Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 6 /May 30, 2025
Why building multiplayer BIM tools is hard, and necessary
Paul O'Carroll, Arcol
May 30, 2025 /Data, BIM & Interoperability
Why building multiplayer BIM tools is hard, and necessary
Paul O'Carroll is the founder and CEO of Arcol, a startup building collaborative BIM software that runs in the browser, backed by venture capital and staffed with engineers who built Figma's multiplayer editing. He is attacking what he calls the biggest problem in construction: everything downstream depends on design, and the authoring tools were due for a rethink years ago.
Paul O'Carroll, Founder, CEO, Arcol
In this conversation
Paul's vision of design empowered by agents: a principal describing early-stage intent and software generating options within the firm's standards.
Why the incumbents have not solved multiplayer authoring, and what hiring early Figma engineers taught Arcol about how hard it is.
His advice to evaluators: try to break the tool, because most products that claim real-time collaboration fail within minutes.
How he thinks about sales hires: empathy and language over industry background, because a good seller can learn the industry.
We're attacking what I think of as the biggest problem in construction, which is everything is inherently built upon design.
Paul O'Carroll
Chapters
Design empowered by agents
What design looks like when software agents work alongside the architect.
Why the incumbents haven't fixed it
Why the largest software vendors have not delivered true collaboration.
By the numbers
Construction-related spending as a share of world GDP, roughly $10 trillion a year
Paul says he chose the biggest problem in construction on purpose. The industry he is building for is a seventh of the world economy.
Source: McKinsey Global Institute, Reinventing Construction (2017) ↗Try to break it
The test Paul gives anyone evaluating collaborative tools.
Monetizing a browser BIM
How a browser-based BIM company plans to make money.
Hiring for empathy
What Arcol looks for in the people it hires.
It's easy on the surface to build a collaborative toy, really hard to build a solid collaborative professional app. My advice to people who are judging tools is go try and break it.
Paul O'Carroll
Takeaways
It is easy to build a collaborative toy and very hard to build a solid collaborative professional application. Anyone evaluating 'real-time' software should open two tabs and try to break it.
Venture money on an industry with long sales cycles comes with a clock: the company either becomes public or raises billions. Paul chose the hardest technical problem he could find and hired accordingly.
The difficult problem was never the browser engineering. It was deciding what the product is, and then scaling decisions beyond the founder.
One of the most important things that a CEO can figure out, and will never truly figure out, is how to scale yourself.
Paul O'Carroll