Innovation, Built World Maintenance, and Infrastructure: A Q&A With Turf Advisory Founder and Managing Partner Lisa Diaz

A woman wearing a green Turf Advisory hard hat sits in a red chair holding a beagle on her lap.
Lisa Diaz with Turf Advisory’s late canine mascot, Wilma.

As our Venture West Conference approaches, we had the opportunity to sit down with Lisa Diaz, founder and managing partner of Turf Advisory, to discuss innovations and investments in construction tech and infrastructure, as well as her tips for startups looking to connect with VCs and customers.

In the eight years since the founding of Turf Advisory, a business development advisory firm focused on smart cities, infrastructure and raising capital, it’s become hard to imagine a world in which Diaz didn’t enter the construction industry. Yet, that was very nearly the case.

As she tells it, after 35 years working on Wall Street, including 23 years as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, Diaz was in search of the next chapter in her career. Then, she missed a train at Grand Central Station in New York City.

“There’s always these tourists doing tours of Grand Central, and I kind of decided to go along,” she recounted. “And I learned two very important pieces (of information) which changed the course of my life professionally.”

The first piece of information was that in 1975 Jackie Kennedy Onassis was instrumental in saving Grand Central Station from being demolished and replaced with a skyscraper designed by modernist architect Marcel Breuer. The second piece of information was a story about the conservation of the famous constellation mural on the ceiling of the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. After decades of pollution buildup, including a lot of tobacco smoke, conservationists undertook the arduous task of restoring the ceiling nearly thirty years ago, leaving behind a small rectangle that was never cleaned.

The darkened rectangle is still visible, a testament to just how dirty the structure had become, which, in turn, speaks to the built world’s potential longevity.

“I always loved Grand Central and I was very intrigued by these stories, especially the army of construction workers who restored the station,” she added. “So I sat on the train going home and did some research. By the time I reached my station, I had decided that the next chapter in my career would be construction.”

After that train ride home, what did you learn that sold you on jumping into the construction industry?

Frankly, I’d never thought about construction. It was not my world, but I had a thirst for something more permanent and physical. When you work on Wall Street, it’s all transactions captured for a second on a machine, but there is nothing permanent and lasting like in the built space.

A woman stands in front of an electric sign on a city street.
Lisa Diaz stands in front of a sign highlighting Turf Elevate, an offshoot of Turf Advisory, in New York City.

So, I looked at the size of the market. The TAM (total addressable/available market) of construction is about 6% of the GDP, which is a big number, so that checked one box. Next, I found that construction was—or construction is—an industry with very little technology and innovation. According to McKinsey, the least digitized or tech-powered industry is agriculture and the second-least is construction. I thought there were lots of opportunities for innovation, so that checked the second box.

The third box was that margins are very low in construction. For example, in commercial real estate construction, margins are 4% to 5%; and in civil construction, it’s better at about 8% to 9%. But, that’s still not a very attractive rate of return compared to the current money market funds that yield around 5% for little risk and not much effort.

I prefer low margin businesses because small improvements can yield disproportionate financial returns, and this looked like a great opportunity to enter a new industry armed with a fresh perspective that would let me see new ways of conducting business. At Goldman Sachs, you were always trained to go into new industries and sectors; although, none of my former friends from Goldman went to work in construction. So, that’s how I launched into this career and it’s been an interesting journey. I’ve been at it for about eight years.

With so many verticals of construction that are already well-established, what is it about startups that draws you in?

Innovation.

At Goldman, I spent a lot of time studying innovation and we spent a lot of time as an organization trying to invest in companies that adopted innovation effectively to grow their revenues and increase margins. However, often in large established companies—and that’s what construction is—one of the best ways to innovate is to work with smaller players because they have the dexterity and the flexibility to do things differently.

The startup community attracted me because they are unconventional thinkers looking at established business practices from a fresh perspective. When you’re in a major corporation, there’s this dilemma of if you change things then you might make mistakes or adversely impact an established or cash cow business; so it’s easier to stay the course. It’s kind of like the difference between a supertanker versus a sailboat. The sailboats are the startup. They’re able to move in a more agile way to respond and change, but are also more vulnerable if a storm kicks in.

What makes for good innovation or, to use your analogy, a sturdy sailboat?

I don’t believe in technology for technology’s sake. In order to actually have a successful startup, you need to make sure you solve a real pain point for the people who can give you business. I’m a big fan of the d.school at Stanford and how they innovate, which was inspired by Steve Jobs’ approach to technology and human-centered design. My view is that if it’s good enough for Steve Jobs, then it’s good enough for me. Innovators at the d.school don’t come with an “I know better than you” attitude. Instead, they do product research, test theses, and iterate solutions.

When you go to a class, everybody sits in the same place because, by human nature, that’s what’s comfortable. We do what’s comfortable, so the only way you’re going to walk in a different direction or try something new is if something is painful for you and if addressing that pain is going to allow you to take a different approach.

I know there’s a lot of talk about pain points; it’s the big buzzword across the board. At Turf, we develop theses and insights by conducting primary market research with people in the AEC industry that also helps us figure out if there is, in fact, a problem. Our best intelligence comes from having boots on the ground, so we spend as much time as possible on jobsites. Then, in order to solve the problem and implement new tech, you need to make a change that improves the quality of life of the person having to make the change.

Once a startup has identified a problem and proposed a product to help, how do you determine which startups are viable options to take on for either investing or business development?

We have different theses or information we come up with from talking to thought leaders, and then there are some themes that they are looking to solve.

For example, there’s a company we work with called Steelbeam that actually just won the Demo Day competition at BuiltWorlds’ FinTech Conference. The thing that attracted me to Steelbeam is that I’m a margin person. I love margins. So, in construction, as I talked about, the margins are about 4%. One of the things Steelbeam’s Founder and CEO Noah Reneau talks about—and I think, part of the reason he won the Demo Day—is that he has a playbook in order to improve margins by 100 basis points, which is music to my ears.

In the current construct, a project manager is asked to run the project, build things, do delivery management, plus look at the P&L. That’s a lot of work for one person, right? So that’s issue number one.

Issue number two is that you should be able to look across all of your construction projects to predict cost or point out margins so that your company is benefiting from the teams’ collected wisdom. Procore is the market leader for this type of software and they’re fantastic, but their financial program is set up to be single-project without the ability to seamlessly analyze the financial data on one platform.

As a finance person who thinks with a margin framework, I thought this was a major pain point. Meanwhile, Noah was a product manager on various construction sites and was frustrated by his lack of profit visibility. Turf Advisory met Noah and the problem resonated with me, and more importantly, our market research indicated it resonated with project managers and CFOs. And, there wasn’t a solution in the space.

So, that’s how we back into finding a company, but it’s an iterative process.


A woman wearing a white hard hat stands in front of Niagara Falls with the buildings in the far background.
Lisa Diaz onsite in Niagara Falls, N.Y. at a Meet the Primes session for Buffalo Bills Highmark Stadium.

How do you advise startups to find customers and clients once the concept is off the ground and a product is created?

A lesson I learned at Goldman Sachs is that this is an internal and external process, and the most important thing is to find someone within your target organization to be your advocate. At Goldman, I was the fixer, which meant that if there was an angry client, I’d have to figure out how to get them back on our team.

My playbook was really always the same: I would start by trying to figure out the pain point. People have different complaints. They’re not one-size-fits-all, right? So, you find that person—a project manager or CFO or someone else who is frustrated by the problem you are trying to solve—and develop a relationship with them. They tell you the pain point, improve your solution with their suggestions, and together you fix the problem. If your technology works, they’ll tell other people and make internal introductions that move you from being solution No. 20 to solution No. 1.

Construction technology adoption is exactly the same because you can’t get someone else to buy an idea. You have to work towards internal and organic promotion, so it needs both an external and internal transaction.

What advice would you give to startups coming to a BuiltWorlds Demo Day on crafting a good pitch?

You have to tell a good story. I went to this presentation many moons ago that really impacted me about how, as human beings, we like to think we’re always rational and use the logical part of our brains. A professor at Stanford did a study with an MRI to actually test what happens in people’s brains. It turned out that the frontal part of your brain, which is the emotional part of the brain, is actually where buying decisions are made.

When we were working with Noah, I asked him, “Okay, so what’s the story?” He told me about his time playing football in college under a very famous coach, Mike Leach, showed me some pictures, and tied four main things you need to do in football to get touchdowns. I said, “Wow, that’s such a great story, now let’s draw the parallel between touchdowns and construction.”

Noah’s story was memorable, and I would say spend some time really thinking about what makes you memorable. How are people going to differentiate you from the crowd? The startups BuiltWorlds bring in are all very deserving. It’s like when you’re applying to college. There’s lots of deserving people but how do they pick the class? In part, by telling a good story and capturing imagination, because it’s that deeper dive that gets you admitted into university or on the short list to talk to a VC.

I’d also recommend practicing your pitch relentlessly.

What tech innovations or trends are you looking forward to digging into at Venture West in April?

One of my big visions, or missions, when I left Goldman Sachs was to build America back in a more cost effective way. The numbers show that almost 40% of our investment dollars are not used in a productive way, which hurts my heart because I’m a taxpayer and so are you. So that’s problem number one.

The bigger problem is we don’t spend enough time on operations and maintenance. We build a cool bridge, highway or subway system, but then do we really take care of it? If you can fix a small pothole, it’s a high return on invested capital. If you let it grow to be a crater, it’s a disaster area. It’s the same thing with our infrastructure.

So, I’m really looking for companies that are able to help with operations and maintenance, who are going to be able to say, “How do I use that forty percent wasted dollar and extend the life cycle of our assets?”

I’m interested in this framework for infrastructure projects—bridges, roads, tunnels—but also smaller infrastructure, namely elevators.

What about elevators makes them a good asset for investors focused on maintenance?

As a consumer, there are two places you notice in a building: you notice the lobby and you notice the elevator. Everybody goes into the lobby and everybody goes into the elevator, so it’s an important asset and branding opportunity for the real estate owner.

Elevators last between 20 to 30 years, which is a very big difference. If I’m the owner of this asset, I want it to last 30 years. So, it’s the same theme of “how do you make that investment dollar go further?” It’s being able to know when to fix the small repair and maintain your asset before it becomes a huge disaster that needs to be replaced.

Why should startups and investors come to Venture West?

I think Venture West does a fantastic job of curating a community of people who care about the topic. Half the battle is finding people who have similar goals, which is the type of community that BuiltWorlds has created at Venture West.

BuiltWorlds is good at identifying the stakeholders, getting them around the table and facilitating a conversation. So, when we talked earlier about pain points and doing market research, Venture West is a great place to do it. You can walk around, grab a coffee with someone and ask them questions, which will make you a more informed investor, innovator and change-agent.

Lisa Diaz will be speaking on a panel titled “The Role of VC in Rebuilding Aging Infrastructure” at the 2025 Venture West Conference from April 8-10, 2025, in San Francisco, Calif.