One of Alphabet’s subsidiaries is a company by the name of Sidewalk Labs. Some of you, I’m sure, have been following it. The goal of the company is to leverage technology in order to solve some of our biggest urban challenges.
Initially, they were fairly under the radar, but more recently they’ve become a lot more public with their projects and their mission. Here is a snippet from a recent blog post written by their CEO, Daniel L. Doctoroff:
“The world is poised for a fourth urban-tech revolution — an age of connectivity capable of reshaping cities as much as the steam engine, electricity, and automobile have in the past. New technologies will help citizens and elected officials tackle those intractable urban challenges that Larry outlined last summer, but making sure this age imposes fewer social costs than those previous shifts is critical.”
Earlier this week it was also announced that the company is likely to enter the real estate development business and construct a new city precinct in order to pilot some of their ideas and projects. The initiative is called Project Sidewalk.
Here is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:
“According to people familiar with Sidewalk’s plans, the division of Alphabet is putting the final touches on a proposal to get into the business of developing giant new districts of housing, offices and retail within existing cities.
The company would seek cities with large swaths of land they want redeveloped—likely economically struggling municipalities grappling with decay—perhaps through a bidding process, the people said. Sidewalk would partner with one or more of those cities to build up the districts, which are envisioned to hold tens of thousands of residents and employees, and to be heavily integrated with technology.”
When I read this, I immediately thought of the Port Lands area in Toronto. Not because Toronto is decaying – far from it – but because it’s a massive 880 acre site that is both adjacent to downtown and entirely underutilized. I can’t wait to see this area transformed into a thriving waterfront community.
In any event, if or when Project Sidewalk gets off the ground, it will be very interesting to see what a Google-backed real estate development company looks like.
On Monday, Google broke the internet when it announced that it was reorganizing itself into a holding company structure called Alphabet.
That means that Google, Inc. will now become a subsidiary, along with many other companies, of Alphabet Inc. and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares in Alphabet.
This is huge, but also something that was likely inevitable given the passions of the founders. Apparently Larry Page has been thinking about this move for years.
As it stands pre-Alphabet, Google (with its main internet products) is basically a cash cow funding all of Google’s other experiments. But this muddied the waters and made it difficult for investors to clearly see how much the main internet products were making and how much the founders were spending on self-driving cars, delivery drones (Project Wing), and other new ideas.
Now everything will be separate.
But what’s really exciting about the reorganization is that it sets the stage for Alphabet/Google – which is arguably already one of the most important companies in the world – to become even more impactful in a wide variety of industries and disciplines, some/many not traditionally associated with tech. Each wholly owned subsidiary will have their own CEO and the founders rightly believe, I think, that this overall structure will afford them more “management scale.”
Within Google will remain search, advertising, maps, YouTube, and the Android mobile operating system. But already Alphabet is the parent company of the following other businesses:
Calico, an anti-aging life extension company
Sidewalk, a smart cities company whose mission is to improve life in cities
Nest, an “internet of things” company that makes connected devices for your home
Fiber, a company that offers super fast internet
Google Ventures (venture capital) & Google Capital (private equity)
Google X, which is the lab developing self-driving cars and delivery drones (Project Wing)
If you can’t tell, I’m bullish on all of this. The approach really resonates with me and I can’t wait to see what Alphabet becomes. If you’d like to read the full and official blog post announcement, click here.
Cheers to trying new things and making big bets.