Founder Of The Week: Garrett Reynolds

• Garrett Reynolds is the co-founder of UpCodes, a platform designed to make building codes searchable, accessible and easier to apply.
• Reynolds launched UpCodes alongside his brother Scott, an architect who experienced firsthand how difficult it was to navigate compliance information.
• A software engineer by training, Reynolds identified the challenge as a systems problem, transforming UpCodes from a simple searchable database into a broader tool that helps professionals interpret and apply building regulations more clearly and accurately.
• The company later evolved to incorporate structured data and AI, shifting from a reference resource to an intelligent system that supports real-world decision-making in construction, with a focus on improving clarity, safety and compliance.

Tell Me About Yourself and UpCodes

I’m a software engineer by training, and I’ve always been interested in technology, whether that’s new science or software systems. I co-founded UpCodes with my brother Scott, who’s an architect. He saw firsthand how difficult it was to navigate building codes in practice; I saw a systems problem hiding in plain sight.

UpCodes started as a way to make building codes searchable and accessible, but it’s grown into something broader: helping people understand and apply the law more clearly. At its core, the company is about reducing friction in an industry where clarity, accuracy, and safety really matter.

What Inspired You To Start UpCodes, and What Problem Were You Trying To Solve?

The spark came from discussions with my brother Scott, who would spend hours digging through PDFs and physical books just to answer basic compliance questions. The information existed, but it wasn’t structured, searchable, or even reliably accessible. In many cases, the law itself wasn’t freely available online.

That disconnect bothered us. It seemed like a silly problem to be struggling with in the 21st century. Putting the law online and making it searchable was just very obvious, and we couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been done.

What Has Been Your Biggest Challenge So Far, and How Did You Overcome It?

We soon found out why the law was not free. There were groups who thought they owned the text of the law given they had been involved in authoring it.

One of these law publishers sued us soon after starting. Lawsuits in the US are tremendously expensive, long and stressful. The judicial system favors big incumbents who can bury innovative startups in legal fees.

It was only through venture capital that we were able to survive the onslaught of the early years. Being physically present in San Francisco was critical for that, at least back in 2017.

Can You Describe a Pivotal Moment That Significantly Shaped the Direction of UpCodes?

A turning point was realizing that access alone wasn’t enough. Making codes searchable solved part of the problem, but applying them correctly across real projects required deeper intelligence.

Construction has near-infinite variation, and hard-coded rules can only go so far. That’s when it became clear that structured data and AI were the answers to scale understanding responsibly. Importantly, AI wasn’t the starting point; it was the result of listening to the problem. That shift reframed UpCodes from a reference tool into a system that actively supports professional judgment.

How Do You Define Success?

For your business: Success means being trusted. If professionals rely on our tools when the stakes are high (safety, legality, cost), that tells us we’re doing something right. And generally surviving and growing; the conversion funnel is pretty harsh.

As a founder: In my opinion, the most important thing a founder can do is stick around. The journey can be pretty gruelling and stressful at times. A startup’s success is mostly luck, but you do also have to play your cards right and endure a lot. In the early years, we never imagined UpCodes growing this big. We did get lucky.

What Advice Would You Give To Someone Thinking About Launching Their Own Startup?

Start with the problem, not the technology. It’s tempting to fall in love with a solution (especially with something as powerful as AI), but that’s usually backwards.

Look for something that frustrates you deeply, something you’d want fixed even if it weren’t fashionable and glamorous. Then ask what approach actually fits. At UpCodes, if AI hadn’t been the right tool, we wouldn’t have used it. The best startups I’ve seen are driven by clarity of purpose, not by chasing trends.

What’s Next for UpCodes? Any Exciting Developments We Should Watch Out For?

We’re focused on continuing to turn static rules into usable systems. That means helping professionals move not just from research to answers, but from answers into real decisions: where requirements, intent, and documentation stay connected instead of breaking apart across tools.

More broadly, we’re interested in how better access to the law can unlock safer, faster, and more equitable outcomes, especially in housing and infrastructure. The details will evolve, but the direction stays the same: reduce handoffs, reduce guesswork, and help teams carry clarity from early design all the way through execution.

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Founder’s 5 with Garrett Reynolds

Want to know more about the man behind UpCodes? Here’s TechRound’s exclusive Founder’s Five with Garrett Reynolds.

Favourite business tool

As the CTO, I love linters (automatic code checkers) and automated test suites (tests that check to make sure the code does what you think it does over time). We use Ruff for Python. I think companies tend to underinvest in these guardrails.

One lesson you learned the hard way?

Let people “try and fail” to some extent. As a founder, I kiboshed an idea for a new feature the team had for years, but finally someone joined who really pushed hard. I decided to let them do it since it wouldn’t take too long to try it. Turns out I was wrong, and it was our best-converting feature ever. Even if it had failed, there would have been good learnings.

One future trend you’re watching?

AI automating more coding work. Coding is itself automation, so once the automation gets more automated, things could move really fast.

One quote you live by

I like thinking about the Steve Jobs quote: “We don’t make most of the food we eat, we don’t grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean, we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.”

One book/podcast you recommend

“Homo Deus” by Yuval Noah Harari. Great exploration of the potential of technological progress.

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