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 26 /May 8, 2026
Why killing Revit won't fix construction
Eitan Tsarfati, SWAPP
May 8, 2026 /Data, BIM & Interoperability
Why killing Revit won't fix construction
Eitan Tsarfati is the CEO and co-founder of SWAPP, software that automates the production of construction documents, and a trained architect who previously built and sold companies to Autodesk. He spoke days after a prominent venture essay declared that every building was designed with software from 1997. His response is that the industry's problem is bigger than any one program.
Eitan Tsarfati, CEO and co-founder, SWAPP
In this conversation
Eitan's answer to why an owner-operator with a CAD-based team should care about BIM at all.
How to read 'the model has data in it' as an owner, and the layers of value between geometry and information.
His memory of spending days rendering a single view, and what that says about how quickly the tools moved.
Why he believes it is the best time to be an architect: complex-systems thinking now matters more than knowing Python or C#.
If you asked me three years ago, I would probably tell you it will take 10 years to build another BIM tool. Today, in less than a year, a company can build a really strong BIM tool.
Eitan Tsarfati
Chapters
The Revit killer is the wrong framing
Why the industry's favorite villain is the wrong target.
Why an owner should care about BIM
What BIM means for an owner who has never opened a model.
How fast tools can be built now
How quickly a credible design tool can now be built, and why that matters.
By the numbers
The 1997 software, in three dates
Revit Technology founded
Acquired by Autodesk for $133M
to build a BIM tool today, per Eitan
Eitan says a credible BIM tool now takes under a year to build. The tool everyone is trying to replace took a startup five years and an acquisition.
Source: Autodesk press release on the Revit Technology acquisition (2002) ↗Remembering the render days
A look back at the render days, and how far the tools have come.
Advice to an AEC founder
What Eitan would tell a founder starting in this industry now.
Once you have democratization of data, that you can pull data out of this BIM tool, then you can ask yourself why build yet another BIM tool.
Eitan Tsarfati
Takeaways
A Revit killer is the wrong framing. Design is one workflow; pre-construction, the job site, deliveries and facility management are others, and replacing an authoring tool fixes none of them.
Three years ago a new BIM tool took a decade to build. Today a small team can build a strong one in under a year, which is good for the industry and changes what is worth building.
Once data can be pulled out of a model without opening the file, the question becomes why build yet another BIM tool at all.
It's the best time to be an architect, or any industry which is not in software development.
Eitan Tsarfati