Every industry that ends up shaping our daily lives starts the same way:
Fragmented, inefficient, and way overconfident in the wrong places.
Oil was explosive and not very useful.
Iron cracked under the pressures of scale.
Railroads couldn't talk to each other.
Automobiles were expensive toys.
Phones worked, almost never.
What changed wasn't novel features or better marketing. It was a shift in focus: addressing the bottleneck to scale that everyone else ignored.
Refinement made crude oil usable for everyday life.
Optimizing steel production dethroned "King Iron" as the dominant infrastructure material
Standard gauges turned railroads into nationwide networks.
Parts simplification turned cars from a novelty to something ordinary people could own.
Physical cable networks turned phone calls from a gamble to a given.
As we work on scaling building digitization from a niche service to a nationwide utility, I can't help but notice the patterns that emerge in history: when variability is removed and trust becomes affordable, scale follows.
Buildings are standing at the same inflection point today.
When you line these stories up, the similarities are hard to ignore, and their relevance to Integrated Projects' mission to improve the world's buildings by bringing them online.
These industries are different, but the bottlenecks are the same. Scale stalled not because demand was missing, but because reliability was. In every case, progress resumed only when a company chose to focus on the bottleneck that controlled trust.
What follows aren’t anecdotes. They’re patterns we've taken a page from. Five of them.
LESSON 1
The bottleneck for oil production at scale wasn't extraction. It was refinement.
Crude oil was abundant way before it powered the last 150 years of economic activity.
But in 1859, extracting crude oil from the ground was dangerous (sometimes explosive), inconsistent, and unusable for most applications.
What changed wasn't the drill, it was the refinery; it was in turning crude oil into usable products for everyday application.
The Standard Oil Company treated refinement as an engineering and operational problem rather than an extraction problem solved with expensive rigs. Crude oil became useful to the general public only when it became predictable. That meant: cost control through disciplined procurement, predictable delivery through strategic partnerships and geographical placement of refinery locations, refinement technique advantages through associations with academia and professional groups.
Each activity was a strategic lever that removed variances and made oil predictable.
John D. Rockefeller famously believed that:
“…the secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well,”
And refinement became that thing. That discipline unlocked breadth.
Standard Oil didn't just sell fuel; it produced over 50 oil-derivative products that entered into daily life: kerosene for lighting, gasoline for engines, lubricants for machinery, asphalt for roads, paraffin wax for candles, petroleum jelly, fertilizers, paints, among many other goods. While competitors chased wells, Standard Oil saw the bottleneck that every crude oil barrel had to pass through.
By the 1880s, Standard Oil controlled nearly 90% of US refining, proving that oil scaled not by extraction, but by mastering the bottleneck of refinement.
LESSON 2
Steel proved that having a structural cost advantage—not just a better product—wins scale.
In 1830, Iron was the dominant material for infrastructure in Britain and the United States. It was dubbed "King Iron."
It was stronger than wood or stone.
But iron was brittle and inconsistent: Bridges collapsed. Railroads warped. Buildings couldn’t rise higher than 6-7 floors. Our ability to innovate our infrastructure was at the mercy of an inferior material. A deeply malevolent king, if one. Iron worked until it was pressured to scale, consistently.
And then came steel.
Carnegie Steel Company didn’t invent steel, but industrialized its production.
The breakthrough was in adopting the Bessemer process, developed by Henry Bessemer in the 1850s. Before the Bessemer process, steel existed. But it was slow, expensive, and inconsistent to make. Production took days or weeks. Quality varied batch to batch. Steel was effectively a luxury material and undifferentiated from iron.
Carnegie Steel Company implemented the new process doing one simple but radical thing: it blew air through molten iron to remove impurities (especially carbon) quickly. That single change cut production time from weeks to minutes, collapsed costs, and made steel predictable, not artisanal.
By the 1870's, steel stopped being a craft. It became a trusted, consistent process. Trust earned attention. Producing the trusted material cheaper than their competitors led to scale through consolidation.
Qualities | Wrought / Cast Iron | Steel |
|---|---|---|
Dominant Era | Pre-1870s | 1870s onward |
Production Method | Small batches, labor-intensive | Industrial, process-driven |
Production Time | Days to weeks per batch | Minutes to hours |
Cost Curve | High & slow to decline | Rapidly declining with scale |
Material Consistency | High variable quality | Standardized, predictable quality |
Strength | Strong in compression, weak in tension | Strong in both compression & tension |
Flexibility | Brittle, prone to cracking | Ductile, resilient under stress |
Durability | Shorter lifespan under heavy use | Longer lifespan, less fatigue |
Scalability | Constrained by craftsmanship | Enabled mass infrastructure |
Economic Impact | Supported early industrialization | Enabled cities, rail networks, global trade |
LESSON 3
To scale nationally, railroads didn’t need faster trains. They needed standards.
Before the mid-1800s, American railroads were not a system. They were a collection of local businesses.
Each railroad company had to set its own schedules, operate in specific regions, and chose its own track gauge (the distance between rails). Track gauges ranged wildly: 4 ft-8.5 inches, 5 ft, 6 ft, etc. This meant a train could not continue onto another company's tracks. So when freight reached the end of a line, cargo had to be unloaded and manually transferred to another train.
The New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, led by Cornelius Vanderbilt, understood: local optimization was the enemy of national scale. Vanderbilt did not invent standard gauge railroads, nor did his company single-handedly decree a national standard.
What Vanderbilt did was more subtle—and operationally effective. The real contribution was operational standardization at scale.
Consolidate multiple regional railroads
Convert acquired lines to compatible gauges
Standardize timekeeping, scheduling, and routing
Focus on throughput and reliability, not novel systems
Standardization was brutal. It required New York Central to physically move rails, re-space ties, rebuilding switches and depots, and temporarily shutting down lines. It was expensive and unpopular initially...Until Vanderbilt was the first to connect Chicago to New York without breakage. Once goods could move through without stopping, New York Central became the default rails. Others had to adapt, or be bypassed.
By 1880s, no one marveled at the rails anymore. They relied on them. The railways evolved from a novelty to infrastructure by standardizing the rails.
An official, 1940 system map of the New York Central Railroad. Credit to American Rails
LESSON 4
The "car for the great multitude," started by stripping down its parts
At the end of the 1800's, the automobile wasn't a symbol of progress. It was a public nuisance.
There were more than 500 automakers in the United States, most producing hand-built, elaborate machines that cost more than most families earned in years. Roads were dirt. Cars broke constantly. Car mechanics were rare and expensive. Newspapers and politicians openly mocked the automobile as a toy for the wealthy. In 1906, Woodrow Wilson called the car “a picture of the arrogance of wealth.” Anti-car activists tore up roads and sabotaged parked vehicles.
This context matters because when The Ford Motor Company entered the market in 1903, they didn’t compete by making a faster car or a prettier one. They won by redesigning the production system: stripped the car down, fewer parts, interchangeable components. A process that could be repeated thousands of times, anchored by a relentlessness to simplify. Ford famously is attributed by stating in his autobiography:
"Whenever anyone suggests to me that I might increase weight or add a part to my car, I look into decreasing weight and eliminating a part."
The "car for the great multitude" wasn’t a breakthrough in the car itself; it was the assembly line. And the bottleneck wasn’t demand for cars. It was scalable production.
By 1929, 60% of American households old a vehicle.
LESSON 5
Communication didn't scale with the telephone. It scaled with physical cables.
Before smartphones and streaming, you were lucky if a phone call connected at all.
Early telecom companies didn’t try to win by shipping better phones, better TV shows, or by adding features faster than competitors. They focused instead on something far less visible: making connection universal, predictable, and boring.
From the 1890s through the 1910s, the phone itself already worked. The cabling system did not.
Networks were fragmented, incompatible, and unreliable. Voltages varied. Protocols differed. Long-distance calls were expensive and uncertain, often routed through multiple human operators and prone to failure. Owning a phone didn’t mean it would work—especially outside major cities.
The breakthrough came when AT&T treated communication as an infrastructure problem, not a product one.
Their advantage wasn’t technological novelty; it was operational discipline. Standardizing cables, switching systems, and operating rules across geographies. Building redundancy. Investing heavily in physical infrastructure users would never see. The goal was not to sell features or products, but to make communication so dependable that no one thought about it at all.
AT&T’s motto wasn't branding, it was operational discipline: “one system, one policy, universal service.”
The company focused on the unglamorous work: laying cable, standardizing voltages and protocols, building switching systems, and insisting on interoperability across regions. Cables were laid, networks were stabilized, and then culture followed: businesses reorganized around real-time communication. Markets synchronized. Distance shrank.
AT&T’s push toward universal service accelerated in the 1910s, with major milestones:
1915: First transcontinental phone call (New York to San Francisco)
1910s–1920s: Rapid standardization of line switching and long-distance lines
1920s-1940s, call reliability improved enough that business depended on it
Only after coaxial physical networks were in place did downstream industries emerge. Brian Potter of Construction Physics made a similar case highlighted in this chart.
KEY TAKEAWAY
History is remarkably consistent about how scale is unlocked.
First, a company accepts the unglamorous work of disciplined operations to address a bottleneck to scale—which usually means limiting variability.
Simplification removes variability.
Less variability means fewer parts.
Fewer parts enables cost control, repetition, and quality.
Quality builds trust.
Trust breeds scale. And also, better negotiation power.
Negotiation power means even better costs.
Better costs means more consumer adoption—and more scale.
Only after that do new behaviors emerge—new markets, new industries, new ways of working.
Infrastructure doesn’t announce itself when it’s built. It announces itself when no one has to think about it anymore.
Building digitization is still early in this arc.
The fact that the AECO industry still debating design authoring tools, faster scripts to outdated workflows is a sign that the foundation isn’t finished yet. The opportunity is to do what every enduring industry did before:
…find the bottleneck, sit inside it longer than anyone else is willing to, and make it reliable at scale.
When building data becomes legible, available and reliable—when accurate, standardized building plans are as normal long-distance call or trains arriving on time—the change will feel sudden.
But like oil, steel, railroads, cars, and cable before them, it will have been earned quietly. That is the work IPX is doing now: addressing the bottleneck by simplifying scopes, improving quality of digital building models, forcing repetition which lead to better digitization costs, one building at a time, until buildings stop being rediscovered and start being understood. All 1.6 billion of them.
Gradually, then suddenly.
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Jose Cruz Jr. is the Founder and CEO of Integrated Projects.
Integrated Projects (IPX) is a spatial intelligence company focused on turning physical buildings into accurate, standardized digital information models, enabling organizations to acquire, design, renovate, and operate buildings with confidence.