Below is an interesting podcast with venture capitalist Bill Gurley talking about how technology might transform and improve health care.
Based on their discussion, the US spends about 17-18% of GDP on health care. In most Western European countries and in Canada, it’s about half of that.
In Singapore, it’s only 4% of GDP and there doesn’t appear to be any demonstrable differences in terms of health outcomes.
If you can’t see the podcast embedded below, click here.
Coworking spaces are big business.
One of the biggest of those companies is WeWork. As of last month (November 2015), the company had raised close to a billion dollars from investors like JPMorgan Chase, Harvard Management, and Benchmark Capital, and was valued at $10 billion. (Remember though, this is in the private not public markets.)
If you’re unfamiliar with coworking spaces, check out this post from The Spaces. It’s a great demonstration of how beautiful these spaces can be.
All of this is interesting because it speaks to the changing nature of work. There are a lot of people freelancing, participating in the “online gig economy” and working on new ideas. And in many of these cases, they don’t want or need traditional office space and/or they want the community that many of these coworking spaces afford – both offline and online.
But it’s not just the office that is changing. It’s also potentially living spaces. Since 2014, WeWork has been talking about their new coliving concept, WeLive. The idea here is to combine smaller living spaces with larger common areas and create an overall live-work community. And they are not the only ones thinking about this.
Below is a building section of what this might look. It’s from a Vornado Realty presentation. They are working with WeWork to deliver their new WeLive concept in Crystal City, Virginia.
It’s so interesting to see this concept come to fruition. Back in 2008 when I was in architecture school, I worked with a classmate of mine and designed a modular coliving apartment building. It was called the Philly Flex Dwelling and it worked like this:
The idea here was to start with standard floor plates and use a structural exoskeleton to minimize interior columns. This way you could insert whatever prefabricated modules you wanted and also re-purpose the structure should you want to change the building’s use in the future.
This is not that dissimilar from what was originally proposed for One Bloor West here in Toronto. Though the goal there was column-free retail spaces.
The yellow spaces are the shared common areas and the remaining spaces are the residential living “pods.” We also designed a “solar skin” that was perfectly tuned to the building’s orientation and location in Philadelphia. The idea here was to maximize winter sun (for heating) and minimize summer sun (to keep the building cool).
That was a fun project to work on.
A few days ago, Bill Gurley – who is an investor in Uber – wrote a really fascinating blog post called, Uber’s New BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal): UberPool. Bill doesn’t update his blog very often, but when he does it’s incredible stuff.
I’ve touched on UberPool briefly before. But basically it’s a true “ride sharing” service where people with overlapping routes can easily share the same car – much like people do today informally. The obvious advantage of this is cost. It’s cheaper to share.
What’s most fascinating about this service though is how it fits into Uber’s larger mission to drive transportation costs down. And there’s a specific reason for that (via Bill Gurley):
When Uber launched its low-cost UberX offering in the summer of 2012, the company quickly realized that the demand for its transportation services is HIGHLY elastic. As the company achieved lower and lower per-ride price points, the demand for rides increased dramatically. A lower price point delivered a much better value proposition to the consumer, yet still remained a great business decision due to the remarkable increase in demand.
So what Uber quickly figured out was that if they could increase the utilization rate for drivers (the time actually spent with passengers), they could charge consumers lower prices while at the same time maintaining driver salaries. Prices went down, but volume went up.
One way to do that is to obviously decrease driver downtime by improving liquidity on the marketplace. But another way is to simply increase the number of passengers being transported at one time. Hence the creation of UberPool.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Because of all the transportation data that Uber now has (the company has a data group called the “math department”), they can fairly accurately predict what a price cut will do to their ridership levels. This allows them to “forward invest” their capital in new services – such as UberPool – before they even have the revenue from the anticipated increase in ridership.
So what does this all mean?
It means that Uber is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Uber is trying to get to what they call “The Perpetual Ride”, which basically means that drivers will always have customers (100% utilization). That’s quite a goal, but it would mean the absolute lowest prices for consumers (barring any other changes to their cost structure).
Dirt cheap transportation is a pretty compelling value proposition, which is why I continue to believe that cities should be hard at work trying to figure out how to harness this transportation shift.
If you’re interested in this topic, I would encourage you to give Bill Gurley’s blog post a read.