The People Behind Built
REAL NAMES. REAL STANDING.
Built is made by real people you can look up — journalists, editors, product people, and industry veterans who understand the built world, inside and out. Want to know how a story gets from idea to published piece? That’s spelled out on our Editorial Process page.
THE EDITORIAL DESK
Frank Kalman 
Content Manager, Editor of Built
Medill-trained journalist (Northwestern) with 15-plus years turning messy, technical industries into something people read and use. Runs Built day to day: assigns it, writes it, edits it, and kills the stuff that doesn’t earn its place. Former trade-magazine editor and financial ghostwriter; current believer that clarity is uncomfortable and worth it anyway.
Christopher Magee
Copy Editor
Career copy editor who came up on a newspaper copy desk before years editing for trade magazines and degree-program marketing. A master of AP and Chicago style who also knows exactly when to break them, so a writer’s voice survives the edit. He’s the last set of eyes; if a typo or limp sentence sneaks through, he takes it personally. English and history out of Valparaiso University.
THE WRITERS
Elisa Silverman
Brand Journalist
AEC and industrial-systems writer who’s been a contributor to Built for five-plus years, with bylines placed in technical publications like Control Engineering and Offshore Engineer. She specializes in turning subject-matter expertise into content that holds up in high-stakes B2B sales. A law-and-tech background (philosophy at Brandeis, JD from Emory) means she can take complicated, regulated, easy-to-get-wrong material and make it clear without dumbing it down.
Sarah Lindenfeld Hall
Contributing Journalist
Longtime journalist with decade-plus experience on North Carolina news desks before going freelance. She now reports for brands and major outlets alike, with bylines stretching from Fast Company to NBC News. She covers construction and the future of work, and she treats every blog post as a reported story: she interviews sources, does the heavy digging, and writes to inform, with a focus on clarity over spin. Music and history degrees from the University of Virginia.
Emily Beyda
Contributing Writer
Novelist and journalist (MFA in fiction from Texas State, comparative literature from NYU) who’s written for Built since 2018, interviewing construction and design pros about the world beneath the surface of the built environment. She’s the one who finds the human story inside a technical subject. Living proof that construction-tech writing doesn’t have to read like a spec sheet.
THE INDUSTRY EXPERTS
Usman Shuja
CEO, Bluebeam; Member of the Executive Board & Chief Division Officer, Build & Construct, the Nemetschek Group
Runs Bluebeam (Harvard MPA, Kellogg MBA); former Honeywell software exec, AI-company founder, and DARPA advisor. When Built publishes a real point of view on where construction and AI are headed, it’s grounded in someone steering a software company through that shift.
Luke Prescott
Product Manager
Spent four years running commercial construction projects — real subcontracting, automated daylighting systems. He’s since built product at Procore and Bluebeam. So when a Built piece describes a jobsite workflow, Luke’s the one who can tell you whether that’s how the work really happens or how a marketer imagines it happens.
Don Jacob
Chief Innovation Officer
On the original team that started Bluebeam in 2002; spent 17 years as CTO before moving to R&D and innovation. Holds the line on anything that touches the platform or the underlying tech. If a claim about how the software works wouldn’t survive his read, it doesn’t run. He holds 22 patents, and he started his career writing software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is a tough one to top at a dinner party. Computer science at Cal State Northridge; MBA from Pepperdine.
Stephen Wayne Smith
Director of Partnerships
Builds Bluebeam’s integration ecosystem across AEC and construction tech, with a background in reality capture and LiDAR (Leica Geosystems). Translation: he knows the wider tool stack a builder touches, which keeps our stories honest beyond the Bluebeam bubble. German and business out of BYU; MBA from Thunderbird.
Parth Tikiwala
Head of Government & Academic Affairs
Before Bluebeam, Parth was a senior economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and an acting director at the Office of Management and Budget. His actual job was producing and vetting the kind of federal data the rest of the internet quotes without checking. When a Built piece leans on a public-sector or industry statistic, he’s the one who can tell whether the number holds up and where it really came from. Harvard MPA, Booth MBA.
Jeff Sample
Senior Industry Development Manager, Trades
25-plus years in construction technology, with the unusual distinction of doing the work in both directions: IT director at a major specialty contractor (The Gallegos Corporation), then consultant, evangelist, and now Bluebeam’s point person for the trades. He’s hosted The ConTechCrew for eight-plus years, a weekly conversation with the people building things, so when a Built piece talks about a trades workflow, Jeff can tell you whether it tracks with how subcontractors work today. Known industry-wide as the Ironman of IT and, improbably for a construction-tech lifer, a biology grad of Quinnipiac.
Philippe Hervé
Head of Energy Industry
Leads Bluebeam’s energy industry vertical across the EPC lifecycle: oil and gas, power, utilities, renewables, and nuclear. 22 years at Schlumberger, then SVP Energy at SparkCognition (Series B to unicorn), alongside two decades running his own energy consulting firm. Chair of the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ ATCE HSE-S committee, governing body member of Gastech, multiple patents on ultrasonic well inspection. When a Built piece touches energy infrastructure or EPC workflow, Philippe is the one who can tell whether it reflects how those projects run in the real world. Civil engineering out of INSA Rennes; business at UT Austin’s McCombs School.
James Chambers
Director, Global Industry Development, Build & Construct
Bluebeam veteran turned Nemetschek Group industry development lead. Nearly 14 years inside Bluebeam, including running UKI and international expansion, before stepping up to shape strategy across the parent company’s Build & Construct division. ISO 19650 Information Management certified, and active across ICE, RICS, RIBA, CIOB, and the UK BIM Alliance. The reason Built pieces on international AEC practice, standards, and data interoperability don’t read like they were written from a single ZIP code. 3D design and applied engineering degree from Sheffield Hallam.
Spot something we got wrong? Tell us here. We’d rather hear it from you than leave it standing.
