Listen Now
The O.H.I.O. Fund Report℠ — a podcast dedicated to elevating Ohio’s collective ambition by highlighting the most compelling stories of innovation and growth throughout the state. Each episode carries the industrious DNA of Ohio, exploring the state’s economic renaissance across advanced manufacturing, digital infrastructure, biotech, healthcare, energy, data centers & AI, consumer goods, and logistics advancements.
Ken Sobel — Co-founder and CEO of Hyperframe.
Ken is a repeat founder and engineer whose path into construction followed an earlier startup journey through Y Combinator and an acquisition by Visa. With Hyperframe, he’s taken a first-principles approach to one of the most fundamental components of construction — steel framing — reimagining a process that’s been slow, manual, and largely unchanged for decades, and redesigning it into a snap-together framing system that’s faster, safer, and far more efficient.
After years of development and real-world validation, the company has achieved strong product-market fit and is now scaling manufacturing. That journey led Ken and his team to relocate Hyperframe from California to Ohio, where they are building their first large-scale production facility.
In our conversation, we discuss:
- Ken’s path from startup founder to construction entrepreneur
- Why construction remains slow, manual, and resistant to change
- The insight behind Hyperframe — redesigning building products themselves
- What it actually looks like to use Hyperframe on a job site
- The challenge of scaling a hard tech company
- Why credibility is everything in construction adoption
- The decision to move to Ohio — and what it enables
This is a conversation about reindustrialization in practice — and what it takes to rebuild physical industries from the ground up.
———
For more on The O.H.I.O. Fund: check out & subscribe to future content @ www.theohiofund.com
———
LINKS:
Subscribe to The O.H.I.O. Fund Report℠ on these platforms
or wherever you get your podcasts: