Built for the businesses that build everything else

My wife has been a general contractor and project manager for over ten years. She joined a small construction company when they had about ten employees — today they have over a hundred.

Every evening she'd come home and tell me about her day. The projects they won. The customers they were building for. The crews they were coordinating. The material orders, the schedules, the hundred small decisions that keep a job moving. She loves what she does.

But she'd also tell me about the problems. A subcontractor's insurance expired and nobody caught it until the job site audit. A change order that fell through the cracks because the update was buried in a text thread. A foreman who couldn't get a straight answer on tomorrow's tasks because the information lived in three different places — a spreadsheet, someone's email, and someone else's memory.

These weren't complicated problems. They were visibility problems. Alignment problems. The kind of issues that happen when a fast-growing company outgrows its tools but the enterprise software is too expensive, too complex, or too English-only for a bilingual crew.

I started writing down the patterns. Every issue she described, I'd draft how automation or better information architecture could prevent it. Over time, those drafts became a system. That system became Portal.