Silicon Valley thinks precon software sucks

When Dustin DeVan sold his startup to AutoDesk in 2018 for $275 million, it wasn’t the pinnacle of his career. It was just the beginning.

After working with general contractors in California for six years he’d quit his job to found BuildingConnected, a platform designed to manage bid management, risk analysis and other preconstruction activities. 

Starting an empire

The goal was consolidation. DeVan found construction to be highly collaborative, yet also highly fragmented. Every GC communicates with a lot of subcontractors, but maintaining accurate data was a challenge.

“At the time they had  these large corporate directories of vendors and you’d go in there and the data would always be outdated because people move around, new businesses form and it has to be maintained,” said DeVan. “We wanted to build a network that facilitates all communication. That worked really well.”

BuildingConnected’s digital network grew to more than 700,000 construction professionals getting the attention of AutoDesk. After the acquisition, DeVan ran construction strategy at AutoDesk for several years. But his vision for preconstruction was much bigger. Now that the relationships had been established the next step was to build out more software solutions. 

“We had this whole roadmap to build out estimating and more pre-con services,” said DeVan. “There just wasn’t room to do stuff like that in Autodesk. So I left … I explained that we have hundreds of thousands of businesses connected and we are missing a big opportunity in pre-con.”

Your construction software is bad (really bad)

His mission to transform preconstruction didn’t die. DeVan founded Ediphi, a cloud-based pre-construction platform created to unify the entire pre-con lifecycle into a single source of truth. 

He believes that pre-con isn’t just underserved in terms of software. The existing ecosystem is downright offensive. Part of this is because it’s not an obvious play for software developers outside of the construction sector and to fix it you have to understand preconstruction. 

 “The software we have in precon is absolutely terrible,” he said. “If you were to ask Silicon Valley engineers to look at the tools we use, they would want to throw up. It’s that bad.”

DeVan explained that builders have a patchwork of legacy tools that are decades old. While they were good in their time, they have long since faded.

“It’s really hard to migrate to new technology,” said DeVan. “It really takes a leader at a company to say, you know what, we’re going to forgo any new feature development and rewrite everything. Very few companies are bold enough to do that.”

A huge red flag for DeVan is if a software company doesn’t have multiple product designers on staff. Engineers writing code is not enough. Many software companies have outsourced product design to save money when it should instead be one of its core competencies. 

“You end up with a bunch of stuff that’s really clunky and checks the boxes,” he said. “So sure, you have all your features, but how they actually flow and are utilized is really bad.”

Price first. Design later

He doesn’t just want to make life easier for builders, he wants to fundamentally change how the industry thinks about preconstruction. 

“I hate the way we price today,” he said. “We have a conceptual set of documents so we estimate what that is and then it costs too much. And then we go through value engineering and get a new set of documents. Then what does that cost? It’s all reactionary.” 

DeVan’s vision would be for the owner to talk to the builder before involving an architect to cement pricing options. This way, as you go through pricing exercises, the program of the entire project is known. This is presented to the architect who has a pricing framework to operate in. 

“Rather than that, we get these designs, the architect thought it cost $100 million but it costs $200 million,” said DeVan. “They are off by that much. You have this disconnect and that’s why everyone is so mad and the industry is so frustrating. These projects take forever in precon because you are starting so far apart.”

DeVan explained that starting with design is for those who are completely price elastic and budget isn’t an issue. But if you study target value design, you realize the first input dictates the budget. That means you should be having pricing conversations before or at the exact same time you’re having design conversations. 

“We’re going through this slow evolution where BIM thought it was going to get there, but BIM’s not getting there,” said DeVan. “And one of the reasons is that design is harder than people think. Generative design is not going to work as it’s being proposed today. I’ve seen almost all the generative design tools. They’re not even considering cost in their equation.” 

Precon 2026 in Vancouver

To hear more from DeVan and other industry visionaries, check out Precon 2026.

Taking place May 22, 2026, at the JW Marriott Parq Vancouver, Precon 2026 is an exclusive morning summit dedicated to the estimators and preconstruction leaders driving the future of Western Canada’s building industry. Presented by Ediphi in partnership with ICBA and SiteNews, the event centers on the transformative shift from traditional “design-then-price” workflows to a strategic “pricing to design” model.

Attendees will gain expert insights through high-level panels on building collaborative precon teams and mentoring the next generation of talent, all while exploring how AI and structured data are elevating the estimator from a quantity calculator to a vital strategic partner. The summit serves as a lead-in to ICBA’s Meet the Generals event.