Chad Kouse
Chief Technology Officer, StartBuild
Two decades building the technology and cost database behind StartBuild — the systems that turn any house plan and a ZIP code into a localized, line-item construction estimate.
- 20 yrs
- Building the StartBuild platform
- 10–12×
- Cost-data refreshes per year
- 50 + Canada
- States & provinces localized
About Chad
Chad Kouse is the technologist behind StartBuild. For roughly 20 years he has designed and built the company’s cost-to-build platform — the estimating engine, the cost database, and the tools customers use every day. Where Rob’s three decades in construction shape what StartBuild measures, Chad’s career in software shapes how it gets measured: reliably, repeatably, and at scale across all 50 states and Canada.
An engineer’s foundation
Chad is a software engineer by training — a Computer Systems graduate of Miami University — with a long track record of building and scaling real products. He co-founded and served as CTO of TuneWiki, a social music-and-lyrics platform used around the world, and has shipped mobile, web, and large-scale data systems throughout his career. That background is why StartBuild’s numbers hold up: behind every report is a genuine engineering system, not a spreadsheet.
What he builds at StartBuild
Chad owns StartBuild’s technology end to end. He built the cost engine that prices a plan by foundation, finish level, square footage, and location; he maintains the cost database the team refreshes 10–12 times a year so estimates track real market prices; and he designs the controls that let customers adjust any line item to match their builder’s quotes. He’s also the architect of StartBuild’s deliberate human-in-the-loop workflow — software does the heavy lifting, and an experienced estimator reviews every report before it ships.
“Anyone can put a number on a screen. The hard part — the part I’ve spent twenty years on — is making that number trustworthy: the same plan and ZIP priced the same way every time, and updated as the market moves.”
Areas of expertise
- Cost-estimation engines
- Construction cost-data pipelines
- Full-stack & platform engineering
- Mobile & web applications
- Scaling data systems