Ignite Startups: Designing the Future of AEC Software with Amar Hanspal | Ep210

Ignite: Conversations on Startups, Venture Capital, Tech, Future, and Society

What if the tools reshaping our cities still think it’s 1998? Amar Hanspal thinks that’s a bug, not a feature—and he’s building the patch.

Amar Hanspal is a veteran product leader and entrepreneur who helped steer Autodesk’s product org through a massive cloud shift before co-founding Bright Machines. Today he’s the co-founder of Motif, reimagining how architects and engineers design—collaborative, AI-native, and web-first. With decades spanning CAD’s early PC era to modern ML, he offers a rare front-row view of how platform shifts rewrite entire industries. In this episode, he shares why AEC tools froze in time, how to modernize the design stack without breaking workflows, and what “Figma + Cursor for buildings” actually looks like in practice.

In this episode, they discuss how to turn customer empathy into product judgment, the grind behind true distribution, and why the biggest AI wins in AEC won’t be flashy—they’ll quietly kill the drudgery.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss

00:01 — Early hustle: empathy learned through 100 customer calls a day

00:27 — Discovering CAD on a microVAX and joining Autodesk’s early wave

02:57 — From listening to choosing: the evolution of product judgment

04:50 — First startup lessons: timing, humility, and asking customers to pay

05:19 — Rejoining Autodesk and learning to scale leadership

07:00 — Dot-com detour: building, raising, and shutting down a venture

07:31 — Leading Autodesk’s cloud transformation and move into construction

08:45 — Why computer vision led to Bright Machines

10:46 — The birth of Motif: designing for carbon, complexity, and collaboration

12:49 — Tackling the hardest problems first: scale and real-time teamwork

15:00 — Starting with architects: where Motif begins

15:40 — Product #1: a collaborative 3D workspace for context sharing

16:44 — Embrace, then replace: winning users from legacy tools

18:07 — “Figma meets Cursor” — AI as a co-designer for buildings

19:26 — GTM strategy: human-in-the-loop now, product-led later

21:29 — Founder vs. executive mindset: execution, resilience, and team

24:57 — Real AI value: automating the boring, not the brilliant

27:46 — Why Motif starts from a clean sheet (not geometry-first)

30:40 — Measuring speed-ups and early user feedback

31:37 — Defining success: love from users before scale

32:50 — Lessons for AEC founders: problem-first, tech-second

33:19 — Mythbusting BIM: it doesn’t have to be painful

33:37 — Pride point: leading Autodesk’s cloud shift

34:27 — Adobe vs. Autodesk: two paths to reinvention

35:26 — Regrets and reflections: taking bigger swings sooner

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