Podcast/Video Interviews by Stephen Ibaraki
Nick Maciel: Co-Founder & Manager, Next Pillar Capital LLC
This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Nick Maciel.
I'm a mechanical engineer by training - BS and MS - and an operator by trade. My path to Next Pillar Capital ran through building things that had to physically work before it ever ran through capital.
The engineering years. I came up designing and building: mechanical and product design through Cadversity, an IoT venture in Fluxxio, and time on the Paradigm Hyperloop project, where the constraint was never the idea - it was whether the thing survived contact with reality. That discipline never left. It's why I still measure work by whether it runs unattended on a Tuesday morning, not by whether it demos well.
The operating years. I founded Rising Origin, an AI automation and marketing agency, and have spent the last several years inside small and mid-sized businesses as a builder and de facto fractional CTO - insurance, real estate, professional services, coaching. The work is unglamorous and specific: custom automation systems, AI voice agents handling live inbound, CRM architecture, lead routing that doesn't drop calls, reporting that owners actually open.
What I saw. Working inside dozens of these companies, the same pattern kept appearing. The best trade businesses in America are run by exceptional operators using software that was built for someone else.
Packaged tools are rented, generic, and priced to the median customer - so they solve the median problem and leave the margin on the table. Every time we replaced a packaged tool with something custom-built for that specific business's workflow, the earnings moved. Not marginally. That observation is the whole thesis behind Next Pillar Capital.
What we're building. Next Pillar Capital is an AI-enabled acquisition platform. We acquire established, mandated building-compliance trade businesses - commercial plumbing, backflow prevention, fire and life-safety inspection - beginning in the Tampa Bay metro, and modernize them with AI operating systems we build ourselves. Roughly 2% of funded searchers are engineers. We build what the rest have to rent. We keep the founders' names on the door, protect the workforce, and hold ourselves to the earnings lift we engineer rather than to financial engineering.
Why the philanthropic commitment isn't a footnote. A defined share of platform revenue is committed to philanthropy, with AI access and AI-for-good as the intended focus. I want to be direct about the motive: the leverage I've gotten from these tools over the last few years is not evenly distributed, and it should be. The businesses we're buying employ people who will be told AI is coming for their jobs. I'd like to be part of the case that says otherwise - that it can raise the floor for the technician and the dispatcher, not just the owner. That's the part of our conversation I most want to get right, and the part I'd most value your guidance on.