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W/C 2nd February 2026

Dear friends, followers and fans,

For the first time in forever, we are peeling back the curtain and giving you an inside look into Bricks & Bytes.

From today and this month forward, each month, we will be taking you inside our world with “The Monthly Byte”. Don’t worry... It’s not another newsletter! Just an extension of our weekly ICYMI.

This will almost be our external-facing diary of how two construction dudes started a podcast and are turning it into a global media business.

Expect:

Thanks for being a subscriber, we appreciate your support and we look forward to you joining this journey with us.

Ok so January was an extremely busy month. There is nothing like hitting the ground running at the start of the year.

Firstly, we welcomed 3 new team members:

Aren’s background includes various forms of as business, in particular within property and investing, as well as growing his own YouTube and social media channels to tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of views.

Note: We named him Zed as there are too many people with names starting with the letter A in Bricks & Bytes and poor Martin can’t handle it.

We have officially launched our 2026 media kit. Details here. Some great opportunities for folks to get their brand in front of a highly engaged and concentrated AEC audience of founders/operators/execs/buyers/industry enthusiasts.

A new event arises in Europe. And a Bricks & Bytes first, we are an official media sponsor of Contech Connect. True story - I had to look up what a media partner was before pitching the idea to Jerome. Here, we will be hosting the opening fireside chat with our fellow Buck, Patric - quite a big deal, especially as Patric is not an event kind-of-guy.

Contech Connect will be held in Paris on 28th May 2026. You can buy tickets here: https://contech-connect.com/, and we will shortly be releasing a discount code for you all.

In December Mike Powers & Luigi approached me (Owen) with an idea. They wanted to debate eachother on B&B.

Fine. I told Patric Hellermann I wanted him to moderate it and with some minor convincing, he agreed. What resulted was a new, provocative format, hosting the conversations that as an industry we should be having. For a number of years, people had told us that a debate format is needed in AEC. So here we are.

Soon after, Dustin & KP agreed to partake. What followed was a fiery debate, contemplating the “death of software or the system of record”.

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If0jJnX7tZY

We will continue to build this format out over 2026, with more participants and more events. Watch this space.

PS shoutout to our sponsors for the latest edition: Track3D, HVAKR, Provision, ALICE, Datagrid, and BuildVision.

I was in two minds as to whether to include this in this month’s edition. But as it is starting to appear and gain traction, here is an insider/soft/silent launch of www.bbradar.com. Long story short: Tech buyers hated being sold tech. We make it easier for them. Official announcement coming soon.

If you are building a product in AEC and want to be featured in the platform, we have some launch offers through Q1 2026. Just hit me up.

In December, we held a closed Beta for the AEC prediction market. Shout-out to Tom Feliz for claiming the #1 spot. Keep your eyes peeled to see how our prediction market develops over the year.

That’s about it for January. Plenty more in the pipeline for February :).

We’ve been working up some awesome claude code apps to help us with all sorts, from financial analysis through to analysis on which of our content performs best. Every member in our team is required to teach themself how to claude code and build automations to help them do their job quicker and with more insight.

Check out the screenshot of our newsletter analysis below:

Well, January hit with a bang. Here’s some of the tech highlights:

We feel that the construction industry is starting to split. On one hand, you have the huge AI boom, but in the other hand, you have the shrinking of “critical” construction i.e., housing.

The AI Industrial Complex is hoovering up capital, labor and power at a rate that's starving the business of building homes for actual humans, and the 26% collapse in residential construction starts is a rental crisis time bomb, apparently set to go off in 2027.

On the tech side, Procore made a bold and smart move, snapping up Datagrid (congrats again to Thiago on exit number two seriously, find us another founder with that track record!!), while Autodesk's 7% layoff and pricing overhaul feels less like a strategic pivot and more like a company betting it can replace human relationships with a subscription fee.

Meanwhile, Patric's prediction of a $3B+ construction tech exit landed faster than any of us expected when EquipmentShare IPO'd north of $6B… proof that real revenue and real assets still beat vaporware!!!

The robotics and humanoid hype is loud… But we're siding with Gartner on this one: boring robots on tracks will eat the lunch of sci-fi dreams on actual jobsites for a long time yet.

And finally, for anyone still quoting a fixed-price contract without a material escalation clause in a world of 28% aluminum tariff spikes, you're not a builder, you're a philanthropist.