Weekly Update

June 13, 2025

Just the facts this week.

Metrics

I pitched Cadence at the JLL Foundation Annual Pitch Event last Wednesday. Low stakes since we’re not raising right now, but a good opportunity to meet investors, and other companies who got support from the foundation. (FH)
Good progress on building science udpates needed for L+M pilot project including documentation to add new heat pump measures (MZ)
I met with CPC and Bright Power to discuss the contractor procurement and loan closing phases of the CFHF program, looking to ways to make it clearer for folks and move faster. We’ll have a part two in a couple of weeks to discuss the In Construction and Compliance Monitoring phases. Two big takeaways: a) Everbody wants things to move faster! And b) We need to anticipate that programs will change over time. I think we’ve been discussing and building this in, but worth highlighting with a real world example. (JB)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around?

(all repeats)

Shipping small, often, well, and safe: I don’t think anybody feels great yet about where we are right now (at least Momentum side, the hardest side). But there’s real progress on testing speed, coding and PR best practices, involving Jeff early and often, and navigating long-term branches, all while pleasing the SOC-2 gods. Let’s keep at it, we’re almost there!
Growing the team: the “$2.5M demo” is not only motivating on its own, it also re-opens the door to hiring. Let’s prep for it, so that we can identify the right skills, attract the right candidates, and welcome them efficiently. Ahead of permanent hires, and to flex our onboarding muscles, could it make sense to get help from consultants for Laravel expertise, or interns for testing help?
Automated Testing: I’m convinced that reliable tests that run quickly and reflect our users’ experience are table stakes to move faster and with more confidence. Are we going to find the bandwidth to get this party going?

Budget for 2H 2025 Carryover from last week but will be finished by next week - seeking some outside support to ensure we are able to look at our scenarios with a high level of confidence. Completing the scenarioes will support strategic decision-making around hiring and other resources over the second half of the year and beyond.
Growing the team This requires conversation amongst the team leads post mid-year budget review, but also want to think ahead as far as resources and needs that could support a search such as salary comps and regional employment considerations and guidelines. This would also require getting the documentation on worldwide work into the handbook, along with other policies, asap so everyone is aware of how we should proceed with hiring, onboarding and integration moving forward.

Need to make sure we are making progress with market engagement even as we wait for dust to settle on big rfp’s.
What would an AI native start up do to this space in 2026 or 2027 and how can we build a moat.

Using AI tools to help us move faster We’ve been having more human about how to incorporate AI tools in our workflow. I hope these can help us move faster soon. We have a ton of stuff to build, and I feel like we end up spending a lot of time working on table stakes features that really aren’t even what we think will distinguish us in the market.

And carryovers:

Local politics The federal picture certainly isn’t good, but we also have some local political risk on the horizon. There’s a big NYC election coming up this fall (with the primary in a few weeks!) There’s a lot of belief that if Cuomo becomes the mayor, Local Law 97 would face some serious setbacks—maybe even go away. It looks like DC is close to delaying its building performance standard BEPS, which isn’t great.
NYC Accelerator and ConEd Recompete These are both big contracts with outsized impacts on revenue and product roadmap. Both interviews are done now, and eager to hear back.
Balancing new feature development with cleaning up debt We have a lot of new features to build, but also a lot of legacy code debt that can make adding those features take longer than it otherwise should. How much time do we spend pushing new features out to the door to keep current and potential clients happy vs. time spent getting our codebase cleaned up so we can move faster in the future.
Portfolio/program reporting Users want the ability to look at groups of buildings in our software, whether it’s looking in their own collections for buildings that meet certain criteria or looking at trends across projects in a program. We haven’t done anything in this vein yet, but we’ll need to start. But like François above, we need to figure out how to keep users in Momentum, pulling them out of their spreadsheet comfort zone.

360s: Erika, Maksym and François (EP)
pressing the flesh with service providers at a NYC accelerator expo on Tuesday (MZ)
Customer / user success with Related and HDC (MZ)
Getting the first draft deliverable out for the L+M project this week! (JB)
Marc and I will be meeting with Dextall, a manufacturer of panelized envelope systems on Wednesday. I showed them Momentum at The Clean Fight summit a couple of weeks ago, and they really liked advanced search. (JB)

Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!