About

I've led projects from simple sidewalk improvements in NYC to major parks developments and billion dollar university campus expansions. Small, big, and in between. I was in the design trenches and still am, leading teams and managing budgets.

I'm so addicted to design, to going back and making it better every time, but when you're actually doing the work the budget is stretched in a dozen places at once and design is only one of them.

So do sheets and layouts really make a big difference in budgets? From the last 7 years of observation, they actually do.

On simple projects with a few layouts, it took an amazing and talented drafter at least 1 to 2 hours to put together an initial set of Builders Pavement Plan (BPP) and street improvement plans. These are your street frontage demo plan, grading plan and detail with a cover page, most of which are copied from another project, then adjusting the viewports and edits, north arrow, scales, putting in some legends, and that's not even getting into layering.

On bigger projects, the one that made me walk away from a great career in civil engineering was a 1000+ acre land development with 400 sheets. It took 2 designers and 2 drafters over 2 weeks to get them done, and that was only the initial round. To no one's surprise in our industry, roads moved, lot lines changed, sheets were off, and now the next update took another 2 weeks. I'll let you imagine the cost, the time and the frustration.

After completing that project I vowed to find a solution, a solution born from our needs as civil engineers.

The idea for SheetAgent for Civil 3D was born in October 2025, and Setline followed in 2026. Yes, we're in San Francisco, but for once this startup began on a kitchen table and not in a garage.

As designers we really want to put time into design. We want to bring our ideas to life and spend that time where design is needed the most. Layouts are just as important, because without them our ideas can't come to life and can't be delivered. So we started with the repetitive and less engineering task.

Some will say there are other tools that do something similar, and yes there are, but none do it completely. They either do the initial set and leave you for the update, or they only do some modes but not all, and you spend days learning them and then end up doing the rest manually.

My passion for accessibility, for safe site design that gives equal access to everyone, is the same instinct I brought to this tool. Whether you're a Civil 3D guru or new to the field, using it should be simple and equal.

I'm very fond of the Japanese idea of kodawari (こだわり), an uncompromising devotion to getting a single thing exactly right, combined with extreme specialization. You pick one thing and refine it for as long as it takes rather than doing many things adequately. That's what we're trying to achieve here at Setline with SheetAgent.