Imran Khoja

I’m thrilled to officially announce our $3M seed investment in Propel People, a company we built inside the 1848 Ventures studio to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the #construction industry today: the skilled #labor shortage. For small and medium-sized contractors, hiring isn't just a challenge. It's the number one threat to their growth, profitability, and safety. With 94% of contractors struggling to find qualified workers, it’s clear that traditional hiring methods aren't built for the trades. That’s why we built Propel People. It’s a mobile-first, AI-powered hiring platform designed for how construction actually works: in the field. By leveraging smart candidate ranking, instant #SMS-based screening, and a fully #bilingual interface, Propel helps contractors build great crews faster and more efficiently. I’m also thrilled to formally announce that industry veteran Dexter Bachelder is at the helm as CEO. Having worked with Dexter and the team over the last few months, we've already seen the impact of his leadership. His 25 years of experience scaling construction tech companies will be instrumental as Propel People enters this initial stage of growth. This investment reinforces our core thesis at 1848 Ventures: building AI-native companies that solve fundamental pain points for the #SMBs that form the backbone of our economy. A huge congratulations to Dexter and the entire Propel People team on this milestone. We are incredibly proud to partner with you to support the people who build our world. Read the full announcement below. #constructiontech #venturecapital #seedfunding #ai #skilledtrades #smb

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Boards are supposed to help founders. Over the past 19 years, I've watched many trap them instead. As companies scale, many boards turn from insight to oversight and stop doing what founders actually need: Help making big, hard decisions. Early boards tend to be small, the board members are close to the business and highly invested in it. They argue from first principles. They help founders think. Later-stage boards often look more impressive on paper - they have more independent directors, committees and process. Somewhere along the way, collective problem solving gets replaced with oversight. The board shifts from helping the CEO make better decisions to monitoring decisions that have already been made. Strategy discussions get safer, real debate gets rarer and meetings become more about risk management than judgment. This usually coincides with the introduction of more professional board members. For better or worse, they often optimize for governance, optics, and liability management. That’s their job. But it’s not always what the company needs in moments of real uncertainty. Then, CEOs stop using them as thought partners. That’s a problem. So what should founders do? A few principles that help: • Keep the board as small as you can for as long as you can • Add directors for new insight they bring, not what boxes they check • Treat board seats like senior hires, not trophies • Design meetings for debate rather than reporting • Be explicit about when you want input vs approval Good boards should improve decision-making. If your board isn’t making you think harder, it’s probably not doing its job.

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I was on a call last week with a CEO who’s built one of the more successful consumer companies of the past decade. She mentioned something that stuck with me: a lot of her peers are getting pitched by vertical AI startups, but don’t actually know how to tell which ones are real. Fair question. The demos all look good. The models all work. So how do you separate signal from noise? I told her to use the “pull test.” Ask yourself: if this AI product disappeared tomorrow, would your business feel it — or just move on? In vertical AI, durability isn’t about better technology. It’s about whether the product has made itself impossible to remove. Here’s what to look for: - Is the product saving time — or eliminating roles entirely? The value shouldn’t be “10 hours saved per week.” It should be headcount never hired, decisions that happen in minutes instead of days, or revenue that can’t exist without it. - Is it a tool you use — or infrastructure you depend on? If it lives in a tab someone has to remember to open, it’s optional. The products that work become invisible and essential. A pilot only makes sense once the problem is already painful and the workflow is well-defined. At that point, the best way to know is to run it in a real environment. Not a demo — a pilot. After ~60 days, you’ll know whether turning it off breaks something. Model quality is no longer the bottleneck. For investors, the real diligence question is whether this product rewrites the economics of the workflow it touches.

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