One of the co-founders of Juno -- a new mass-timber and modular housing company -- was recently interviewed by Dezeen. Prior to cofounding Juno, BJ Siegel was Apple's design director and spent 19 years designing and working on their stores. And so this is the lens that he and his partners are bringing to the real estate development space. (I also just learned this morning that their head of real estate is a former classmate of mine from Penn.) Here is an excerpt from the Dezeen article that speaks to their goal of productizing the delivery of new housing:
The third is Apple really challenged us to think about the way we deliver the project more like the way they deliver products through a kind of owner-furnished direct source supply chain model.
And that actually spurred a lot of investigation as to how to translate that work from a product into this industry [real estate development], which is really kind of not focused on that.
So that really was a big, big focus.
The company recently announced that they have broken ground on their first project in Austin, Texas. It is a five storey 24-unit residential project that is being positioned as "middle-income, market-rate" housing. They've reduced the building down to about 33 standardized parts and are using a secret type of mass timber that is manufactured in the US. Supposedly it's better than cross-laminated timber, but the company is keeping it as part of their secrete sauce right now.
Juno is not the first company to identify this gaping problem in the development and construction space. The typical construction process is antiquated, inefficient, and filled with far too much waste. Which is why modular / pre-fabricated housing has been a goal of architects, builders and others for generations. Eventually we will figure out how to better productize the delivery of new housing and bring down its costs. And in my view that will be a great thing for consumers.
Rendering by Engraff Studio via Dezeen
This is an interesting chart from the New York Times showing the breakdown of (real estate) uses across the largest downtowns/CBDs in the US. It was put together using satellite data and data from CoStar, including their boundary definitions for each downtown/CBD. The point of the chart is to show that some US downtowns are heavily dominated by office square footage. But if you look a bit closer, there are other interesting takeaways. Look at retail in Honolulu, hotels in Austin, and how much residential many US cities have in their CBDs.
In the world of startups, a unicorn is used to refer to a company with a market cap greater than $1 billion. A decacorn, the latest benchmark, is what it sounds like in that it's a company with a market cap greater than $10 billion.
While unicorn status is just one measure, valuations are an important yardstick for cities and countries. How many big new companies are you creating? That is a critical question because, presumably, these big new companies are going to create a bunch of new jobs and generate a lot of new wealth for people.
This recent blog post by Elad Gil is a great summary of what's happening in the world from this perspective. The raw data is also available if you'd like to dig deeper.
Here are the number of new unicorns since October 2020 by city:
One of the co-founders of Juno -- a new mass-timber and modular housing company -- was recently interviewed by Dezeen. Prior to cofounding Juno, BJ Siegel was Apple's design director and spent 19 years designing and working on their stores. And so this is the lens that he and his partners are bringing to the real estate development space. (I also just learned this morning that their head of real estate is a former classmate of mine from Penn.) Here is an excerpt from the Dezeen article that speaks to their goal of productizing the delivery of new housing:
The third is Apple really challenged us to think about the way we deliver the project more like the way they deliver products through a kind of owner-furnished direct source supply chain model.
And that actually spurred a lot of investigation as to how to translate that work from a product into this industry [real estate development], which is really kind of not focused on that.
So that really was a big, big focus.
The company recently announced that they have broken ground on their first project in Austin, Texas. It is a five storey 24-unit residential project that is being positioned as "middle-income, market-rate" housing. They've reduced the building down to about 33 standardized parts and are using a secret type of mass timber that is manufactured in the US. Supposedly it's better than cross-laminated timber, but the company is keeping it as part of their secrete sauce right now.
Juno is not the first company to identify this gaping problem in the development and construction space. The typical construction process is antiquated, inefficient, and filled with far too much waste. Which is why modular / pre-fabricated housing has been a goal of architects, builders and others for generations. Eventually we will figure out how to better productize the delivery of new housing and bring down its costs. And in my view that will be a great thing for consumers.
Rendering by Engraff Studio via Dezeen
This is an interesting chart from the New York Times showing the breakdown of (real estate) uses across the largest downtowns/CBDs in the US. It was put together using satellite data and data from CoStar, including their boundary definitions for each downtown/CBD. The point of the chart is to show that some US downtowns are heavily dominated by office square footage. But if you look a bit closer, there are other interesting takeaways. Look at retail in Honolulu, hotels in Austin, and how much residential many US cities have in their CBDs.
In the world of startups, a unicorn is used to refer to a company with a market cap greater than $1 billion. A decacorn, the latest benchmark, is what it sounds like in that it's a company with a market cap greater than $10 billion.
While unicorn status is just one measure, valuations are an important yardstick for cities and countries. How many big new companies are you creating? That is a critical question because, presumably, these big new companies are going to create a bunch of new jobs and generate a lot of new wealth for people.
This recent blog post by Elad Gil is a great summary of what's happening in the world from this perspective. The raw data is also available if you'd like to dig deeper.
Here are the number of new unicorns since October 2020 by city:
Silicon Valley, not surprisingly, continues to dominate, followed by New York.
Here is a breakdown for the United States as a whole:
Miami and Austin have been in the news a lot over the past year and their startup scenes may very well be on the rise relative to other US cities. But it's interesting to see other smaller cities on this list, like Salt Lake City, who are, at least right now, holding their own.
I found this last set of two charts particularly interesting:
They are showing unicorn count (first) and unicorn market cap (second) as a percentage of their respective countries. For example, Silicon Valley is sitting at about 47% and 51%, respectively. So about half of all unicorns in the US have originated from this geography.
But for most other cities on this list, the percentage is much higher and, in many cases, it is 100%. (Silicon Valley is perhaps relatively low because the US has lots of other big and important cities.) For me, this shows the continued dominance of cities. If you're building the next great unicorn or decacorn, the data tells us that you're probably doing it in a big city somewhere. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Silicon Valley, not surprisingly, continues to dominate, followed by New York.
Here is a breakdown for the United States as a whole:
Miami and Austin have been in the news a lot over the past year and their startup scenes may very well be on the rise relative to other US cities. But it's interesting to see other smaller cities on this list, like Salt Lake City, who are, at least right now, holding their own.
I found this last set of two charts particularly interesting:
They are showing unicorn count (first) and unicorn market cap (second) as a percentage of their respective countries. For example, Silicon Valley is sitting at about 47% and 51%, respectively. So about half of all unicorns in the US have originated from this geography.
But for most other cities on this list, the percentage is much higher and, in many cases, it is 100%. (Silicon Valley is perhaps relatively low because the US has lots of other big and important cities.) For me, this shows the continued dominance of cities. If you're building the next great unicorn or decacorn, the data tells us that you're probably doing it in a big city somewhere. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.
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