#304 - ROBERT YUEN, Co-founder and CEO of Monograph
SUMMARY
This week David and Marina are joined by Robert Yuen, Co-founder and CEO of Monograph to discuss his long term vision to help the industry; the growth of the company over the last year; the importance of tracking data in an architecture office; new key features; the similarities and differences between running a tech company and architecture practice; the success of Monograph’s Section Cut seminars; and more. Enjoy!
ABOUT ROBERT
Robert Yuen builds tools and software. A partner at Dixon & Moe and Co-founder of Section Cut and Monograph, he’s a serial entrepreneur, a trained architect, an expert in designing software solutions, and zealously productive.
Inherently industrious by nature, Robert has made a career out of crafting his own advantages. Born and raised in Chicago, IL, the son of immigrants from Southern China, Robert’s family worked in and out of various Chinese take-out restaurant in Chicago’s north side, where he worked as a young boy. From a very young age, going through the Chicago Public School system and coming from a low-income family, he learn quickly what went into running a small family owned restaurant. By the time he tested into Lane Tech High School and entered the school’s architectural track, he had learned not only the ins and outs of a small business, but the reality that making something from nothing takes a lot of work.
He worked to pay for his education in architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and upon completion of his coursework in 2007, placed first at the Lyceum Fellowship He was awarded a Travelling Fellowship, and began a tour of 22 countries over 10 months. Appreciating the immense value of the opportunity and intent on maximizing the experience, he slept on couches and occasionally a park bench, wishing to obtain a greater cross-section of architecture across a diverse set of cultural environments. When he returned, he continued his studies at the University of Michigan, earning a dual master’s degree in Architecture and Digital Technologies. After graduation, he worked with some of the industry's most renowned firms and designers, including SOM, Holabird & Root, and Blu Homes.
But his natural curiosity was not sated by office work. Robert had already begun building Section Cut, a digital collection of design references and resources for architects that was beginning to flourish into a new model of design education. When he contracted software designers Dixon & Moe to enhance Section Cut’s functionality, they realized his design expertise, ambition, and architectural training would be a critical asset to their firm. He joined them to begin work on Monograph, a suite of resources and tools designed specifically for architects, and become a partner of the firm in 2016.
Above all else, Robert believes in making. Businesses, with their logistics and administrative bulk, are a required byproduct that he is happy and able to manage. But satisfaction comes from the ability to identify a problem, formulate a solution, and produce a flawless and elegant execution.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) The growth of Monograph over the last year
(07:45) The importance of tracking data in an architecture office
“I like to keep things really simple regardless if you're going to use your hours to bill or not, you should just understand how well you are doing as an individual and as a team and the only way you really know how to do that is to understand how much time went into it… Most of the time, what's not clear is how much time did I actually put into it really? And if you extrapolate how much am I worth, is that number a sustainable number?” (07:59)
(13:44) The long term vision to help the industry and profession
“The objective is to focus on design. The back of house practice ops workflows should have ideally been figured out decades ago by someone else. The fact that there is no tools, essentially, is the drive for me every day and every morning I wake up. The larger firms… they do have the resources but I have strong opinions that those resources are misaligned. The tools they have were designed originally in the early eighties and nineties.” (15:29)
(22:11) Monograph video demonstration
(36:23) The challenges of creating a product for the architecture profession
(46:38) How tracking time can solve industry issues
“Culturally, as an industry, we're not motivated to track time and for a long time, it’s more about the creative process. It's really hard to cap or run through an exercise of understanding, how much time should I spend on a creative process… And I think that notion has historically prohibited us to really think about how important it is and how necessary it is. I think the conversation historically has been over-indexed on not tracking time. What I'm asking for is not that we all should be tracking time to the every second and really restrict our ability to be creative but I think we should allow that to essentially add constraints and scope to our own process.” (49:43)
(01:11:05) Potential future products
(01:19:27) Different strategies that help Monograph understand the community needs
“Our end goal is really to move industry forward. We have the means and the capacity to set the stage and so we should. What’s fascinating for Monograph, in a very selfish way, is that we learn a lot, too, in terms trying to set direction of where the product needs to go and what are the larger thematic problems we should to continue to focus. And it's a great way for us to aggregate a whole bunch of industry leaders and really understand are we going to be correct in terms of what is the next thing we need to solve and how do we solve it?” (01:22:05)
(01:31:40) The challenges of running a company
