The Ex-SpaceX Engineer Reinventing the American Home

In this episode, Chris sits down with Riley Meik, co-founder and CEO of The American Housing Corporation, a company building factory-made row homes for the kind of city lots we've stopped building on.

For 70 years we got great at putting single-family homes on the outskirts and basically quit building family-sized housing in the places people actually want to live.

Riley's bet is that you fix that the way you'd fix any hard manufacturing problem: own the whole stack, design every part from first principles, and build the home in a factory.

His first prototype went from manufactured to installed to finished in 13 weeks, and the goal from here is a home that costs 30 to 50% less than local construction.

Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(01:22) The Housing Crisis Is a Production Problem
(04:33) Why America Stopped Building Family Housing in Cities
(09:50) The First Company and Why Selling to Home Builders Doesn't Work
(14:58) First Principles Engineering: What Does a Wall Actually Need to Do?
(21:39) Getting Code-Certified for a Building System That Doesn't Exist Yet
(27:57) One Miracle at a Time
(31:47) Three Entities, One Mission: How AHC's Capital Stack Works
(37:52) 18 Months of R&D: Panel Install Time Dropped 70%
(44:22) The Two-Week Build Goal
(47:03) Eichler Homes and Designing for Young Families
(52:24) Beautiful Housing Gets Approved: Design as Regulatory Strategy
(1:00:08) Gigafactory Over Mobile Micro-Factory
(1:04:40) Margin Targets, Market Selection, and the Coastal City Thesis
(1:11:39) Earning the Right to Automate and Hiring for the Housing Crisis

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