FireDesign.ai founder and CEO Jason Tielve was recently featured in ValiantCEO, where he spoke with Jerome Knyszewski about the path from U.S. Army veteran to fire protection trade to founding a software company built to fix one of construction's most stubborn bottlenecks.
A few of the threads Jason pulls on in the interview:
- Why the industry stalled. Fire protection design moved from hand drawings to CAD in the early 2000s — and then largely stopped evolving, even as regulations tightened and the talent pipeline shrank.
- Augmentation, not replacement. The real risk isn't AI taking engineers' jobs; it's not having enough qualified engineers to meet demand. FireDesign.ai shifts their time from repetitive production work to oversight, judgment, and compliance.
- Three layers of trust. In a life-safety environment, every output is grounded in verified NFPA-aligned inputs, constrained by code-tied logic, and signed off by a licensed engineer.
- Lessons from scaling 24/7 Fire Protection from $600K to $20M — and why the same people-first leadership translates to a SaaS team (office puppy named Peaches included).
- What's next. A U.S. launch, Canadian expansion, EU patent protection, and the 2026 NFPA Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.