Summary: The Rhumbix inception story is unlike most in Silicon Valley. It’s a story of two navy veterans on seemingly parallel paths. Before founding Rhumbix, co-founders Zach Scheel and Drew DeWalt both served in the navy, as a civil engineer and a submarine pilot respectively, and eventually crossed paths at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. In the summer of 2013, both Zach and Drew were working in Northern Chile. Zach was working at a copper mine, and Drew was at a startup that was building a non-collocated solar and pump hydropower plant. They found that they were facing the same challenges of data collection on construction sites and estimating labor costs, which led to a fateful conversation over beers about solving this problem. Soon after the pair returned from South America, they began the ideation for Rhumbix — a mobile platform that is reinventing the construction site by providing real time project data and insights to all stakeholders. In our latest podcast, Greylock partner Jerry Chen is joined by Zach and Drew to talk about the experience as veteran entrepreneurs, what Rhumbix does, and the future of the massive but slow moving construction industry.
