Thayer Technology Advisors
Updated
This is the advisory practice led by David Thayer. Most of my time goes to Immersive Homes, where I'm CTO. Thayer Technology Advisors is for interesting projects and business experiments with applied AI.
Immersive Homes
Immersive Homes builds beautiful, custom, steel-framed homes in its own factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan: vaulted ceilings, radiant floors, a thermal envelope built for Michigan winters, and a walkthrough in VR before production starts. First contact to move-in runs under a year. I'm responsible for the technology acceleration of the business, meaning the custom platform, tools, and operations that let a fully custom home be built at incredible speed and quality.
Outside of Immersive Homes
Software is getting cheap, and as that happens, value moves to what was already scarce: physical production, accountability, the judgment and taste to know what's worth building. Immersive Homes is taking a big swing at that. Thayer is where we do R&D on the others.
- Interesting projects
- Usually something that needs to get built for a specific owner, and more and more for an operator with an idea of what would help the business. It helps to have someone who can set the strategy and launch v1 quickly, with an eye on how it will work in production and scale.
- Business experiments
- What used to be a deck and a pitch is now an operating business running publicly to test a hypothesis.
- Applied AI for operating businesses
- Finding where AI pays off inside real companies, often ones owned by family offices, and rolling it out so the people doing the work are excited about how it will help them and the owners can trust it's a sound investment.
Background
Twenty years in the San Francisco Bay Area, moving between strategy and hands-on product building: product work at Amazon, machine learning platforms at Oracle, and before that emerging technologies at PG&E and in clean energy. Now, I split my time between the Bay Area and Grand Rapids.
Contact
Find more on LinkedIn.