As members of the Google for Startups Cloud Program, Team Vereyo spent the day with founders, engineers and Googlers talking about where technology is headed. We heard about moonshots, about thinking 10x instead of 10 percent, and about how AI is letting companies move faster than anyone thought possible a few years ago. We left with full notebooks and one clear conviction: construction is ready for its moonshot.
Think in 10x, not 10 percent
The big idea of the day was moonshot thinking. Uday Ghatikar, Field CTO and Global Founder Advocate at Google Cloud, walked us through Google's principles of 10x innovation: a healthy disregard of the impossible, innovation over instant perfection, start with the user, data over opinions. If you aim to make something 10 percent better, you tinker with what already exists. If you aim to make it 10 times better, you're forced to throw out the old assumptions and rebuild from first principles.
That reframe hit home for us. For decades, "better" in construction estimating has meant a faster calculator, a cleaner spreadsheet, a nicer takeoff screen. Those are 10 percent improvements. A 10x improvement asks a different question: what if the builder never had to do the paperwork at all?
The 70-20-10 rule
We also heard about the 70-20-10 rule, a way of splitting time and resources so a company can protect today while inventing tomorrow:
- 70 percent on the core business, doing what you do today and doing it well
- 20 percent on adjacent bets that extend what already works
- 10 percent on moonshots, the wild ideas that could change everything
The lesson isn't that every company should be all moonshot. It's that the moonshot gets a protected slice, every single quarter. At Vereyo we run the same playbook: we sweat the details of today's estimates for the builders who rely on us, while always keeping a piece of our energy on what the job site of 2030 should look like.
AI is changing the speed of business
Across every session, one theme kept coming back: AI is helping businesses work faster than ever. Work that took a team days now takes minutes. Documents that once had to be read line by line can be understood, summarized and acted on almost instantly.
But the most inspiring part wasn't the speed. It was what the speed is for. When the tedious work disappears, people get their time back for the work only they can do: the creative calls, the hard judgment, the craft.
“Builders should create great structures, not fancy documents. They should be on the job site, not buried in spreadsheets at midnight.”
Bringing the moonshot to construction
This is exactly what we're building at Vereyo. Construction runs on paperwork: plan sets hundreds of pages long, takeoffs, sub bids, spreadsheets and estimate after estimate for jobs that may never be awarded. Every hour a builder spends on that is an hour not spent building.
Here's how Vereyo takes that weight off:
- AI plan reading. Upload a PDF plan set and Vereyo reads it, powered by Google's Gemini models, and turns it into a fully priced, multi-trade estimate. Hours of takeoff work become a review.
- Subcontractor bid management. Our Bid Center lets GCs send scopes and takeoffs to subs in one touch and collect bids in one place, no more chasing emails and phone calls.
- Bid analysis with Bid Check. Vereyo checks sub bids against the plans so builders can see what's complete, what's missing and what's out of line, then award with confidence.
- Your numbers, your format. Builders bring their own cost database and get estimates in their own customer-facing templates, ready to send.
Builders are noticing. Since opening to the public, more than 100 builders have joined Vereyo in just 45 days.
Building, not paperwork
This is our 10 percent. We're already working on the next wave of features that take even more off a builder's plate, so every project runs smoother from first plan to final bid.
The goal never changes. Builders should create great structures, not fancy documents. They should be on the job site, not buried in spreadsheets at midnight.
That's what AI is for. Not to replace the people who build, but to clear the way so they can do the great work they set out to do. Google Tech Day reminded us to think 10x. In construction, 10x means giving builders their time back.
Ready to spend less time on paperwork? Upload your next plan set to Vereyo and see what your estimate looks like in minutes.