Rick is a San Francisco Bay Area native, a social entrepreneur, and a pioneer in affordable housing construction. He has more than four decades’ experience building affordable and market rate housing across California. In 1978 he helped create Eden Housing, which builds affordable homes for workforces and formerly homeless Californians. In the early 1980s, he and visionary housing leader Don Terner teamed up to establish BRIDGE Housing, which builds homes for families of modest means who have been priced out of the market. These remain two of the most successful non-profit housing corporations in the nation. In 1988 he founded Holliday Development, and went on to become a leader in leveraging the benefits of private development to create vibrant, sustainable communities the the Bay Area and beyond. Today he is founder and CEO of Factory OS, an ambitious effort to ease the housing challenge by scaling the off site production of multifamily housing. Factory OS is a new approach to housing construction, integrating the design and build processes, powered by local union labor and pioneering in-house research and innovation. Having successfully developed the largest prefab home construction project in San Francisco history, Rick knows firsthand how powerful this technology can be.

Samidha Thakral is Vice President at Lendlease Development where she is responsible for the acquisition and development of projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to joining Lendlease, Ms. Thakral was Development Director at Equity Residential and Director at Hines. During this time, she led the groundup development of 1,400 apartment units in San Francisco, 6 million square feet of office and over 500 condominium units valued at over $4 billion. She currently also serves as Vice Chair of the ULI San Francisco Innovation Council that brings together leaders in Real Estate, technology and Venture Capital. Ms. Thakral has a Master’s in business administration from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s in Architecture from the Sushant School of Art & Architectu

Nick Milestone has joined the Softwood Lumber Board to support its mission in the areas of strategic partnerships and adoption of mass timber construction in the United States. He is a veteran of the European and United Kingdom mass timber markets and the current chairman of the Timber Research and Development Trade Association (TRADA). Milestone, most recently director of mass timber at Katerra, was also the director of offsite manufacturing at the William Hare Group and the managing director of B&K Structures, the largest mass timber construction business in the U.K.

Shaina Doar is Head of Sidewalk Urban Systems at Sidewalk Labs. Most recently, Shaina served as the Chief of Staff to the Mayor’s Economic Council under Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. In this role, she set the city’s economic development agenda and managed fiscal policy. Prior to her role in the Mayor’s Office, Shaina was the Director of the Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs, Mayor Emanuel’s economic development plan for the City of Chicago. Before working with the City of Chicago, Shaina was an Engagement Manager in McKinsey & Company’s Chicago office. As a Public Sector Fellow, she led work in the public and social sector offices on a variety of strategic and reform topics including economic development, higher education, and infrastructure. She holds an MBA from Northwestern University and a B.S. from the University of Notre Dame. Shaina lives in Chicago with her husband and two daughters. She enjoys traveling, running, and skiing, and is proud of her Minnesota heritage.

Curtis Rodgers is an industrial technologist and investor at Brick & Mortar Ventures, with six years of construction operations experience across defense, industrial, infrastructure, and commercial markets at both Kiewit and McCarthy Construction. Curtis founded The Society for Construction Solutions (SCS) in 2014, contributed to the NASA Centennial 3D Printed Habitat Challenge, and participated as a lecturer for the US Dept. of Energy's Project Leadership Institute.