Prior to Textura Corp., Patrick Allin had very little experience in the construction industry. The former COO and CFO of Price Waterhouse Cooper's global consulting group once supervised a 250,000-sq-ft office complex, but that was pretty much it.
Shortly after PWC sold its consulting arm to IBM in 2002, William Eichhorn, a former e-commerce consultant at PWC, came to Allin with an unusual idea: Having learned about construction during a consulting exercise, Eichhorn thought the Internet could remove the physical and painfully repetitiveexchanges of paper that take place when contractors receive paychecks and issue lien waivers.