Ep. 219: Federico Negro on Making Tools to Empower and Scale Sustainable Design

Founder and CEO of Canoa, Federico Negro, was born in Uruguay during a time of political turmoil and lived in four countries by age 14. As a teenager in Chicago, he used music as a means of learning English, and during college became fascinated by forensic architecture, which informed his fixation with “how we build with what we build.” An Architect, designer, toolmaker, and entrepreneur, his first company, CASE, was acquired by WeWork. From there he served as the Global Head of Design for Wework during the company’s rapid expansion, and witnessed first-hand the pain points and environmental challenges that could be mitigated with better tools. So in 2019, he founded Canoa, an AI-driven, collaborative software aimed at revolutionizing the interior design and furniture industries by addressing environmental issues and becoming a tool to help us build a better future. 

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Learn more about Federico on his website, and learn more about Canoa on their website and instagram.

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Read the Transcript

Amy Devers: Hey Clever listeners, it’s Amy. I have a quick announcement before we get started… We’d love for you to complete our Listener Survey. It’s brief and easy and the link is right in the epsiode’s description. Clever is an independent podcast, entirely supported by Sponsorships, advertising and donations. I know ads can be annoying, but if you fill out the survey it will help us work with advertisers that actually have something you may find valuable - and that makes it a win for you, a win for Clever and a win for the sponsor. God I love a trifecta of wins. So thank you in advance for filling out the survey and again the link is in the episode description. Today I’m talking to Architect and toolmaker Federico Negro. Federico is the founder and CEO of CANOA - the first AI-assisted, collaborative online tool for interior designers to create and share data-rich mood boards, layouts, and product schedules with their teams. A second-time founder, He began Canoa as a response to the design sector’s failure to address current environmental issues. Technology and design have been an early interest of his, and getting involved with disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina shifted his outlook on the industry’s contribution to climate change. Having studied Architecture at University of Illinois and Parsons, Federico got his professional legs under him at SHoP Architects, before starting his first company, CASE, which focused on developing design technologies for built environment businesses. Case was acquired by WeWork in 2015 - and Federico assumed the role of WeWork’s Global Head of Design. During this time he led the effort to launch into 30 countries and open over 500 locations, growing his team to over 2000 individuals. He also became acutely aware of the end-to-end challenges businesses face when dealing with specifying Furnishings, Fixtures and Equipment (or FF&E.) More than $250 million per year in FF&E procurement later, he decided it was time to start working on the tool designers always wanted, and Canoa was born. Additionally, Federico has been a returning speaker at Harvard GSD, leading seminars focused on entrepreneurship and architecture, and has been featured in many publications including The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis Magazine, and Wired UK, among others. What’s fascinating about Federico is his alacrity with toolmaking - which In my opinion, is the height of creative agency. Rather than alienation from creative labor, which can happen so often when one is silo’d into a single aspect of creation, toolmaking involves big-picture, whole systems thinking, profound intimacy with the process, and empathy with the practitioner… logical and sensitive qualities, that as you’ll hear, reverberate throughout his character… here’s Federico….. 

Frederico Negro: My name is Frederico Negro, I’m based out of Brooklyn, New York. I’m a Designer and currently is the Founder of Canoa, which is a design software. I like to define what I do as building tools to design. I’m a toolmaker and I love it. (Laughs)

Amy: You are speaking straight to my heart. My background is in furniture design and to do what we do; we have to build jigs and our own tools. That’s a very analogue way that I came to my love of toolmaking, but it’s the ultimate agency when you cannot just use tools, but make your own tools, then you can make anything. It’s incredibly empowering in the material world, in the digital world, in any world, is learning to make tools. So that’s a pretty exciting place to be. But before we get to the current tool that you’re excited about, let’s go all the way back to Uruguay and talk to me about where you were born, what your family dynamic was like, your home town, what little Frederico was doing? 

Frederico: (Laughs) I’m actually there now. 

Amy: Oh?

Frederico: Yeah, so yeah, I grew up in Uruguay, I moved around quite a bit as a kid because of my father’s job, he was a chemical engineer, mostly worked in the food industry. And I’d say a lot of engineering in my family and then my mother was very much into the arts, she was a literature professor. So maybe a good balance of the two, if you will. 

Amy: Right brain/left brain, full force. We’ve got a literary professor and a chemical engineer and how many siblings? 

Frederico: There’s four of us total. 

Amy: Four, okay. What were you interested in as a kid? 

Frederico: I loved drawing, that was my safe space, I would always go back and sketch and draw. If I could just be drawing forever, I probably would have been really happy. Unfortunately I was born in 1980 and it was still a time when… I think if you wanted to say something like I want to be an illustrator or something like that, they’re like you should go into a ‘real’ career.

Amy: Yes, familiar, same. 

Frederico: Aand so I thought a little bit about things like animation and things like that and so I gravitated to any field that had this wonderful combination of… of course creativity, but that sort of expression that comes through the use of our hands. And I maybe without knowing it, began to gravitate to maybe what later on I became more familiar with it, the concept of craft, which I think to this day is something that I’m super passionate about. And it all started with drawing and sketching, for sure. I was a pretty good student. [0.05.00] I would get bored easily and so I would end up doodling and doing those kinds of things. Maths and sciences, all of these topics, I wasn’t good or bad at them, I think I was a pretty good student overall, but I didn’t feel super engaged in those things, in the way that I was with say like reading stories and of course like drawing and sketching and inventing things, inventing characters and all these kinds of things. That to me really took hold. 

Amy: Where are you in the birth order with your siblings? 

Frederico: I’m the youngest. 

Amy: Okay and at some point you emigrated and landed in Chicago, this was still during the civic military dictatorship, so I really am curious about what that experience was like for you. Was that during your teenage years that you emigated? 

Frederico: Yeah, so actually the timing is that Uruguay was under dictatorship from about 1973 to about 1982/83. My parents actually immigrated to Venezuela during that time, which was a little bit of… very different from today. It was a bit of, let’s say a safe space for a bunch of expats in the region because Chile, of course, was undergoing a similar period. So was Argentina, and so the Southern cone of South America, which is really where I’m from, was in dire straits at the moment. In 1984, we as a family moved back, we actually moved to Argentina for a couple of years and then we moved back to Uruguay once the military government had been replaced. And so we were able to sort of come back around, if you will. My parents will describe it as a lost decade and a half Once back in Uruguay, then 1994, my father was offered a position within the company he worked for. He worked for a subsidiary of an American company that was headquartered in Chicago, because he worked in grains, that company was headquartered near the Grains Exchange in Chicago and we moved up there. 

Amy: Okay, that’s a lot of moving around. 

Frederico: Yeah, four countries by the age of 14. 

Amy: Tell me a little bit more about being 14 years old and being thrust into a new country, new language, those are typically the awkward years. [0.10.00] A lot of things are coming online in your body but you’re also… social circles are really important because you need peers to help navigate this challenging time. How are you finding your way? That feels like survival skills? (Laughter)

Frederico: Yeah, maybe that’s a good way to put it, is you have to learn to adapt. The good side of it is that… well of course everything is trial and error, you have no idea (laughter) what you’re doing or whether what you’re doing is okay or not. But you sort of learn as you go, it’s definitely trial by fire from that perspective. And maybe a lot of those things that we feel as teenagers, that apprehension, that embarrassment and these kinds of things, you’re so way past all of those things. (Laughs) It’s like, oh… I remember my first days there, I had of course taken English, but it was always English as a second language and it was usually taught in the countries that I’d lived in. It was taught by either English speakers from Britain, so like Irish or Scottish. And so not only did I have poor English, even the English I had was with a Scottish accent. (Laughs) 

Amy: Oh, this is an amazing picture you’re painting right now. Wow. 

Frederico: So I landed in Chicago and I had to adapt quickly and luckily… it’s one of those things where you hear this from many immigrants, but watching TV and music videos and all those kinds of things, you practice and practice and practice and you listen and you listen and you listen. And you begin to hone in on that annunciation, that accent, all of those things, which also in Chicago, it’s a very specific… 

Amy: I’m from the Midwest. 

Frederico: (Laughter) There you go! I think I just caught it at the exact right moment where my brain was still maybe mushy enough, where picking up that second language just was pretty swift. 

Amy: That’s helpful. 

Frederico: Yeah but it was also intentional, I need to figure this out because otherwise I don’t know how I’m going to make it. So every effort went to… I would rewind the CD, what did they say, what did they say, and I would take notes and I would try to transcribe music, just because I was really, really trying to study the language from that perspective. It was interesting… I didn’t have any friends. (Laughs)

Amy: What an interesting way into a culture though, transcribing music, that’s really cool actually, because it’s like the poetry of youth and also includes slang and vernacular and cultural references and so that’s pretty smart, that’s making your own tool right there. 

Frederico: Well, yeah, maybe. My mother used to say that because of course in literature, translations are a bit topic of literature, they’re accurate and they’re not accurate and I remember her saying all the time about how learning language through grammar is wrong. And it shouldn’t be done. And learning language [0.15.00] should always be founded on a cultural foundation and not a grammatical foundation. And so I’m applying this logic way later. (Laughs) It’s not something that came at the time. But I think there is a lot of that, is that there was a connection with the music that went well beyond the US in the mid-90s, like Clinton and Bush era, Bush senior, all this sort of stuff, Indie bands and all of the sort of grunge culture that was coming up. That was very much also in Latin America as well. So there was something… I felt that that cultural bridge… somebody is like, oh you know, you’re listening to Nirvana or something, I was like Nirvana was becoming this global thing and I could sort of latch onto both sides of that conversation. One of them was like, okay, what is it that they’re talking about, what is it that they’re rebelling against. How are they saying it? What language are they using? Why are they feeling the way that they are? And as a teenager being able to tap into that. Early MTV years, all of these kinds of things that all of that stuff was super helpful. 

Amy: I’m going to take a guess that you were kind of always interested in architecture, but it also appealed to you because it’s the creative practice that’s also very engineering-ish? Did this factor into your decision to study architecture? 

Frederico: Yeah, I think so. Or I’ll just say yes. There’s something that really attracted me about the permanence of it. The sort of idea that there are some professions out there where you get to build something, to me was already fascinating. That sort of creator thing, whether it’s engineering, whether it’s architecture, whether it’s art, just creating something new was fascinating. And then beyond that it was this sort of tying into history, tying into art, tying into my love of drawing and sketching, tying to this cultural overlay that of course architecture has such an impact on. 

Amy: And at this point in time too, you’d also had firsthand experience of different architecture… different cities culture and how the architecture impacts social behavior and everything, so you have a pretty large sample of how architecture in the built world impacts us. 

Frederico: Yeah. Again, looking back on it, I think it’s logical to make those connections. I think at the time maybe I didn’t know how to make those connections, but Monteverde is like an art nouveau city. Venezuela… Caracas is modernism gone totally nuts. (Laughter) Buenos Aires, which I also lived in, is sort of like a mix of French colonial with like Spanish colonial with like a bunch of let’s say Italian styles as well and all of that. So it’s a mix, for sure. And so there’s a lot of things happening that I don’t think I could truly relate to. I don’t think I had the language to express what that experience was giving me until probably after I went to architecture school and I learned that these urban centers have size and we can measure them and they were planned in some way or another. And they’ve gone through phases and layers. I think all of that, I didn’t really get it at the time, but I definitely felt [0.20.00] attracted to it. 

Amy: You just go towards what you’re gravitating towards, but you don’t really know why. And then I think part of what’s so fascinating to me is unpacking that these many years later and understanding, oh, maybe it’s because of those influences, now that makes sense. But you got your bachelor’s in architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and then did you go straight to your master’s at The New School, Parsons? 

Frederico: I did. While I was at UoI, I became, oddly enough, UoI is a really strong engineering school and it has a great architectural school, but it’s very engineering oriented. 

Amy: Yes…I’m familiar. 

Frederico: Within all of that they had a pretty wonderful architectural history set of courses. And I became pretty enthralled with that. Maybe that side of it was really pulling me and so everybody had these study abroad programs and all that. I ended up going to Italy and studied in Florence for a semester, taking real detailed courses around everything from the Greeks all the way to the Romans and then all the way into the Renaissance. I just couldn’t really get enough of it and I ended up going to work that same summer, so I had one semester and then I stayed for the summer and I ended up going to work in Greece at an archeological dig. 

Amy: Oh! Sorry, I just got really excited! Tell me about this? (Laughter)

Frederico: All good. I met this guy, this architect in Italy that was running this program and he ran the classics department at Middlebury College. They had this program where they go and effectively they do and dig and everybody who comes is a classic student, I don’t have any architects, do you want to come? And I was like, of course. (Laughter)

Amy: Yeah!

Frederico: I would love to come. And this was one of these defining moments, I think in my early life, because I got to go, we were living in this little town, maybe of like 500 people in the mountains of the Pyrenees. We would get up at 5:00 in the morning, you go to work until 10:30 at most because then the heat was so bad you had to stop until 2:00/3:00pm. Then we worked later, and we were digging and my job was, because I could draw, was to draw what are called scarp drawings. And scarp drawings are when you draw, you just sit there and you sketch out the elevations of the cut, the cut down of the earth, like every layer of dirt and you have to document everything. 

Amy: It’s sort of like a storyboard of the cross-section of the earth. 

Frederico: Yeah, and it’s Greece, you find all kinds of things. (Laughs) Every little hole that you make, here’s pottery or here’s a coin or here’s this. And so we were in a small town called Ithome which was… well classical town and it had three/four temples, it had a theatre, it had a gymnasium, it had all of these things and there’s like a German team digging, a Japanese team digging, there’s a US team, there was us, and we were focused on this one Hera Temple. Part of the objective of the day was to figure out how that temple was built, because what was really interesting was that… so this was mostly stone, of course, but a lot of those temples would use different types of clamping, iron clamps to have all of the blocks connecting to each other. Some later into Roman times, a lot of the roofs used to be timber and then timber with some sort of tile or something. By the construction method you would arrive at when this temple was either built or reconstructed or all of that. And so we were doing all that work, we were able to age this temple right around, I think it was like 50AD, it was Roman, it wasn’t Greek. 

Amy: Whoa!

Frederico: We were able to reverse engineer all of that because of the construction method, which was super cool. 

Amy: Yeah!

Frederico: I became enthralled with this idea of forensic architecture, everything you could do with all of this…

Amy: Yeah, I’m right there with you! (Laughter)

Frederico: But it very clearly created this connection for me between how we build, with what we build. I remember this one story, we were able to find… it wasn’t the wood remains themselves that was gone, but there’s the stones had been carved to receive the wood, and the type of wood spans that would have required for the structure gave us a pretty limited, let’s say sizing of what the original tree could have been. And so based on that, then there’s this arborist that we were working with, some other expert from some other university was like, well, based on where you are, the timber likely came from this area, which had to be upstream because usually they would move through rivers and blah blah blah. So we were even able to even guess, just how you do with a quarry, you understand which quarry the stone came from. Maybe you could even guess where the wood was coming from. I was watching these people talk and put these papers together and then you read them, it’s like oh my god, that’s amazing. It’s just so fascinating, the whole thing was just incredible. And it was 2000 years ago… 

Amy: Yeah. (Laughter) That’s amazing. It’s also the human ingenuity involved in all of these even just okay, let’s use the river to move our lumber, it’s just so clever. I love everything about that, the structural forensics, the history of it, but also the collaborative sciences coming together and creativity and science working side-by-side to unpack this mystery. Man, I get why that was a formative experience for you. 

Frederico: Fascinating. 

Amy: I am so glad you told me that story because that really makes Canoa click into place for me. Now I understand why you’re so passionate, especially when you said ‘how we build with what we build.’ I want to get to Canoa, but I think we have some highlights to go through before the founding of Canoa that also will… I’m doing the forensics now, that will also help us understand how you got to Canoa. Can you give me the highlights tour and the big lessons and challenges in your creative trajectory? I know you started at SHoP Architects and then founded CASE and then we have a big enchilada to deal with, with WeWork before the founding of Canoa. 

Frederico: I have some good stories!

Amy: Yeah. (Laughter) Take me through it, I’m on the canoe, you’re paddling… steering. 

Frederico: We’ll come back to this, but the reason for the name, which of course means ‘canoe’ in Spanish, is ‘slow but far.

Amy: That’s beautiful, oh, that’s the literary professor coming through, the language, the person who understands language through culture. 

Frederico: Yeah, so I moved to New York after Illinois, went to Parsons, that time at Parsons was actually super exciting because there was a lot of young practices that were working there. SHoP was one of them, two/three of the partners were teaching there, I had two of them as professors. Parsons had this program that was called Design Workshop where you would design something and then you would build it and I had gone through that, so this was my second time now of being out in the field and so it was Greece and then we built this one structure out in Brooklyn. And I loved getting my hands dirty, again, that’s a connection to craft, I just kept coming to it, coming to it. Which in architecture sometimes it’s hard because of the scale of it. There’s a real separation between design and then making. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Frederico: And what really drew me to SHoP at the time was that they were really telling the story of, now through digital technologies, but the story of the architect doesn’t make again, where you could actually influence how things get built. And maybe as a little bit of a rejection of the 1980s, anti-liability (laughs) sort of movement, they were saying, we’re actually willing to take on some risks because it affords us design opportunities that would otherwise not be really possible. And so they taught this course where we were designing the building system for a house that they were going to do in Aspen and we were doing all of the 3D design for this, we were trying to figure out how to build it. Of course with their guidance and everything. The house didn’t get built, but what was really fascinating about that is that this is probably my first… time where the computer itself became the crafting mechanism, this tool that we’d use to craft things. The reason for that is because the house was a house for somebody who loves skating, I think it was an ex-professional skater and so it had all this curvature in it, very much in the same way that you would have on a skateboard. And so solving all of that surfacing, like all the surface continuity and the structure behind it and how do we carry it, how do we not carry it, that geometric problem was fascinating. And the right tool for the job in that moment was now really getting into 3D modelling and parametrics and these kinds of things. So I finally found the true use of it, and I was like okay, that connects, that makes sense. 

Amy: Okay and for context, where are we in time? 

Frederico: This is 2004. Yeah, and so anyway, we were doing that through the semester, like I said, the house didn’t get built, but then SHoP at the time was beginning to grow. They were moving out of their first office into their second and they hired me and a couple of other people to help them do a whole series, like all of the furniture build up for their new office. So I was in my last year, in grad school, but I was going there and working weekends and whatnot. Just hit it off with everybody there, they offered me a job after I graduated and I found myself in a place where I think for the first time there were a lot of like-minded people in the sense that this idea of how we do the work we do was probably just as important, if not more important than the work we were doing. All of the stuff that they were talking about in terms of mass customization and the books that came out during that time. It was a very exciting time to be there, there’s just so much talent in those early days at SHoP, it was amazing. I don’t think I realized until much later a group of people come together and it’s just clear and it amplifies and those moments, because they are rare, I think one hopefully learns to look for them, because they don’t have to happen just once, but if you don’t seek them out maybe, they won’t happen very often, if at all. So that for me was, I think another defining, let’s say building block in my career, which was how do I find myself in situations where I can team up with the right group. Team up with the right group who will catapult us into something really fun, really exciting, incredibly educational and that, like you say, next growth spurt. Because what’s really cool. They’re about learning, they’re about pushing boundaries and doing things and those could happen at any age. 

Amy: Yes, and actually I think the first couple of them feel like they happen coincidentally or accidentally, but now, you said there’s more agency involved in seeking out the situations that you want to find yourself in. But also creating the conditions and building the tools if you need to, to create those conditions

Frederico: That’s exactly right. You design a context that affords this to be able to happen. It won’t happen also just magically. Sometimes we stumble upon these things, but once you do, I think we do have to have the presence of mind to recognize those things and then maybe pick it up and be like oh, this is a thing. I want to go back to that moment though, because of all of the excitement and everything there’s one thing that happened during my time there that was very much formative, which was… I started there 2004, 2006 I think it was, Katrina hit. 

Amy: Oh yes, yes, yes. 

Frederico: And we were working on a competition for a new building at Tulane University, coincidentally, and then Katrina hit. We had just presented the final… I think it was August, as the hurricane comes through, of course New Orleans is upended, most of South Western Mississippi is upended as well. Of course the whole country is looking at this area. And we get a phone call from the school, somebody in Tulane, that the person who was going to be the main donor for the building and the competition was actually from Mississippi, and that the storm had just directly hit her childhood home and if we knew people who could go help. Because everybody of course locally was either incredibly busy with first response, or they were just worried about handling care with their families. So they were just trying to get people to… to give them a lot of credit for this, the SHoP partners asked, is anybody interested in going down there to help? And so myself and a friend, my friend Reece, who had started with SHoP the same day as I, we raised our hands and were like, we want to go. (Laughs) And then one of the engineers that was on that project as well, the structural engineer, his name is Andrew, him as well, and so we got on an airplane, that she sent, packed up a bunch of hand tools into duffel bags and threw them into the airplane and then landed in Mississippi and took a car and driving through the dark…

Amy: Architectural EMT. Wow. 

Frederico: (Laughs) What was really interesting there, now they came from the other side, which is like disaster relief, what is the thing you need on day one, what is the thing you need on day seven, what is the thing you need on month three, what’s the thing you need three years from now. And that sort of building up from scratch as opposed to forensic, is just a different perspective. But again, it was thing where you’re like, okay, we’re now back in the field for the third time, I have this connection between how we make things and what people need and that became also just like energizing to such a degree because first of all, just the level of destruction was incredible. I had never seen anything like that. You tear up randomly, you’d be like driving on the road and literally just tears starts coming down your face. 

Amy: I actually did a little bit of reconstruction after there too and I know what you’re talking about. [0.45.00] It was so evident everywhere you went; just how many lives had been completely devastated and it was very emotional. 

Frederico: Incredibly so. And so you do the little things you can do but for me it was maybe like the first, very hard and very real connection to weather and climate. And how us as architects do have a role to play in all of this. It’s not the foreign thing that happens outside of us, but the vast majority…

Amy: The responsibility even. 

Frederico: That’s right. And seeing first hand that many, many, many of the issues were actually beyond the storm itself, it was the issues that happened because the infrastructure had been either lacking or designed in such a way. And so there’s a very, very real connection to how buildings can make things much worse as well, if they’re not done properly or if they’re not done with these kinds of things in mind. Of course we have to consider what we’re designing for, and maybe in that case those buildings were not designed for that, that’s okay, but it’s like what do we do next became the real clear answer. So we did what we could, I spent just a few weeks there, Reece spent almost a year there. We built a community center, simple things like a laundromat, a hair salon, the things that people just needed every day to feel that there’s some semblance of a common life. But we kept going back to this idea of what we could do. And all of it was done with us sort of seeing what we could get in terms of materials and labor because everybody was busy doing things and so…

Amy: You had to be extra resourceful. 

Frederico: You do what you can and you figure it out and you get there. But that was maybe a much more visceral connection to tooling and things like that because pictures of us sleeping on the trailer on site and then the next morning tying rebar because the person who was going to come out and tie the rebar didn’t show up. (Laughter) And you have a concrete truck coming the next day, okay, you’ve got to tie the rebar, otherwise this thing is not going to work. And you figure it out. In a way you become… architects will never tell you this, but they’re massively jealous of furniture designers…

Amy: Oh, I know that, totally! (Laughter)

Frederico: You get to touch and feel the detail and the rounding and the connection and all of these things. 

Amy: Oh, it’s embodied material knowledge, yeah. 

Frederico: That’s why we love 3D modelling because that’s the closest we get… (Laughter) And so those instances where you get to go out in the field and you touch and you feel the material, it was like, I’m tying the rebar, maybe I designed something really stupid, it looked good on paper, this is not the way it should have been done. (Laughter) You gain a lot of that empathy, which is pretty wonderful. I like to tell the story because I think my main takeaway there, it was really how much designers, architects and interior designers, industrial designers, how much of those designers whose core job is to negotiate what I like to call the ‘human planet interface.’ Like that’s what we do. And if we don’t do it right, our planet suffers and people suffer. And that’s it. I was like, okay, I finally understood this thing that we do to be more so than just like, do I like this or do I not like this? It has purpose that hopefully lives on beyond my lifetime and that we should consider that. 

Amy: Yes!

Frederico: And so I kind of like re-fell in love with architecture all over again, in a very different way and maybe more mature way than I had when I was a teenager. So I just began to understand, I think design as generally one of the clearest manifestations of our own ingenuity as a species. And I also began to understand that as this thing were like… again, generally speaking, design can be really good, it can be a force for good, it can be an agent for good, for each other, for our planet as well…

Amy: Yes!

Frederico: And if we think about it that way, then there’s so much we could do. And going back to SHoP and all the stuff, we were like super tool nerds, doing all kinds of different things, doing really cool stuff. This sort of became the genesis of CASE, which was our first company, which was to say, look, we believe software as a whole will have a fundamental impact on how much design we can do. Because the general constraints that design had on the world was great, you’re a phenomenal designer, but your expertise is bound to whomever the highest bidder is to your one hour of availability. And so we can only do so much work and whatever project wins or whoever is paying us the most, that’s what we do. And so we said software should have the ability to just massively expand our ability to do design work. Not to do better… let’s just leave the qualifiers out of it, just to do more of it. If we consider the fact that most of our problems in the world today are environmental in nature, one should logically then see that maybe design can help some of those things, right? Like housing or access to water or all of these kinds of things. So more design by the experts that we do have should equal a good thing. And we fundamentally believe that software was a way for us to amplify ourselves. I think in a way we were right. Maybe I don’t think it’s hit the explosion that we had expected or maybe it has in other ways, but that’s genesis of CASE where we said, we believe that there’s now a whole new part of practice that has to do with software tooling for designers, architects, engineers, interior designers, builders, who just need to do more.  They need to do more and they need to do more and they need to do more. And that was the genesis of that company, I was 27/28 when we started that. 

Amy: So CASE was acquired by WeWork and then begins this essentially rocket launch, kind of, right? Like blast into, I don’t know, the scale of it is just mind-blowing. Can you talk to me about that chapter? 

Frederico: Yeah, so 2012/13 we start working for… CASE starts working for WeWork on some projects, mainly they had built a handful of locations, they were looking to figure out how to begin to scale that. They were looking at it, I think correctly, as architecture as product as opposed to architecture as a one-off. And maybe they didn’t have the language for it at the time, but what we kept saying was to say, look, the architecture as a product has been around for a very long time. You look at the Catholic Church, there’s a shape and a form and a function that becomes truly associated with let’s say a brand. And maybe some people won’t like that I say this, but then from there to Disney or McDonalds or retail and food and beverage, they do this all the time, hospitality as well. And so I think what you’re looking to do is to set up a roll-out, a retail roll-out type of mechanism as opposed to this sort of one-off development methodology that you’re using. And so we were helping them build some software tooling, just little optimizations for design to procurement or design to fabrication or these kinds of things that were necessary for them to just move faster. Those things were going well. We were growing, they were growing. 

And about a year or so into that relationship they had raised more money, they now had the money to expand from say 10 locations to a couple of hundred and they said, look, there’s not a lot of people out there who both know the industry and they also know technology and so why don’t you guys come here. And we’d gotten a couple of other offers in the past for acquisition. I think the reason why we ended up taking this one was because we weren’t going to be an attachment to the bigger thing. They came and said, you guys come do it and this was core business. They were sort of giving us the keys to the car and saying, here’s a bunch of money and we trust you to do this and to give them credit at the time, they gave us that trust. And so it was super fun and super interesting and totally crazy and all of those things…

Amy: Bananas. 

Frederico: Completely bananas. 

Amy: Like 500 locations in 30 different countries, 250 million dollars per year of FF&E, did I get those numbers right? 

Frederico: Yeah, that’s just FF&E, we did everything… a billion dollars of CapEx investment probably yearly. We did everything from upgrading elevators to HVAC systems to windows and then of course all of the interiors, which was the core of the product, which was all that fit and finish that happens at the end, which was really I think what made the product. But all of the architecture behind it, that allowed [1.00.00] that context to exist, also had to happen. 

Amy: On a personal level, did you just impress the fuck out of yourself, being able to pull that off? You can say it now, after… because you probably really did have to push yourself?

Frederico: Yeah…

Amy: Almost like an Olympian or something… because the speed of it was also intense. 

Frederico: Yeah, I don’t know, maybe I’m just really hard on myself. My general look back at my time at WeWork was that I could have done more. 

Amy: What? (Laughter) I can’t wrap my head around that. 

Frederico: Because… not more buildings, there’s always these little things that… and this is actually a great connector to why ultimately then we started Canoa. There were a lot of things we were doing really well. We had built an amazing team, we had scaled that team globally, we were building buildings in 30 different… not just 30 cities, it was 30 different languages, 30 different construction codes, right? We like to say we were breathing new life into buildings that had seen severe under-investment for decades and you’re basically giving them another 50 years of new life. So all of that felt really good. 

Amy: Yes!

Frederico: But there was also a lot of things that we just wanted to do and didn’t get to. And so I think you talk to a lot of people at WeWork that were part of the design and construction group will probably tell you that yes, of course, in context what happened was amazing. But we also all probably hold a little bit of that, like argh, it just could have been so much more because it was right there. And then the whole thing collapsed. And there’s so much more that could have been done and it ended up not happening. The company scaled so much, it just got torn apart, it just got spread so thin. Then of course mismanagement and everything else that came up and then the thing collapsed. But aside from what… you see other companies collapse, the core product here was actually fine. (Laughs) It’s all of the frothiness around it that was not…think about Apple retail, for example, or Disney Imagineering, then when you go buy door hardware, you don’t buy it one project at a time, you buy a years’ worth, and then you distribute because you get prices that are 70-80-90% lower than you would otherwise. And so as this machine was getting going, it ju st consumed all of this stuff. [1.05.00] But any of that material didn’t get routed properly, it would just get lost, right? And so now going back to when we say we could have done more, I’ve told this story once or twice before, but I’m in LA visiting a job site and we come off of an exit and on the side of the exit there’s an office chair. And I can tell you (laughs)…

Amy: You recognize it as one of your own. 

Frederico: I was like, that’s a WeWork chair. 

Amy: Oh no!

Frederico: And I was like, I did that, I put this piece of plastic on the side of the road and that pained me and going back again to this idea of our design decisions matter, of course they matter. We decided to bring this into the world and we should be responsible for it. And this was one of those moments where I was like, again, for as much good work as we were doing, this is where things clearly began to split at the seams. We’re not on top of things as much as maybe we think we are and we need to figure some things out. 

Amy: So I think this is a great place to talk about how Canoa comes into the picture? 

Frederico: Yeah, so 2018, throughout that whole year, I was at WeWork that whole year, but really throughout that year I was super burned out. I was beginning to have some health issues. On top of all of that at some point we were opening something like 15-20 buildings a month, globally. And so managing all of that, it was a huge, huge, huge amount of work. And then they were also trying to launch completely new products like WeLive and WeGrow and all of these other things. And so I kept saying, my core job is WeWork, I don’t want anything else, I don’t want anything else, I don’t want anything else. But because of the governance structure of the company wasn’t keeping up to date to how our product was being developed, I’d inevitably get pulled into lots of different things and meetings and conversations. Anyway, I wasn’t enjoying doing two/three jobs at once. I wasn’t doing as good a job as I wanted to and frankly a lot of what I was excited about, which was that creative freedom that comes with early stage, WeWork was no longer early stage. We had 12,000 employees. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Frederico: And so a lot of my time was meeting and spreadsheets and not really doing a lot of crafting, if you will. I think in the back of my mind I was like, maybe I’m sort of ready to… let’s call this rocket ship launched and let’s go build a new one. By the end of that year I decided to leave. I took a year off…

Amy: I’m happy to hear that, I feel like your nervous system probably needed a break. 

Frederico: I needed it, yeah, I needed to get healthy again, I was a bit of a mess from that perspective. 

Amy: Okay. 

Frederico: I learned that I’m a sprinter and not a marathoner. Whenever I sink my teeth into something [1.10.00] I just go and I go and I’m 110% on it until I can’t go anymore. (Laughs) And then I’ll rest for a while and then I can sprint again.

Amy: Good to know about yourself, yeah. 

Frederico: I think that period taught me that. So I took a year off and then right at the end of 2019, I was going really deep on two problems that I was super passionate about. One was small scale housing and the other one was really more on the tooling side, it was let’s say interior design tooling. One of my biggest takeaways after CASE and WeWork was just how incredibly poor the tooling is around interior design and FF&E in general. This idea that the tools we have to use are borrowed from either ground up construction or worse, they’re borrowed from just generic tooling that may or may not be 100% applicable to us. There’s all of these design fields that have very specific tooling, like Web is different than print, which is different than media, which is different than 3D and then interior design is like, oh, just use [Mero?].

Amy: Yeah. 

Frederico: It’s like the amount of money this industry moves and there’s so little, even tools like SketchUp or Revit, they weren’t made for this. So there’s limitations even there. And we felt it, of course, head on, this was one of… the story of that chair, like with WeWork, this is one of those examples. And so you have this very clear divide in the design world where as you go from the scale of the architecture to the human scale, that fit and finish scale that turns a blank room into a usable space, like a baby’s room or an office or whatever, that scale is just completely unattended. Completely unattended by tooling. And so super passionate about that. I was like okay, I’d done services (laughs) in my career, I had done product in my career, I was like, I need to try out this SaaS thing. I’m going to go sell software on a monthly subscription and see how that works. (Laughter) And that’s really how Canoa came about. I put aside the housing thing, housing is just a wonderful horrible mess of a problem. 

Amy: Indeed. 

Frederico: I was like, I’m not naïve enough to think that one company can really put too much of a dent in it, I think on a personal level I’m going to continue to follow it, but I think that where can I be most impactful? Okay, I’ve got to go back to tooling. I’ve got to get back to celebrating the craft that is design and hopefully build something that many, many, many people can do so that they can then go out into the world and do more design. 

Amy: So they can scale up their own services, their own good intentions. 

Frederico: Yeah, that’s right. Probably above all, one of the key takeaways was that in the world of interior design, so much of what we do is product research. 

Amy: Sourcing and specifying…

Frederico: There’s just so much of this. An architect can put up a wall and just create a performance specification that could be fulfilled by three/four different products, construct them in a very particular way. And to a designer it needs to be specific, more specific and say no, no, I don’t want the light to only just perform at this level of, say of lighting, I need it to be this light, I need it to be this, I need it to be this, because there’s of course an aesthetic requirement and all of those things as well. [1.15.00] So we felt like the fact that most of the tooling, if not all of the tooling that we use has no intrinsic database backing, there’s no concentrated way in which our software helps us manage all this information so we can design easier, it just felt like a gap. The core benefit of a Revit, if you will, in the architectural world, is that. Its core benefit is that it has a database inside of it that you can create a database for your building of like, here’s all the stuff that you’re building, there’s no equivalent in the world of interior design. 

There’s no equivalent tool in the world where I was like, I just need a database of all my stuff. I need a database of all the stuff that’s in this project, that’s in the design and we end up scheduling things, of course in excel and these kinds of things. And it’s all that manual work and manual labor that happens. And worse, all of that data has a shelf life of like 30 minutes because you call a thousand people, you get the information and next most of that information is now null and void and you have to do it again and you have to do it again and you have to do it again. And the only people who suffer are the designers who have to do rework and rework and rework and respecify and respecify and respecify because it’s just the natural order of things. And brands don’t love it, by the way, they kind of hate it too, but it’s kind of the way it is. 

Amy: Okay. 

Frederico: And so the objective with this was to say, if we’re going to start a tool today that wanted to make the process of interiors easier, in 2020, which was the time, what would that look like? And of course the answer has to be different than if you were to ask that question in 1990 or 1980, which is where most of the most popular tools we use today were founded. 

Amy: Yes. 

Frederico: Right? So 30 years on, technology affords you all kinds of different opportunities than it would have 30 years ago. So what are those things? So we tend to bias, focusing on the things that will really make us an accessory, or a complement to those core tools, not because we say… look, we eventually will get there as well, but what are the things you cannot do with those tools today? And that’s really where, the complement ends up being a real benefit. 

Amy: And from what I understand, that database is continually growing and it’s rich with all of the information that a designer would need to know about the products they’re specifying, including lead times, material specifications, shipping, carbon footprint, and so then having that information at their fingertips and then stored within let’s say their design plan or their mood board, helps them make more informed choices. And it updates on its own, right, so they don’t have to keep tracking this information down, it stays current, which is amazing. And then (laughs) these are also shareable, so you can get client feedback or you can collaborate and all of this information is contained within. What are the limits? 

Frederico: I mean I think you hit the nail on the head on let’s say the core tension and opportunity that we tried to go after and we like to say it’s the moment a designer and a product meet. A link is established. And so our only job is to make sure that that link is stable and it continues to exist. So we say, what are the most popular tools that interior designers use today? You ask somebody and they’ll be like, I don’t know, SketchUp, it’s Pinterest, bar none, because when they take a step back and they’re like, well actually the first tool that I open up in the morning, other than maybe Instagram, is Pinterest. So what have they done really well and what they’ve done really well is that they have really honed in on what we call the, our core need to curate the world. I need to save things, but I need to save my things, not somebody else’s, right? 

Amy: Yeah. (Laughs)

Frederico: And then it just stays there and then of course you use that for inspiration, you use that for projects, great. What this teaches us is that the world in 2024, the world of the internet (laughs) [1.20.00], and I hate that I have to say it that way, but our industry is that far behind, has so much wonderful information out there. There’s just so much content, there’s so many brands, there’s so many websites, there’s just so much. And our design tools don’t tie into any of it. 

Amy: Yup. 

Frederico: Our design tools are desktop software that don’t even know the internet exists. And so what we said is why would we have this concept where I’m doing all this stuff and then I have a materials library over there and I can go to it physically and then I can come back and then if I created a link there, that link is immediately severed because there’s no… like this is where technology can actually help. Don’t make the renderings for me. 

Amy: Yeah. (Laughs)

Frederico: Who cares, that’s the fun stuff. Help me say that if I’m interested in this such-and-such product or paint or finish or whatever, and I am evaluating it next to three other ones and I’ve decided to bring that into my design space, yeah, retain a link and keep me updated on what’s happening with those products over time so I don’t have to keep having to go out and fetch this. So I’m not going to stumble over myself when I go to make my final presentation and I didn’t even know that that product is now discontinued and what I just presented to you, sorry, I’m going to have to make a change here and this is why we’re browser based as well, it’s being in the browser and being connected into the internet gives us tremendous opportunity. And so what was our first integration? Pinterest, it’s like yeah, bring in your Pinterest, Pinterest is wonderful. And as you go from collecting things from the world and you need to design things, it’s okay, we need to bring reality into these things. And so we help you go walk through that journey, but you asked, what are the limits? I don’t know. But what’s happened now that’s really cool is that we want to get, let’s call it unstructured data from the world. Pinterest and things like that. 

What’s happening now that’s really cool is that brands are like, that’s awesome, but we want the highest level, cleanest data and so we’ve over the last years, we’ve been bringing on, what we call ‘publishers,’ which are brands, that actually publish their own data in their catalogues, and so what we can help you do is to say, you bring in a chair and we can identify that chair. We now have all of the information from the brand directly. And so now all of a sudden your materials library is now a digital materials library that is real time, from the brand directly. Not from anybody else. And as that chair updates or doesn’t update or whatever, you should be notified of that. And that’s as simple as that. So our objective is that of course we would have all of the brands on there, which maybe is vast, but why not? All the brands, all the paints, all the finishes, all of the surfacing, all of the lighting, so that you are able to focus more time on deciding what is appropriate for your project, for your client, for that space and not copying and pasting data that doesn’t really help anybody. That’s where we feel technology is really should be focused on, and that’s where the tooling, like we talked about tooling and craft making, this is a better knife, it’s just a better knife, but we still need to cut, you still need to make the sushi, I don’t know. (Laughter) Use a better knife. 

Amy: Yeah, it’s auto sharpening. (Laughter)

Frederico: So our only job to makers is to give you as much information, as high fidelity information as we can, as early as possible in the process so that you can make better decisions and you can iterate further and you can reach that nth iteration as opposed to only two or three. And that’s it. [1.25.00]

Amy: So you are like… I know there’s a lot of panic around AI usurping designers’ jobs, but this is the opposite of that. Instead of taking and automating what designers do, you’re just automating, not the part of them that makes them a designer, you’re automating the parts that suck up their time, that make them not a designer, so that they can go out into the world and do more of their good work as a designer. They can scale that up more effectively, more efficiently, make it more pleasant. 

Frederico: Yeah. 

Amy: And make better choices around sustainability. 

Frederico: And make better choices. So many of the choices we make as designers… I had a professor that was like design is like research, you just keep going, it never ending, right? 

Amy: Yeah. 

Frederico: And there’s a lot of truth to that in the sense that most projects are only defined by some time boundary, which is what the budget allows and the time on it, but you could probably keep going and just continue to make it better. A lot of that has to do with just as the cyclical process of design happens, you unearth, let’s say information which then yields opportunities that maybe would not have been clear two steps before and it has nothing to do with being a good designer or a bad designer, it just has to do with how quickly can you get to the core of that optimization and optimization and optimization and optimization and we feel there is a gross amount of our time today that is wasted, frankly, with things that technology could do an incredibly good job at, whereas our time to make judgements…

Amy: Yes! Yes!

Frederico: Can be freed up to make more judgements because if we get to a project that allows us to make a hundred decisions deep versus 10 decisions deep, that will just be a better project. 

Amy: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it is sort of like steroids for your good judgement. 

Frederico: Yeah, that’s it. 

Amy: Well steroids has a bad connotation… (Laughter) Super fruits… 

Frederico: It’s maybe what’s happened in many other professions, I don’t know. I think that there’s maybe music, for example, or even writing today, yeah, machines can make music now, cool, and they have been able to for some time. And that’s okay, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. I’m not going to have a moral discussion about this. What we do know is that the best creations have a time and a place and a context and most, or our ability, let’s say, to make those things, to create those things, I think is one of those things that really makes us most  human, the whole concept of creation is to make something that didn’t exist before, which it may or may not be just a reshaping of what existed in the past what really connects us to anything that is design related, even engineering solutions, all these kinds of things, is that there’s a problem that needs to be solved, that problem is being solved by a particular team in a particular context of time with a particular budget. All of that creates a particular solution that is unique and it’s wonderful in and of itself. And I’m not sure you can predict every possible iteration of these things. I consider myself, like I say, I’m a tool builder, so technology, I’m not afraid of it. I think it’s wonderful, I think it’s quirky, I think it makes lots of bad stuff. (Laughter) But I also think it’s very clear where technology can help us and where it can’t. But if we need to redevelop a town or something like that, where real humans come in and there’s real environmental issues and we want it to last 300 years and all of these kinds of things, yeah, I’d much prefer the judgement of some really good thinkers who are going to consider all of those variables in a very human way. 

Amy: I think I’m right there with you and I think that was a beautiful way to sharpen the pencil, put a real point on it. This has been really, really interesting, thank you so much and thank you for taking me all the way through some of the more fascinating chapters of your life, I’ve really enjoyed learning how you think and how you build. I’m excited for Canoa, I think it seems like a very valuable, potentially game changing tool in the design industry that could cut down on a lot of waste, expand a lot of good judgement and make people’s creativity stretch even further and further. 

Frederico: Amazing. 

Amy: Thanks. 

Frederico: Thank you so much for having me, this was fun. 

Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: Complete our listener survey at teh link in the description. Share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed.For a transcript of this episode and more about Federico, including links and images of his work, head to our website. Cleverpodcast. com. While you're there, check out our resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners, and sponsors, and sign up for our free sub stack newsletter, which includes news announcements and a bonus Q and a from our guests. If you like clever, we could really use your support. You can share Clevver with your friends, leave us a five star rating or a kind review, support our sponsors, and definitely hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. You can find us Us at Clever Podcast, and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is hosted and produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Mark Zurowinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anoushka Stefan, and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround Podcast Network. Visit surroundpodcasts. com to discover more of the architecture and design industry's premier shows.

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Federico Negro at ICFF, Photo Credit: NeuSpace

Canoa Process Shot, Courtesy of Canoa 2024 

Canoa Mood Board, Courtesy of Canoa

Canoa at ICFF, Credit to NeuSpace

Canoa at ICFF, Credit to NeuSpace

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Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.

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