DPR Construction is an employee-owned general contractor founded in July 1990 by three construction veterans - Doug Woods, Peter Nosler, and Ron Davidowski - who pooled $750,000 to build a firm deliberately positioned away from commodity contracting. Today it ranks consistently among the top 50 general contractors in the United States and operates as a multi-billion-dollar organization.
The firm specialises in technically complex, self-performing construction across five primary markets: advanced technology, healthcare, life sciences, higher education, and commercial. Self-performance - meaning DPR directly executes significant portions of the work rather than subcontracting everything - is central to how the company delivers precision-demanding projects in these sectors.
DPR operates on four stated core values - Integrity, Enjoyment, Uniqueness, and Ever Forward - and a registered purpose, "We Exist to Build Great Things."®, which was articulated in 1992 with the help of Jim Collins, then a professor at Stanford. The employee-ownership model means that staff hold a direct stake in the business, a structure the company has maintained as it has grown from 11 professionals in its first year to its current scale.
