Shadow Ventures

SUPER excited to announce we co-led the pre-seed for Western Chemicals. They turn wastewater into the world's cheapest fuels. And they are going to do it at planetary scale. Shadow's LP base includes a deep bench of A/E and GC firms, and well before I met Jared West, wastewater treatment specifically had moved into the foreground of those conversations. Every firm I talked to is betting that wastewater is its next big vertical after data centers. Our investment is a bet that Western solves a unique treatment problem for wastewater plants, dramatically cuts the cost of powering the plant, AND is strongly incentivized to do all of it because of the massive upside of producing biofuel at net-negative cost. How will they do it? You can read our thesis below.

Something important happened at ICSC this year. 😱 ✍ 📙 I wrote and published a book, the real 107 pages book. The book is called The Store Development AI Playbook, A Field Guide. I gave away 25 early copies of a book to CDOs and VPs from Burlington Stores, Inc., Dollar General, 7-Eleven, McDonald's, Family Dollar, Valvoline Inc., CVS Health, The TJX Companies, Inc. and others. The people quietly carrying the weight of opening and managing thousands of retail stores in this country. I wrote it with Schaefer Jones, MBA from JD Sports Fashion Store Development team, It's the real story behind opening 100+ new stores. It's the first field guide ever written about applying AI inside retail store lifecycle management. Not because we wanted to claim a first. Because when we started this work a year ago, we realized no one else was doing it. So we decided to wrote down what we learned within this year of AI implementation. We wrote it because no one had written it yet, and the industry needed it Not to sell or disrupt anything. Retail real estate doesn't need to be disrupted. Technology alone doesn't transform industries. The operators do. The leaders willing to experiment. The teams willing to learn. It's not AI entering retail. It's retail adopting AI. And I believe in the power of community, where everyone cares about each other. This is not a consulting report about AI impact. These are our real actions - week-to-week calls, day-by-day usage, and hundreds of iterations. That's the value, and we wanted to share it with a community of others who care. The first reactions I'm receiving tell me people actually recognize themselves in this book. They recognized the late-night calls. The Sundays in Excel. The landlord coordination. The punch walks. The delays no one outside the industry sees. The quiet pressure behind every portfolio number. Leaders with 20+ years in this industry that started as PMs and now leading whole portfolio were truly grateful for their copy and I'm glad it's now in their hands. This is kind of an open-source project of sharing knowledge with industry is more valuable than keeping it a secret. It's a win-win for everyone if after reading this book you can avoid mistakes and develop your own view on how new tech can impact existing processes. The book is 30 minutes to read. A year of real work behind it. Strategies, workflows, prompts, results and a few honest stories about what we got wrong. #getyourcopy If you'd want your copy, drop a comment below. The next version is better when more people contribute.

Watch this. Fox 5 Atlanta sat down with our CEO KP Reddy to talk about how AI is changing construction across metro Atlanta — and what it means for the workforce, the housing shortage, and the next generation of builders. The part that doesn't get said enough: this industry is actively recruiting. There is a generation that wants to work with their hands, build real things, and see their work standing in the community for decades. As KP put it: "I think we have a generation coming through that wants to work with their hands. They want to do things." AI doesn't replace that. It sets those workers up to succeed from Day 1 — safer, faster, and with the full context of the project at their fingertips. That's the vision. Not a jobsite full of robots — a jobsite where every worker goes home. ▶️ Watch the segment: https://lnkd.in/ezjbC3S5 #ZeroRFI #Atlanta #Construction #WorkforceDevelopment #AIinConstruction #Fox5Atlanta

Excited to announce the Q3 Hackathon. We have limited space. Even if you have attended before, please sign up ASAP. July 21st in San Francisco. https://lnkd.in/gV_mB2HU

I wrote Creating the Intangible Enterprise https://kpreddy.co/books in 2024 as an argument that organizational intelligence — not technology, not capital, not market position — is the only durable competitive advantage. I didn't write it for AEC specifically. I should have. Because AEC is where the gap between information and intelligence is most expensive, and AI just blew that gap wide open. In the full piece, I break down the ten human capabilities that determine which firms compound from this moment and which get overwhelmed by output they can't supervise: 1. AI Deployment Judgment — knowing when to use it, when not to, and how to catch it when it's wrong 2. Systems Thinking — holding the project as a causal model, not a document stack 3. Owner-Outcome Framing — reporting what matters to the owner, not what's easy to measure 4. Proactive Triage — catching the $15,000 problem before it becomes the $150,000 problem 5. Communication Under Pressure — delivering judgment, not status updates 6. Verified Foundational Competency — the floor below which responsible AI deployment collapses 7. Institutional Knowledge Infrastructure — capturing what your best people know before they leave 8. Customer Intimacy — the only moat AI cannot commoditize 9. Revenue-Per-Head Thinking — measuring impact, not activity 10. Narrative Intelligence — the project is not the building; it's the owner's memory of how it was built https://lnkd.in/gdVZDbUx

Building a timber-framed house typically takes a crew of carpenters around four weeks to frame. It's skilled, manual work, and it's difficult to speed up without sacrificing quality or precision. Mollie Claypool spent over a decade at the Bartlett School of Architecture researching how robotics could change this. The answer she and co-founder Gilles Retsin arrived at wasn't a fixed factory that ships panels to site. It was a compact robotic micro-factory that travels to the site instead, produces a home's core and shell in under eight hours, and moves on. That's Automated Architecture (AUAR). Their MasterBuilder AI software takes a building design and generates production-ready output directly, controlling the robotic assembly and enabling the same system to be replicated across different sites and regions. ABB, the global robotics leader, has invested and become a strategic partner. Mollie was recently selected to join the Unreasonable Impact UK & Europe 2026 programme, a partnership between Unreasonable Group and Barclays dedicated to scaling businesses that merge profit and impact. Through this programme, AUAR will gain access to world-class mentorship, resources, and a global network to accelerate its growth and maximise its impact. You can learn more about Mollie here: https://lnkd.in/d43bbw9x You can learn more about AUAR here: https://lnkd.in/dW4p9DdW

This weeks Sunday Scaries. I watched a video of Sadhguru speak at the IIT Summit in Long Beach this week.Jon Fortt asked him about AI displacing intellectual workers. https://lnkd.in/ghaTqaa5

I’m pretty transparent on this website. As we move into the next stage of Zero RFI here is what we are looking to acquire- 1. Owners Reps /PM-CM - Under 250 people. US Only 2. Project Controls Consulting Firms - Cost and Schedule 3. Specification Writers/Firms We are long term holders, with no liquidity time horizons. We are not a succession plan, we are looking for ambitious leaders that just haven’t had the resources for growth in the past and want to kick it into another gear. Email me directly, kp AT kpreddy.co