Danny Haber was sitting at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View when he read about Steve Jobs’ final words: “Oh, wow.”
“My takeaway from that was ‘Oh’, he was a little bit surprised, and ‘Wow,’ a whole lot of amazement about the personal and professional life he lived,” Haber recalled. “What more can any of us want in life than ‘Oh, wow’?”
That combination of wonder and surprise was a source of inspiration for Haber, then in his 20s, just as he was figuring out what he wanted to do next. The New York native had recently returned to the U.S. from Israel, where he had co-founded a company he described as “The Wall Street Journal meets E-Trade for the Middle East.”
By early 2012, he had moved to Palo Alto, where he was couch surfing and subsisting mainly on a diet of ramen and Costco samples. Yet he still bought the domain name owow.com from a women’s wrestling organization for $1,500.
His first Bay Area business was a co-housing company called The Negev, after the Israeli desert, that he founded with his friend Alon Gutman, then a Google engineer. Haber said the company was doing well — with themed houses for introverts, Burning Man aficionados, ambitious founders and more — but it took until 2017 for the duo to come up with an idea worthy of the oWOW name.
That idea was to bring innovation to the building industry by using prefabricated panelized facades and mass timber to tamp down on timelines and costs, essentially putting together entire buildings onsite “like you would a set of Legos,” Haber said. oWOW is a development and design-build firm that implements that strategy through projects.
“How do you have a kit of parts? How do you not do unique bespoke work?” he said. “That’s what we’re doing. We’re basically standardizing every element of the design.”
The firm has built 500 units so far and just finished the 19-story apartment building 1510 Webster in Oakland, the tallest mass timber building on the West Coast. It hopes to top its own record by building a 28-story tower next door at 1523 Harrison, part of a pipeline of about 1,000 units Haber said it is working on in the Bay Area.
To put it mildly, Haber is a busy guy — rising before dawn and getting less than five hours of sleep a night.
“I’ve always been fine on four and a half hours,” he said. “I’ve done it for as long as I can remember.”
Here’s a typical day, in Haber’s own words.
4:30 a.m. I set an alarm for 4:30 but I might hit snooze a few times.
I read articles, respond to emails, take a shower and get dressed. I basically rotate between two outfits: jeans and an oWOW t-shirt or a suit or slacks and a dress shirt. Our President Andy Ball was the former CEO of Webcor Builders and he always tries to give me positive reinforcement when I rock the dressier look.
6 a.m. Several times a week I meet with Joel [Carr], our director of pre-construction, to review our construction schedule for our next project, 3403 Piedmont. We built out our own supply chain throughout Asia and we’ve got a schedule of 11 months due to lead time issues. We’re trying to come up with new ideas to bring that down to eight months.
Jamie, who has been volunteering in our office, will make me breakfast when she is making her own. That’s usually eggs, toast — a full breakfast. I can handle making the coffee. I’ll try to eat it before my meetings really kick off at 7 a.m.
7 a.m. We have video call R&D meetings several days a week with our teams from Oakland, San Francisco, Mexico and Norway. We’re trying to create new types of prefab, panelized systems that can enable us to build high-rises at $300 a foot. All over our offices, there are signs that say “Owow 300.” We’re currently at $411, but if we can figure out $300 we can build anywhere we want in the whole country and be 30 to 50 percent cheaper than any sort of competition. We’re pretty close on the exterior walls but we are still working on interiors and speeding up how long it takes to build our superstructure.
8 a.m. We have a daily scrum from 8:00 to 8:05 with the development team where we talk about our objectives and blockers for the day. Then we look at different business plans and go over the critical path of items that need to be executed.
10 a.m. Most mornings I’m on a job site at an OAC [owner-architect-contractor] meeting. I don’t know why I go sometimes because it’s mostly just arguing, usually between the development team and the construction team. You want to make sure that open issues are discussed and not swept under the table, and having arguments, as long as people have a clear direction and alignment, is fine. Part of why I go is to make sure that uncomfortable topics are raised.
11 a.m. I try to get back to the office by 11 but sometimes the OAC takes longer and I’m running late. I have different meetings on different days. Some days we’re working on our automated project delivery platform, which will allow us to mix and match from our design toolkit to create an efficient plan for any site.
We’re pretty close to being able to automate the concept, so we can input what the zoning will allow and then put it in this software and basically output the entire design of the building, in terms of floor plans and how many units we can get in.
Other meetings could have to do with whether or not to work with an outside company that might want to use our products on its sites. Mostly these are people in the Bay Area but we’re also hearing from some in Southern California as well. It’s an interesting question: should we focus on our own stuff or work with others? And if we do work with others, what’s the best strategy? We’re trying to figure all that out.
1 p.m. A lot of times I’m just eating lunch during these meetings but sometimes I’ll have a business lunch. Sam’s in San Francisco is always good. [Former Mayor] Willie Brown is often there. Just down the block from us in Jack London Square is a former burlesque place that’s now a restaurant I like called The Fat Lady. Also, the Oakland Grill serves food in 10 minutes and it tastes good. I go to the Oakland Grill so often I want my picture on the wall, right next to Ricky Henderson, the A’s legend. We haven’t agreed on the size of the picture. The owner wants an 8×10, but I want bigger.
2 p.m. In the afternoon, I’m usually doing a job walk, just me and a superintendent. We could be discussing timing and inspections, or how light fixtures will be laid out, or that we put in accent colors and now they’re the wrong colors. It’s usually very specific issues and coming up with solutions.
3 p.m. I’m back in the office in the afternoon with more meetings. These could be about new strategies for projects, or new partnerships or other business opportunities. After that there could be another R&D meeting with a different team. We’re also looking at creating a memorandum of understanding with architects who bring us projects that use our products and platforms. Often, I’ll have a one-on-one with people who report to me towards the end of the day.
The meetings go back-to-back, and if all is going well I have as much energy at the end of the day as I had going into it.
Sometimes it’s a bad day — like I recently lost a $2,000 bet with another developer about when we were going to get the TCO [temporary certificate of occupancy] sign-off on Webster. We were so close but we missed one item and the fire inspector didn’t give us the approval, so we didn’t get it. I just felt down and horrible that day. But my feeling is yesterday and tomorrow is a new day and I don’t let bad feelings or previous issues impact the next day.
8:30 p.m. Unless it has been a horrible day, and the energy is gone, I like to do something physical to take a break from work.
I’m currently in a bet with someone who runs a low seven-minute-mile that I can beat them in a run but I’m in the high nines right now. I also go to a boxing gym, but the problem with boxing is that if you’re not boxing three to four times a week you’re going to be in trouble quick when you’re sparring and I’ve been traveling a lot so I haven’t been able to be consistent.
Oftentimes after my work out, I head back to the office to wrap up. Merchants is a bar underneath our office and I’ll stop to chat with their bouncer before going back to work.
12 a.m. Sometimes I have a work dinner or a date, but on the average day I leave the house by 5:30 a.m. and come home from the office around 10:30 p.m. I usually fall asleep between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. On the weekends it’s different. I went to a rave in San Francisco recently that started at 10 and went to all sorts of hours.
I’ve been talking for six months about moving from Oakland to the Marina neighborhood in San Francisco, where I have a bunch of friends and hang out a lot on weekends. But it has been hard to find time to look for apartments.
I like to try to work hard, play hard and push it hard on both.
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