Like Julietta said, there are so many different stakeholders. And so you need some organizing principles.
You have to get really specific in prioritizing. How do you bring everybody together? How do you unite people around an idea? Well, that's where Julietta talks about... The missing middle as a kind of organizing principle to bring people together and to get things done. Let's hear more about that.
[00:36:23] Julieta Moradei: And so that's why when I talk about this missing middle, it's, it's really about just connecting dots.
So if we bring in a startup and we match make them with the developer and they love each other, they're not going to get anywhere without the policy piece getting permitted as well as the financing piece, who's going to really finance you and the insurance piece, the risk adoption. So it's having to get the right people in the room on a case by case basis.
Yeah. For something like the magnitude of the problem of homelessness in LA, it's getting the right people in the room to make a big policy change and saying, this will be okay for hundreds. It's not thousands of buildings that we could do this for.
[00:37:00] Apollo Emeka: Yeah, that's awesome. I can't wait for that future to be reality because there are solutions standing downtown right now, downtown Los Angeles, a thousand feet into the sky, uh, solutions that we just.
Like you said, there are these bottlenecks and pinch points that people just kind of can't see past. And there's also so many people in real estate are deal focused or project focused. And so they think of, you know, things happening in cycles and whatnot. And I think that a lot of folks are kind of like, almost just like stuck.
They're glitching because they're looking at this office thing. I was like, no, no, no. Things are cyclical though, right? Like things are cyclical, things are cyclical. So it's just going to cycle back and people are going to come back to the office and people, right? But like that thing, we're not going back, right?
[00:37:50] Julieta Moradei: It's a massive change. Exactly. I think, I think policy is always what kind of pushes people past that cyclical thinking. So for example, my, my favorite example right now of this is in Colorado. Back in November, they just passed Prop 123, where they're using a certain percentage of taxes in order to build more affordable housing.
So they're actually allocating tax dollars to do this. It's the first state that ever does this. And so Gary Community, they're an incredible organization that's really thinking about it from the policy lens, as well as from the venture lens, from the innovation lens and connecting those people together.
And I think that's what we need to see more of. Because if you just look at how much LA is spending on health care for people coming in that cannot pay for it. Right. Because they're on the streets, they're probably spending more there than if they were just to say, let's actually purchase this building and renovate it.
[00:38:42] Apollo Emeka: I love it. So you're super high leverage. And most of the time that we see executives evolve, they evolve to be a lot more prioritized, typically. Do you see yourself evolving to be, you know, primarily have this prioritized orientation? Or do you think you're going to live out your career in the leverage space?
[00:39:05] Julieta Moradei: That's an interesting question. Because I think for me, that flag has always been the built environment. It's been something that I'm really passionate about. And the problem statements are ones that we just. we hear more and more and more of, right? When we talk about how it's under digitized, how we are the most responsible for, for climate change.
Those problems are there, but they're not changing. So it's, I don't know if I want to jump to that next mountain versus really just focus on this one problem and focus on my, I would say it's kind of like my zone of genius to be in the leverage bucket. And actually, as I'm saying this, it really does make me think of both my parents.
Like I mentioned before, they both work on cancer, right? So their entire career as chemists is they focus on problems that take about 15 to 20 years until they know if it's actually going to create a solution because of testing. And I found that always so boring. I thought, you know, long, long term gain, like long term goals are something that they're not tangible.
You can't see them. It's 20 years of frustration until you actually get to a solution. But when you see them get there. I mean, the impact that they create. So I think that's probably something we have in common, is that I do really want to make a small dent in this massive problem, and I think leverage is the only way to get there because of how siloed the industry is and how many stakeholders
[00:40:32] Apollo Emeka: there are.
Wow. I love it. So many amazing insights and just your, your story of being that child phenom at 16, hitting university, it's just cool to see how that's played out in your life and the things that you're taking on now. And, and even, you know, being able to see how your parents path has influenced you. It's, it's It's super fascinating, and I always enjoy our conversations, and I thank you so much for coming on the show, and congratulations on your new venture.
[00:41:03] Julieta Moradei: Thank you so much for having me, and I'm excited to start our podcast together. This is going to be a very, very fun conversation.
[00:41:08] Apollo Emeka: There we go. Get ready, people. Get ready for some random conversations, people. You heard it first here. Thank you so much, Julietta Moraday, for coming on the show today. And now it's time for everybody's favorite part!
The takeaways. Alright so, from a prioritized perspective, Julieta says that she picked a mountain that is so big, it's so massive. This idea of housing 3 billion unhoused people, like that is the flag that she has planted on the mountaintop. But it's so big that she doesn't have to constantly reevaluate the landscape to decide which mountain she should tackle next.
She is using her engineer brain to... Break things down into problem statements that all fall under that same mountain. She also decided really early on in her even academic journey that she loved bringing the aesthetic together with the structural when it comes to engineering. So she's been navigating this dual mindset ever since she has been studying engineering, which made it easier for her to transition to being an executive.
From the leverage perspective, she leverages her training as an engineer, that mindset and the tools, the ways of thinking as an engineer, thinking in problem statements and solutions. Remember, now I just came up with a problem statement and a solution. to homelessness and she's like, Hey, you just solved the problem.
So she's clearly leveraging that engineering background. She also said that she constantly is asking the question, who do I know that can solve this problem or help me think about this problem and also what kinds of technology exist? to solve this problem from an execute perspective. She says that internships and co ops are great ways to develop your technical expertise.
She believes that everyone should have some grounding in technical expertise. Doesn't matter what it is, but you got to have it. And while you're in that phase, you need to do. Everything that is thrown your way. But if you have aspirations to be a leader, to be an executive, that as you're doing these things, think about how you could make them easier.
Think about how you can get these things done in a more efficient. Now she says that not everybody needs to think like that because if everybody was thinking like that and constantly innovating, then the work wouldn't get done. So some folks stay in that execute mode and mindset and they just become workhorses and subject matter experts.
And Julieta says that. We need these folks, too. So, thank you so much, Julieta, for coming on the show, and thank you all for listening. I'll see you on the mountain.
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