Nick Latty

General Manager

Backstory

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Christchurch. It was always known as the garden city — pretty English, conservative, a little bit snobby back then. But it’s come a long way. After the earthquakes in the early 2010s, it’s now one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, very popular with young families and professionals moving here for the lifestyle and the entirely new, freshly built CBD.

What did your parents do, and what did you take from them?

My dad was a secondary school teacher — taught geography at high schools and also English as a second language to Korean students. From him I took his ability to connect with people, his generosity, and a love of nature, the mountains, and getting outside. A sense of adventure, and not taking life too seriously. My mum was a GP and is the rock of the family. She taught me how to work hard, day in and day out, and she’s got a dry sense of humour and doesn’t sugarcoat! I love that about Mum.

What did you spend the most time on as a kid?

Sport, mostly — cricket, rugby, basketball, and a lot of skiing. I had a lot of energy back in those days which I put into partying and breaking rules. We had a tight group of mates who’d go on adventures over to the West Coast or out on Banks Peninsula on surf trips, exploring the best parts of the South Island with a no-regrets, don’t-look-back approach to life. I was also always into computers, especially in my early teens — we were an Apple family, and I was a computer nerd for a while there.

What did you do before TakeoffQS?

I’ve got a complicated CV. After uni I did a bunch of things that were really about experiencing the world — international development with Maasai groups, a stint as a commercial lawyer, building my first (fairly average) online web store around 2013. I worked for Salesforce in London for two years as a legal contractor on data privacy, then spent five years in the public service doing community engagement, research, and policy.

How did you end up at TakeoffQS?

As soon as I started at Agentic Intelligence I was working on BuildFoundry and TakeoffQS, and I was immediately drawn to the construction industry. I’d had a taste of it before — labouring for a mate’s construction company, and working as a lawyer on leaky building litigation at the Weathertight Homes Tribunal. Most of my mates from high school ended up as builders, tradies, plumbers, so I’ve always had building chat around me, even on those South Island surf trips. Getting back around builders and talking about building things, I immediately felt at home.

What I care about

What’s broken in estimating that you want to fix?

The same set of building plans gets processed upward of forty-plus times. It’s slowing down construction, slowing down people getting into their homes, slowing down companies building more homes — ultimately slowing down the whole economy. It’s a pain point we’ve heard loud and clear from right across the industry, and the signal’s been so clear that this is ready to be disrupted. That’s why we’re here.

What do you look for in the companies we work with?

Companies that want to go all in and do something bold, disruptive, and industry-changing. Innovative ones that want to move fast, work with us, and build strong partnerships. Ultimately this is about people — the tech helps, but it’s people from TakeoffQS working with people from the companies we serve. We don’t want to lose that human touch, and we want people’s experience of us to be sincere.

A mistake you see builders make repeatedly?

The current manual processes lead to errors — wrong calculations, measurements that don’t add up, estimates that come out too high, too low, or too late. As a result they miss the job and lose out. TakeoffQS is here to fix that: supporting estimators to do their best work, freeing them up for the high-value stuff like pricing and checking quotes from suppliers and subtrades, and automating the parts that eat up all the time.

What gets you fired up about this work?

Seeing the progress we’re making and how fast we’re developing the product, alongside the team of A-players I’m working with. Just making that progress with these people, and ultimately building something that’ll be genuinely disruptive for the industry, in the best possible sense.

What values matter most in how we build TakeoffQS?

Trust — with the people and customers we work with. Speed and innovation — staying at the cutting edge, not looking around too much at what competitors are doing, just staying focused on what we’re doing. Integrity — solving real problems with real companies while maintaining our cadence and keeping the industry’s trust.

The human bits

Favourite mantra in a work context?

“I’m not worried” — said very confidently, usually when I’m actually a bit worried.

Secret skill?

Going from knowing absolutely nothing about something to obsessing over it 24 hours a day for months on end, until I’ve built an understanding that can ‘appear’ quite deep.

Dinner with anyone, alive or dead?

Sir Edmund Hillary — to get a real dose of that craggy, brilliant Kiwi persona and ask him what it was actually like to be first up Everest with Tenzing Norgay.

What can you nerd out on for hours?

Distance running. I was a keen marathon runner through my late twenties and into my thirties, and I’ve obsessed over every tiny detail — nutrition, carbs, sodium, shoes, pacing, training techniques, strength work, mindfulness. Spreadsheets, podcasts, books, self-coaching, the works. Full nerd mode.