Built 2 Scale

From bootstrapped chaos to VC-backed scale, Built 2 Scale is your backstage pass to building high-growth startups at the edge of business, tech, AI, and robotics. Hosted by founders Matt Perrott and Scott Wilcox, this podcast dives into the raw, unfiltered reality of turning big ideas into scalable companies. Each week, we unpack the messy middle—fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, and the growing role of automation and AI in modern business. No hype. No jargon. Just real stories, hard lessons, and sharp insights from founders who are actually in the trenches. Whether you’re building SaaS, hardware, or something the world’s never seen before—if you’re scaling, you’re in the right place.

Built 2 Scale is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 46 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Built 2 Scale, a business show with 46 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #8

  Live for Your Drive

  Aug 3, 20261h 1mS2

  The first ever live Built 2 Scale, streaming at 6am for the Australian drive to work and 3pm for the Austin drive home. Scotty and Matt dig into open source models like Kimi closing the gap on the frontier labs and what that does to cost per token for every business downstream, then get into the coming HR nightmare of token spend as a staff member four months into a European summer ranks number two in company token usage. They cover the shift from token maxing to LLM routing, why work is now completely mobile and completely voice, Granola landing on the Apple Watch and BuildPass following with Superite, and the 45 minute hackathon that produced Tinder for Talent, a LinkedIn scraping recruitment app so creepy Scotty's wife told him to delete it. Plus: live audience questions on AI glasses for site defect walks, whether founders will spend more time talking than typing, and how James Hird could use AI to fix Essendon. Built 2 Scale | Season 2 Episode 5 TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 First Ever Live Built 2 Scale: Confirm or Deny the Bed in the Office 2:17 LeBron to the 76ers vs Jacinta Allan Leaving Victoria 4:00 Open Source Models Catch Up: Kimi, Fable Going Offline and Back 4:50 Good for Consumers and Businesses, Bad for the Frontier Labs 6:20 Token Maxing to Agent Architecture: Mapping Models to Your Org Chart 8:13 LLM Routing and the Uber Eats Milkrun Playbook for AI Pricing 11:46 The Token HR Problem: Staff Member in Italy Ranks Number Two on Spend 13:00 Do You Get Tokens on Annual Leave? Personal Use, Side Hustles and JD Perks 15:29 Tool of the Week: Scotty's Three Hour Voice Session Building the WOS 18:03 How to Frame It: Ask the AI to Interview You Until It Finds the Real Problem 19:35 Matt's 20 Minute Drive Home Debrief Built as a Claude Project 22:30 Whisper Flow and Why Typing Is the Dumbest Bandwidth You Own 23:30 Granola Hits the Apple Watch: The Passive Note Taker Moment 25:26 Breaking News: Superite Coming to the Apple Watch (Hit the Gong) 28:12 Site Diaries, Defect Walks and Pre Daily Briefings From Your Wrist 31:47 Building in Public: The 45 Minute Hackathon With an AI Engineer Per Team 36:03 Tinder for Talent: Swipe Right, Auto Message, Wife Says Delete It 39:11 Why Software Now Needs Tight Feedback Loops and Deep Verticals 40:34 Modular Software, MCP Servers and Why You Shouldn't Build Your Own CRM 43:44 Two Businesses Converging: The Builder Gets Technical, the Software Team Goes On Site 46:00 Outcomes as a Service: Coming for the Labour Bill, Not the Software Bill 47:31 Audience Q: How Far Away Are AI Glasses Capturing Defects on Site? 49:27 Scotty's Take: Instructions in the Glasses Beats Live Defect Detection 52:00 The World Model Layer: Live Site Data Rewriting the Schedule in the Background 53:12 Construction's Memory Problem: Everyone Goes Home and the IP Leaks Out 55:48 Audience Q: How Would James Hird Use AI to Fix Essendon? 56:54 Audience Q: Will Founders Talk More Than They Type? (Lovable Becomes Lava Bulb) 57:59 The VTT Hack: Flag Your Voice to Text So No One Judges Your Grammar 59:10 Tongue Controlled Mouse: The Weirdest Input Device Yet This Episode Covers: Open source models like Kimi closing on the frontier and what that means for cost per token across every business Why hardware getting better and models getting smaller were always going to cross over in the middle Moving from token maxing to real agent architecture: mapping models to roles in your org chart by task type LLM routing and why not every request needs the most expensive model on earth The coming HR fight over tokens: annual leave, personal use, side hustles and tokens as an employment perk Voice as the new interface: Scotty's three hour session across a run, a gym, a sauna and a car producing a real artifact Framing voice sessions properly by asking the AI to interview you until it finds the actual bottleneck Matt's Claude project that turns the 20 minute drive home into a daily debrief and to do list Granola launching on Apple Watch and BuildPass bringing Superite to the wrist for site managers The 45 minute hackathon format: every team gets an AI engineer, lists ten pain points, ships a working prototype Tinder for Talent: the LinkedIn scraping recruitment prototype that replaced a $20K recruiter fee Why software companies need modular products, MCP access and deep customer feedback loops instead of point solutions AI glasses on construction sites: capture and processing are solved, the real time guidance layer is roughly six months out Construction's memory and communication problem as the biggest leak in the industry KEY INSIGHTS: Open source is a consumer win and a frontier lab problem : Cheaper models plus better consumer hardware means prices have to come down. The only losers are the labs subsidising inference Token spend becomes a line item next to headcount : Finance teams already track salaries. Companies like RAMP are tracking AI spend. Expect role cost to mean salary plus agent cost Route the request, don't max the model : Sending a basic task to the most expensive model is the AI equivalent of Uber Eats VC subsidies. That era ends the moment margins matter Work is now mobile and voice first : A three hour session across a run, a gym and a car produced a foundational business artifact. The thumb to keyboard bandwidth is the bottleneck, not the thinking The Apple Watch finally has a real use case : Passive capture is less awkward than a phone on the table and frees your hands on site. Voice input is the killer feature, not health tracking Hackathons are 80/20 machines : Forty five minutes gets you a working prototype and a real idea. The last 20% takes 80% of the time, but you can't invest in an idea nobody has proven yet Don't rebuild the wheel, build what makes you different : A construction business shouldn't build its own CRM or payroll. Build the workflows unique to you on top of infrastructure that already exists Outcomes as a service is the next software frontier : Safety paperwork is hard to sell, finance is easier, winning tenders sells itself. The pitch is converting labour bills into tokens Instructions in the glasses beat defects in the glasses : Training vision models to spot a 5mm tolerance issue is expensive. Scrolling the SOP into a tradesman's eyeline scales quality across a workforce today The site as a world model : Live capture doesn't just flag defects, it feeds a system that reruns the schedule, spots downstream clashes and reschedules deliveries in the background Construction's leaky bucket : Everything seen and heard on site walks home at 5pm and never reaches tomorrow's crew. Any observation not shared to the project brain is lost IP Curious beats credentialed : The people getting the most out of these tools aren't waiting to be told what AI can do, they're assuming it can and finding the edges the hard way About Built 2 Scale: Weekly analysis of artificial intelligence business strategy, robotics adoption, and technology market dynamics. Hosted by Scott Wilcox (Australia) and Matt Perrott (Austin), providing actionable insights for founders, investors, and technology executives navigating the AI transformation. Subscribe for AI business intelligence: /@built2scale Available on Spotify | Apple Podcasts #AI #OpenSource #Kimi #Claude #Fable #TokenSpend #LLMRouting #VoiceAI #Granola #AppleWatch #Hackathon #BuildPass #Superite #AIGlasses #Construction #Built2Scale #LiveStream #TechNews

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  Episode #7

  The Master Builder Revival | How humans + Tokens spark a lost-crafts renaissance

  Jun 25, 20261h 1mS2

  How humans + tokens spark a lost-crafts renaissance For two hundred years the master builder got fragmented — one person who could read a site, command a trade and run a job split into site manager, contracts administrator, project coordinator, estimator, fifteen roles deep. That fragmentation wasn’t craft. It was admin: the tax you pay to run a build in the twenty-first century. This week Scott and Matt make the case that tokens are about to pay that tax for us — and what’s left when the admin burden lifts is the craft itself. They go deep on the operating system underneath it: BuildPass’s move to four product lines — Win, Pay, Build, Connect — absorbing the fragmentation so one builder can sit back in the cockpit and give the verdict that matters: approve, challenge, or deny. Then the human side — “human plus token,” hiring for agency over résumés, and why keeping real people in the building still matters. Plus the Traidy launch and raising the floor for 1.3 million trades, finishing your site admin by voice on the drive home, and a live demo of the open-source glasses that put a master’s guidance in your ear while you lay the brick. The robots aren’t coming to replace the bricklayer. They’re coming to make the bricklayer a master again.

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  Episode #6

  The Abundance Stack

  May 25, 202651 minS2

  <p>Scott and Matt are back after a month off — and a new daughter, a new W. hire from the podcast itself, and a 22-minute plan to solve Australia. Matt coins "knowledge debt," Scott coins "tradesmen are skills files with dexterity," and they propose a hackathon that pairs a bricklayer with a developer. Plus Codex Goals running for four days unattended, AI cameras landing in Austin, and Scott drops the full Scotty Algorithm (DMICSA) as a public skill file. The world model, on a site.</p>

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  Episode #5

  Skills vs Agents — The Stack Everyone's Getting Wrong

  May 3, 202654 minS2

  <p>Scott Wilcox and Matt Perrott break down the two weeks that took W.Build's invoice processing from $5–$10 per invoice to half a cent — a thousand times reduction — and what it signals for every construction business trying to figure out where agents fit.</p> <p>In this episode:</p> The clean definition of agents vs skills (and why most people are overcomplicating it) Why BuildPass is "declaring bankruptcy" on five years of company docs Scott's DMISA framework — Direction, Measure, Incentivize, Systemize, Automate — and why automation is the last step, not the first The $5-to-half-a-cent invoice story (and why construction finance has trauma...

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  Episode #4

  The Sims for Founders: What Agent-First Companies Actually Look Like

  Mar 31, 202650 minS2

  <p>Built2Scale is back — and everything's different.</p><p>No more AI news roundups. From now on, every episode documents the real, messy, building-in-public journey of W. (luxury home builder, $30M+ revenue, ~20 people) and BuildPass (construction tech startup, 1,000+ customers across 4 countries) as they converge into one platform.</p><p>This week: Scott onboarded his entire company onto Claude in a single live session — $30/person/month, every tool connected, nobody left behind. Within days, his team stopped asking him questions and started asking the AI instead. ("Imagine if I spoke that eloquently at work.")</p><p>Matt discovered Paperclip — a tool t...

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