By: Anonymous (Aided by AI)
I’ve worked in both worlds: a billion-dollar infrastructure firm where project meetings start before dawn and a small startup where the coffee machine is the data center.
If you’ve built anything in Nebraska, you’ve seen both cultures live under one roof.
People outside of Nebraska don’t understand how deep the knowledge and innovation around the built landscape runs here. We don’t celebrate hype; we celebrate systems that never fail.
That’s why when you trace the origins of modern construction, infrastructure, and now digital jobsite software, you keep landing in the same place, the Silicon Prairie (Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska)
Kiewit, HDR, and LEO A DALY built the world’s bones.
Tenaska, Valmont, and Lindsay engineered its skin and veins.
Now Buildertrend and CompanyCam are wiring its nervous system.
We didn’t pivot from steel to code — we extended the same discipline into a new medium.
That’s the Nebraska Thesis:
Innovation doesn’t mean breaking things. It means engineering them so they never break again. Nebraska is the home to building the landscape of today and tomorrow.
This series is the blueprint — three chapters on how a state of pragmatists quietly built the global architecture of reliability.
Coming Tuesday: Part I — The Engineered Prairie: Why Omaha Is the World Capital of Construction Innovation.
