Nitin Bhandari Podcast Transcript Podcast Transcript
Nitin Bhandari Podcast Transcript joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Nitin Bhandari. Nitin Bhandari is the co founder and CEO of Planera, where he is democratizing construction, critical path method, scheduling with a collaborative visual software solution by re imagining project planning and management. Planera drives team engagement, fosters alignment, and secures buy in at all levels, making complex scheduling more intuitive and efficient.
Bhandari’s leadership at Planera builds on an over two decades of experience in tech innovation. He co founded Skyfire, which was acquired by Opera in 2013, where he served as a senior vice president and GM overseeing operator business and new products. He also co founded Zen Labs, later acquired by Life360, where he led strategic initiatives, including product integrations with Google and Amazon.
With an MS in electrical engineering from Caltech and a rich background in both enterprise and consumer tech, Bhandari continues to drive impactful technological solutions that address real world challenges.
Well, good afternoon, and welcome to the show.
Nitin Bhandari: Hi, thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Love doing this. Appreciate you jumping on and hailing out of that San Francisco Bay Area. I appreciate traversing the time zones to get on a podcast to chat with me. And that means the world to me doing these podcasts. So thanks again.
And we’re going to jump right into your first question. With a rich background in tech innovation, including ventures like Skyfire and Zen labs. What inspired you to transition into the construction industry and co found Planera?
Nitin Bhandari: It’s a great question. It’s probably the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.
As you know, Brian, uh, I’ve done two startups in my past. One was Skyfire where we were doing mobile video optimization. We sold to companies like Verizon and Vodafone and we were in instrumental in making their networks more optimized. And then I’ve done another tech startup, but this Planera idea came about through my co founder who spent 30 plus years building bridges and dams and heavy civil engineering jobs, right?
So his background is more in the heavy civil world. And he started talking to me about how technology hasn’t improved their lives as much as it has improved the lives of most other industries. And how they still struggle with like basic things. And, and I just couldn’t believe it. And so I spent like six months doing a deep dive with him on how the state of the art of construction scheduling and planning works, why it’s so important and how it’s so broken, but first I was, I was shocked and surprised.
And then secondly, the entrepreneur in me got really excited about this 12, 13 trillion dollar industry, like one, probably one of the last very large industries. That are still around that could benefit massively from modernization. And that’s kind of like an entrepreneur’s dream, right? Like a very massive industry that needs a lot of innovation.
And then my co founder having that background just made perfect sense. And as I said, I’ve been so happy. I made that change because as an entrepreneur, like doing something that makes the real world that we live in better is so exciting. It’s no better way to get up every morning and think about that problem.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. And I just love that you got inspired again to solve a big world problem. And I’ve talked to some folks as well in that industry and construction, and there’s a lot of things that could be improved for sure. But I’m just really inspired by your backstory and why you did what you did to co found Planera.
So thanks again. And Nitin, how does Planera’s collaborative visual software solution differentiate itself from traditional CPM scheduling tools in the construction sector?
Nitin Bhandari: Yeah. So to answer that first, I’ll just maybe step back a minute and talk a little bit about the scale of the problem, right? So most of your listeners have probably made a simple schedule, maybe 10, 20, 30 things, you know, maybe it’s a marketing plan, maybe it’s a plan to like launch a website or something like that.
Right. And it’s 20, 30 things, and there’s some dependencies and this needs to finish before that happens. And for most of us, that’s kind of like the extent of scheduling and planning we do. In construction, it’s very different. Some of these construction projects could literally have 10, 15, 12, 000 such activities.
They all have tons of dependencies. They all need resources. Who’s going to do what? And, you know, what if this clashes with that? So it’s extremely complicated. And to make things worse, as soon as the construction starts, things change every week. Right. And so it’s complicated to start with, and then it’s extremely dynamic.
Now the tools that these people use are pretty primitive, like it’s exactly what you and I would use for 2030 line item schedule, right? A bunch of list of things and a bar chart on the right, right? So it’s called Gantt chart, right? list of things and bar chart. And when it’s 10,000 such things, it’s mind numbing, right?
Most people’s eyes glaze over when they look at that construction schedule. Most people are tuned off. They’re not really engaged in any meaningful discussion. How we’re different is that we have all that power to do all of that stuff. But we also have this really easy to understand, easy to use digital front end, which is a like a whiteboard.
It’s a multiplayer whiteboard, and people can just draw logical block diagrams, and then they can add more details. And from that, we use our AI and technology to automatically generate the tens of thousands of line item schedule, right? And so, What most people are interacting with is like a logical flow diagram, as opposed to 10, 000 lines.
And that allows builders to really get excited because they can understand it. They can make the plan better. They can poke holes. They can say, Hey, what if this happens? What if that happens? Right. And that’s the transformation Planera brings to the industry is that instead of being like. Completely checked out and eyes glazed because it’s just like mind numbing amounts of detail.
We allow people to like actually express themselves, be engaged, but we still generate all of the required details.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I appreciate you breaking it down. You know, you and I both done quite a bit of project management and maybe not in construction, but as you know, when you start to put together a Gantt chart, that’s got a bunch of work breakdown structures or lines tasks of thousands at a time.
I can only imagine how hard it is to manage and make no sense for anybody that’s trying to manage something. So I really do appreciate all the work you’ve done to improve that entire industry. Nitin, in what ways does Planera enhance team engagement and alignment across various levels of a construction project?
Nitin Bhandari: It really comes down to participation, right? Like we sometimes say that today, like without Planera, planning is something that is done to you, not with you, right? Meaning that if you’re supposed to build a job, you’re never involved in the plan. You’re just handed over a plan. And now you somehow have to figure out how to execute to that plan, right?
So planning just sort of happened to you. With Planera, the industry change we want to see is that planning happens with you, meaning with the people who are actually going to build the job, right? And so first step in the process, which is pre bid, right? You haven’t even bid for the job. You definitely need to have a good sense of how you’re going to build the job.
How much is it going to cost? What kind of labor equipment needs you have? Right from that point right now, there’s a lot of guesswork. There’s a lot of like, I’ve done 30 such projects. Here’s my approximation. With Monera, instead, what happens is that the estimation manager might bring in the superintendent, might bring in the project manager, might bring in the experts at mechanical, electrical, and say, Hey, look, if we do this job this way, does this sound right?
Or what about this? What about this? And so right from step one, before you even win the job, you have a pretty good high level understanding. And because Panera is so collaborative, these people are happy to participate because eventually they have to own the job and they have to deliver on the job, right?
Then you maybe win the job. You have the right bid at the right price because you had a good plan. Now you’re going to take that and make it into a really comprehensive detailed baseline. Again, all the trade partners, all your subcontractors, everyone can be involved in that process and come up with a really good baseline.
And sort of in this industry, well begun is way more than half done, right? Like if you don’t start the job with a good plan. You pretty much have no chance of making any money on that job. And so that’s the pre construction part, right? Where you haven’t start broken ground, but you have to do a lot of planning.
That’s where we also allow people to do a lot of risk analysis. So any kind of risk you can think of, weather delay, procurement delay, you can analyze that, you can quantify it, right? As opposed to just ballpark guess, guesstimates, so to speak. You’re now, you have the power to quantify it with simulations.
And the third part is probably the most important part. Brian is when construction starts. As soon as construction starts, things are always, there’s always curveballs, right? Things are running late, site conditions, weather delays, all of this stuff happens. And so on a daily, weekly basis, we allow the project teams on the ground to input what’s going on.
to react to it in real time, but then the people in the office, the project managers and the project executives have real time visibility and they can be removing roadblocks, they can be reacting to site conditions, et cetera. And so when everyone works on the same platform, there are no data silos, sort of magical things happen, right?
So participation drives buy in and alignment, and then buy in and alignment improves execution.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. You know, the big thing that I took out of everything that you just said is collaboration. Obviously, you’re getting everybody at the beginning together and this tool allows for that type of participation and collaboration across the different teams, which is amazing.
And, you know, to get software to do that sometimes is really a pain, but really excited about your software and what it can do.
Nitin Bhandari: If I may just add one thing, without Planera, the level of collaboration in this industry. is literally marked up PDFs floating around an email, right? So there’s like big PDF and people will mark it up and then attach it as an email and send it back, especially around schedule.
There’s, there’s other workflows where there’s more collaboration, but in schedules, it’s literally still marked up PDFs. floating around in emails, right? And, uh, when you convert, change that behavior and everyone’s on the same platform, commenting, resolving comments in real time, it’s almost like a Google docs or like a SharePoint word document where everyone’s cursors are visible.
Everyone’s commenting, resolving comments. It’s just sort of a magical transformation, right? And it’s, it’s really exciting to see our customers sort of react so positively to that.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you breaking that, that analogy for us. So I appreciate that. And then last question of the day, what are your long term goals for Planera? And how do you envision it transforming the construction industry’s approach to project management?
Nitin Bhandari: Today, scheduling is done very episodically. And it’s done really for compliance reasons, right? Like you have to, as a general contractor, submit a schedule every two weeks or every month to the owner so you can get paid.
And so scheduling is done today somewhat episodically and mostly for compliance reasons. My co founder often jokes that today’s schedules are used either as a shield or as a sword, right? You’re either going to defend yourself with it against claims or you’re going to hit somebody with it, right? And if we do things right, Brian, our hope is that scheduling and planning becomes the way you operate your business every day, right?
It’s not something you do Once in a while for compliance reasons, it’s the thing that you come back to every morning to say, how’s my job going? What do I need to do to make my teams more successful, make more money, deliver this job on time, right? And so it needs to become like the operating system of a company, the everyday decisioning engine of a company, because That’s where all the ground truth resides, so to speak, right?
What’s actually, what was my plan and how am I doing to that plan? That’s something that people should use multiple times a day, not just once or twice a month. And so that’s our vision for if Planera succeeds, how the industry would be different is that scheduling and planning is not an afterthought.
It’s sort of how you run your business on a day to day basis.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. The collaboration, the communication. Again, I like the examples that you share with the scheduling. You know, people tend to think, oh, gosh, it’s, it’s more to cover my, you know, I’ll just say my hiney, but, but essentially, I just really like how software can actually bring the teams together.
And in this environment where you’ve got global companies, global projects, and then of course, you’ve got this new hybrid work environment is so important. And I’m glad that you have this platform there. And again, Transforming the construction project management side of things, but I think that’s awesome.
Nitin, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Nitin Bhandari: Thank you for having me, Brian. A fan of your work, and thank you for having me again.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Nitin Bhandari Podcast Transcript Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.