A new generation for Truebeck: San Mateo construction giant gets new leadership

Now they are running one of the Bay Area’s top general contracting companies.

In December, Green became the new chief operating officer and Pera became the new president of Truebeck Construction. Truebeck Construction, founded in 2007 in San Mateo by David Becker and Sean Truesdale, focuses on the construction of large commercial, technically complex projects.

“We do hospital work, we do biotech labs, we do education facilities,” Truesdale said. “We’re very diverse in the project types we’re doing.”

Truesdale said the company was founded in San Mateo due to its closeness to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, which is where most of their clients are situated. 

Truesdale and Becker, once colleagues for another construction company, saw an opportunity to deliver large-scale construction methods to smaller scaled projects, specifically with the use of Building Information Modeling. With BIM, builders can use highly accurate 3D model designs to deliver the best representation possible of what the final outcome of the project will look like.

“For smaller jobs, this more technical approach added a lot of value to our clients,” Truesdale said. 

Growing when others didn’t

Treating a $10 million project as if it was a $100 million project through design and preparation distinguished them, Truesdale said. So when the Great Recession of 2008 happened, as companies began shrinking, Truebeck grew.

“The competitiveness of the industry at that time allowed us to get on bid lists that we would not have otherwise,” Truesdale said.

As the company grew, so did the responsibility of having to manage it all. As CEO and former president, Truesdale needed to bring in people he could trust to help. He looked to Pera, the former COO, and Green as the ones who could help balance the load.

Pera, a civil engineering graduate from Santa Clara University and with the company for 15 years, said his focus as president will be maintaining satisfaction with current clients and increasing connections with new ones.

“I’m really going to be focusing a lot on making sure that I’m shoring up the relationships between all the departments as well as all of our current offices, and providing also an overlap and a guidance to making sure that we’re also connecting with our clients,” Pera said.

Green, a building science graduate from Auburn University and with the company for almost three years, said his focus as chief operating officer will be making sure that policies and procedures are followed so the men and women on Truebeck’s job sites are successful.

“My job is to set folks up for success, so that when we deploy our resources onto a job, we have the tools, and we have everything that we need to successfully execute and deliver success and a quality product for the client,” Green said.

The company is still growing, despite the construction industry being hit with high interest rates for commercial development loans. Overcoming this challenge is through new, rapidly growing markets while maintaining work for past clients, Pera said. 

“While we have seen fewer large corporate campus developments over the past several years, our market diversification has served us well,” Pera said. “In addition, our long-standing relationships with past clients, built on strong performance and trust, have led to continued work and new opportunities, even in a shifting economic environment.”

Within San Mateo County, its latest completed project was the San Mateo Medical Center Health Campus, at 222 W. 39th Ave. in San Mateo. The $176 million expansion, renovation and retrofit project was completed in December 2025.

Expansion plans

Today, Truebeck has more than 600 employees and five offices throughout the West Coast, including its home office, San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland and Seattle.

Pera said it is highly likely Truebeck will expand into other regions such as Nevada and Southern California, where markets similar to those in Northern California have been growing. Pera also mentioned that working with emerging AI companies has increased the office component of their business.

“We are seeing a growing number of opportunities with AI firms beyond the large, well-known names that often receive the most media attention,” Pera said.

This means as the AI market grows, so could Truebeck’s. In an ever-changing environment such as the Bay Area, Truesdale said that construction methods are slow to evolve but that evolution is key.

“Anytime you’re doing something that’s new, there’s risk and there’s more research that you have to do to make sure that things go smooth,” Truesdale said, “and that’s the kind of stuff we love.”