#143 From Jazz to Infrastructure: David Karlsgodt’s Unconventional Career Path
Inside the partnerships
rebuilding America's campuses.
David Karlsgodt — Vice President at Brailsford & Dunleavy — on what fifteen years of district energy has taught him about public-private partnerships, aging campus infrastructure, and putting the right team in the room.
#143From Jazz to Infrastructure: David Karlsgodt’s Unconventional Career Path
Working with colleges and universities on long-range energy planning since 2010.
David & partner Rob joined the firm a few weeks before COVID reshaped higher-ed.
Many 1950s–60s district energy systems are now at end-of-life and must be replaced.
A P3 is a means to deliver big projects — not a piggy bank. Early deals proved it.
From jazz school to the district energy boardroom.
David's career doesn't read like a standard infrastructure consulting résumé. Click any stop on the timeline to hear the story behind it — a through-line about putting teams together that runs from Montana to Michigan State.
Youth Growing up in Montana — Hamilton, then Missoula +
College Jazz studies at the University of North Texas +
Late '90s A pivot into web & software development +
2002 Started his own software company — right after the dot-com crash +
~2010 Michigan State hands him a spreadsheet — and an accidental career +
~2015 From software firm to university consultancy +
Feb 2020 Acqui-hire into Brailsford & Dunleavy +
2020–Now Building the energy-partnerships practice at B&D +
"A university does this once.David Karlsgodt · on why institutions need partners
A private partner does it all the time.
That gap is where the partnership earns its keep."
The "one throat to choke" principle
David on what actually separates the teams that win public-university P3 procurements from the ones that don't — and why transparency, not price, is the decisive factor.
Four shifts in how smart campuses buy infrastructure now.
A decade ago, public-private partnerships were sold as revenue generators. The thesis didn't hold up. Here's how the model has matured — and what the institutions getting it right are doing differently.
Stop treating P3 as a piggy bank.
Early energy P3s pitched upfront monetization — selling the utility business, generating a new revenue stream. On paper it looked like a housing deal. In practice, the institution is still the customer for its own energy, and those early deals "proved to be not as rosy as they were made out to be."
The deals that work now enter with eyes wide open: the question isn't how do we monetize this?, it's what can the private market do better than we can do on our own? — access to capital, yes, but more often execution, speed, and newer technology.
What works now
- Framing P3 as a delivery mechanism, not a financing trick
- Starting from the institution's actual infrastructure gap
- Being honest that the institution will still pay over time
- Using partners to execute what a public entity cannot at speed
What didn't
- Selling the utility for a big cash number up front
- Treating energy the way housing deals were treated
- Over-promising revenue upside that never materialized
- Leaving the institution unprepared for long-term costs
The winning bid is a whole team, not a low number.
When B&D evaluates proposals, price is rarely the swing vote. What matters is whether the team has worked together before and can operate as a single, accountable unit — what the industry calls "one throat to choke."
The anatomy of a credible bid: a finance team that knows how to fund these deals, a developer who can integrate the pieces, a design-builder with a track record of delivering on time and on budget, and a high-quality design team that can bring the newest ideas. Each party matters — but so does the ability to show up as one voice.
Signals of a strong bid
- Finance, developer, design-build, architecture pre-aligned
- Transparent cost, structure, and risk allocation
- Proven delivery record on comparable projects
- Clear story of how the team makes it one package
Red flags
- Black-box pricing with no visible assumptions
- A consortium stitched together the week before the RFP
- Risks priced in aggressively with no room for collaboration
- Over-indexing on finance, under-investing on engineering
Replace "do-or-die" bids with a progressive process.
The old model: put out a fully-defined RFP, ask bidders to guarantee a price and design before they really understand the project, maybe throw them a stipend if they lose. It broke down — no stipend is ever big enough for the work required, and several procurements in the industry collapsed because teams were forced to price risk they didn't understand.
The progressive P3 approach inverts the order. Start with qualifications. Narrow to a short list. Collaborate on design. Build in off-ramps so either party can walk if the economics don't work. You end up with better pricing, better fit, and a partnership — not a transaction.
The 4 steps
- 01 — Qualifications. Affordable to respond to, filters for serious teams.
- 02 — Shortlist & scope. Odds shift from 1-in-10 to 1-in-3.
- 03 — Collaborative design. Teams invest because the win is realistic.
- 04 — Commit with off-ramps. Either side can walk if it breaks.
Why it works
- Teams don't price mystery risk — they price known work
- The institution learns what it's actually buying, early
- Market creativity is invited, not blocked by over-spec'd RFPs
- The winner isn't stuck with a deal it will regret for 30 years
Combine transactions to force strategic partnerships.
One of the more interesting experiments B&D is running: bundle different project types into a single partnership — student housing and energy, for example. It takes a more sophisticated team to respond, which is the point. It forces partners to think about the institution's broader needs instead of treating procurement like a shopping list.
"It becomes strategic connections as opposed to just transactional connections." That shift — away from banking transactions toward genuine partnerships — is the direction David expects the whole market to move over the next decade.
What gets bundled
- Student housing + central utility plant
- Mixed-use development + district energy
- Research facility + capital renewal
- Rec center / dining + infrastructure refresh
Why institutions benefit
- Partners have to understand the whole campus, not a slice
- Risk is balanced across revenue-generating and mission-critical assets
- Fewer parallel procurements; less siloed thinking internally
- Natural pressure to plan strategically, not opportunistically
Continuous growth is not going to hide all your sins anymore.On what COVID taught higher-ed leaders
People are being more strategic.
Six questions worth expanding.
Pulled from across the conversation — the threads Jim and David went deepest on. Click any question to open the answer.
01Why is aging campus infrastructure suddenly an emergency? +
For decades, campuses grew their way past infrastructure problems. If enrollment was up, capital was available, and old boilers kept running, there was always a reason to defer a big plant replacement. That era is ending.
Many campuses built their district energy systems in the 1950s and '60s. Those systems are now 70–80 years old. "They absolutely must be replaced at this point," David says. The work isn't expansion anymore — it's capital renewal at scale.
There's no lack of need. It's just showing up differently. Growth isn't hiding the problem anymore.
02Why do housing P3s work when energy P3s struggle? +
Housing is a revenue-generating asset with an outside customer: students pay rent that would otherwise go to off-campus landlords. A housing P3 lets the university capture a new revenue stream and use someone else's capital to build something it needed anyway. The economics are visible and intuitive.
Energy is the opposite: it's mission-critical infrastructure the institution itself consumes. There's no new customer. A P3 doesn't grow the pie; it restructures how the pie is delivered. That's still valuable — but it demands a different story and different metrics than housing.
03What did COVID actually change for higher-ed infrastructure planning? +
COVID forced every institution — mid-major, elite, community college — to ask what they were actually best in class at, and to lean into it. Some campuses continued to shrink; others outpaced private employers for regional hiring (University of Washington recently passed Amazon as Seattle's top employer).
For infrastructure, the effect was subtler but important: institutions started thinking about operating cost flexibility — the ability to weather future shocks, to stand up summer programs, to run leaner when they need to. A lot of long-duration decisions are being shaped by that new awareness.
COVID, then the financial crisis, then the dot-com boom. Those are the three that outlined my career.
04Why does an open procurement matter for public institutions? +
Private universities can negotiate a sole-source P3 if they want to. Public universities almost always can't — they're connected to state procurement rules, and open procurement is usually required.
That constraint shapes the whole approach. It forces B&D to design a project that can genuinely be bid on by multiple teams, to attract a healthy field, and to make sure the winning proposal emerges from real competition — not from a handshake.
05How does B&D get a seat at the CFO's table? +
David's previous consulting firm worked up from the sustainability director or the facilities director — which meant waiting for the day they'd finally get pulled into a room with a decision-maker.
B&D inverts that. The firm is already trusted at the CFO, president, and board level on housing, dining, and mixed-use projects. When they introduce energy into the conversation, they're not selling door-to-door — they're extending an existing relationship.
If you can do what you did on this project, but apply that to energy — we'll buy that all day long.
06What does "owner's advisory" actually mean in practice? +
B&D is not the design engineer, the financier, or the builder. They represent the owner — the university, the city, the research institution — and help them run complex processes where those other parties need to be coordinated.
Sometimes that looks like advisory planning (helping a campus define what it actually needs). Sometimes it looks like program or project management (running the procurement and managing the team through delivery). The unifying work is the same: getting complicated things done on behalf of someone who isn't in that business full-time.
From transactional to strategic — where the next decade goes
David's ten-year view: fewer deals framed as financing tricks, more campuses treating their partners as long-horizon collaborators on infrastructure the institution can't tackle alone.
The four questions every BEP guest gets.
Tap any card to reveal David's answer. They're quick — but they're often the part of the conversation that sticks with listeners.
Concepts worth knowing before you listen.
The episode moves fast through some specialized vocabulary. If any of these terms are new, tap for a 90-second primer — no prior industry knowledge assumed.
David Karlsgodt
David is a Vice President at Brailsford & Dunleavy, where he leads the firm's energy partnerships practice. He works primarily with colleges, universities, school districts, and public entities to plan, procure, and deliver district energy and infrastructure projects — often through public-private partnerships.
His path to infrastructure consulting was unconventional. A jazz studies graduate of the University of North Texas, David spent his early career in software development in Seattle — including contract work for Microsoft — before founding his own software company in 2002. A long-range planning engagement with Michigan State University in the early 2010s pulled him into district energy, and he's been there ever since.
He joined B&D in February 2020 through an acqui-hire, along with business partner Rob and several staff. He's based in Seattle, where he walks his dog every day whether he wants to or not.
Vice President, Brailsford & Dunleavy — Energy & Infrastructure Partnerships
What is a P3?
P3 stands for public-private partnership. It's a long-term contract between a public entity (like a university or a city) and a private consortium (developers, financiers, builders, operators) to deliver a public asset — a building, a road, a utility system — that the public entity needs but doesn't want to finance, build, or operate entirely on its own.
The private partner typically brings capital, speed, and specialized expertise. The public partner brings the site, the long-term demand, and the policy context. The contract defines how risk, revenue, and control are split between them over periods that can run 20–50 years.
David discusses progressive P3 procurement — a more collaborative approach that's replacing "do-or-die" fixed-price bidding in higher education.
In higher education specifically, P3s show up most often in student housing and central utility plants — and, increasingly, in bundled deals that combine both.
District energy, explained.
A district energy system generates heating, cooling, and sometimes electricity at one (or a few) central plants and distributes it to many buildings across a campus or neighborhood through a network of underground pipes. Instead of every building having its own boiler and chiller, the whole district shares infrastructure.
Universities have used district energy for a century. It's efficient, space-saving, and — critically — easier to decarbonize at one large plant than at hundreds of individual building systems. It's also expensive to replace, which is why 70- and 80-year-old systems are such a pressing challenge today.
Most of the campuses David works with have district energy systems built between the 1950s and 1970s. Replacing them is one of the biggest capital projects those institutions will ever run.
What's an owner's advisor?
In large infrastructure projects, the owner — a university, a city, a hospital — is usually not an experienced construction, finance, or energy operator. They build a major project maybe once a decade. The teams they hire do it every week.
An owner's advisor sits on the owner's side of the table and helps them navigate the process: defining the project, running the procurement, evaluating bids, managing the partners through delivery, and protecting the institution's long-term interests. They don't design the building or pour the concrete. They make sure the people who do are doing it on the owner's behalf.
B&D is an owner's advisory firm focused primarily on higher education, research, and other public and non-profit entities. David leads their energy and infrastructure partnership work.
What's an acqui-hire?
An acqui-hire is an acquisition structured primarily to bring a small team of people — and their relationships, methods, and reputation — into a larger firm. The target company's product or services are often secondary to the talent and the book of business.
David's previous consulting firm was acqui-hired into B&D in February 2020. He and his business partner Rob joined as senior leaders, bringing along staff and the modeling frameworks they'd built over five years of independent practice. In exchange, they gained access to B&D's existing CFO- and board-level relationships across hundreds of institutions.
David's team had the analytical depth in energy; B&D had the relationships. An acqui-hire combined both faster than either firm could have built the other capability organically.
