Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Business

  • A single room with a single book, Tokyo

    This recent post by Benedict Evans talks about the firehose that is the internet. To illustrate this point, he gives the example of unread emails. If you were to look at your phone right now, how many unread emails would it show?

    My work email account is mostly read because reading and responding to emails is one of the ways that I manage to remain gainfully employed. But my personal email currently has 27,230 unread emails. Most of these are newsletters and emails from people wanting to somehow optimize this blog or help me reach 1 trillion followers on Instagram.

    Whatever the purpose, it’s almost impossible to keep up. And since having unread asymmetric emails of little consequence doesn’t bother me in the slightest, I let it go.

    This is one way to deal with the firehose — acceptance. And in Benedict’s post he makes the argument that maybe the push that we are seeing toward the metaverse is exactly that — full acceptance. “When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.”

    But the opposite way of dealing with information overload is extreme simplification. And there is something so beautiful about minimalism in a world of too much.

    Today I learned about a bookstore in Tokyo called Morioka Shoten (shoten = bookstore). It is located in Ginza (pictured above) and the proposition is “a single room with a single book.” The bookstore consists of, you know, a single room and at any given time there is only one book for sale.

    Each book is available for six days, after which time a new book is made available. In addition to selling one book at a time, the single room shop is used for things like events and exhibitions.

    It’s a radical idea and perhaps it is best suited to Japan. But maybe we all need things that slow us down and focus our attention on only a few things or even a single thing. Maybe we need it to offset the information firehose.

    Image: Morioka Shoten

  • Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index

    Since the summer, I have been using the lunch line at Jimmy the Greek (in First Canadian Place) as a crude measure for the reopening of the CBD in downtown Toronto. It is partially a joke. Those of you who know me will know I am a fan of Jimmy the Greek (and large filling lunches in general). But at the same time, it is a probably a fairly decent (but again crude) proxy for the utilization rate of the offices that sit above and around Jimmy. Pre-COVID the lunch lines were always long and there was usually nowhere to sit. In the spring of this year, I was often the only person there, single-handedly keeping Jimmy alive. But things picked up throughout the summer months and there was a significant spike this week, following Labor Day (see above tweet). This was the spike that many/most of us were predicting and it showed through in the Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index.

  • Optimistic and excited

    With seemingly so much happening in the world these days — everything from COVID to climate change — it is perhaps easy to feel a little discouraged about the current state of affairs. But I am an optimist. And as I mentioned on Twitter a few weeks ago, I haven’t been this excited about the future of tech and the internet in a long time.

    We are seeing the auto industry quickly transition to electric vehicles (though, in my opinion, not driving at all is still better for our cities than driving something that is electric). Norway has created the world’s first ever zero emission, autonomous cargo ship. And LIDAR vision systems are looking pretty promising as one of the technologies that will ultimately power fully autonomous vehicles.

    I believe in the resiliency of cities and, as I have been arguing on this blog all throughout COVID, I think the claims about the demise of our cities have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, I think this pandemic has forced us rethink a lot of things about our urban environments, including how we allocate and use our public spaces (think patios). Some of these changes have been for the better and they’re not going to go away.

    I think the benefits of working in close proximity to others are too great to have everyone working remotely. Yes, we have learned that decentralization is possible. But there’s an overwhelming amount of research telling us that we’re all more innovative and productive when we cluster together in cities and in offices.

    I have been back in the office almost 100% of the time since it has been possible to do that. And I am much happier and more productive as a result. There’s also research suggesting that there are psychological benefits to a reasonable commute. It creates a break in our day, allows us to detach from our work, and gives us time to process stuff in our mind.

    I think things like digital fashion and augmented reality are going to have profound impact on the way we consume things. You could also argue that there’s a sustainability angle to more digital and less physical. And of course, I am excited about the transformations that I believe cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies will continue to bring to many different industries (if not most).

    This morning I was reading a Financial Times article about cryptocurrencies in the developing world. It it perhaps no surprise that many of these countries are providing to be early adopters. People are leapfrogging over to cryptocurrencies because their existing currencies and financial systems aren’t effective enough. That has lead to adoption and penetration that looks something like this according to FT:

    There is, of course, many other things to be optimistic and excited about. But I’ll leave that for the comment section below. What are you excited about these days?

  • How clustering makes us all more productive and innovative

    Earlier this year, Enrico Moretti, who is a professor at UC Berkeley, published this research paper looking at the effect of high-tech clusters on productivity and innovation. (I am unclear if there is any relationship to the Italian brewing company Birra Moretti.)

    One of the things he looks at in the paper is the decline of Kodak. Headquartered in Rochester, New York, Kodak famously missed the transition to digital photography. And so by the late 1990s, they were forced to start letting people go. The result was an almost 50% decline in the size of the entire “high-tech cluster” in Rochester.

    But what Moretti goes on to test in his paper is the impact that this employment decline had on productivity and innovation outside of Kodak and outside of the photography sector (but within Rochester). And what he found was that between 1996 and 2007, the productivity of non-Kodak inventors dropped by about 20%!

    This, of course, is one of the great features of cities. Even if you’re not working at some big company with lots of smart people, just being in the same city, on the same block, or within the same office building, can make you more productive. It turns out that business ecosystems are pretty interconnected. Spillovers are important.

    For more on this topic, check out this recent Wired article by Viviane Callier. In it she makes the case that remote work is going to negatively impact productivity and innovation over the long run.

    Photo by Yassine Khalfalli on Unsplash

  • Paul Smith on being “childlike”

    British designer Paul Smith was recently interviewed by Monocle on Design about his recent collaboration with BMW and Mini. If you like Mini cars, you’ll probably like the episode. But he also raises two interesting points about his business and about how he approaches design.

    The first is that his business is a balancing act. In the front, he wants it to be pioneering, flashy, and self-indulgent. But in the back, he keeps the lights on by selling lots of navy blue suits and polo shirts. Both are important, because if you stop pioneering then you stop being relevant.

    The second point he makes is about how he approaches design. Paul Smith’s London studio is famously cluttered. He likes to collect a lot of stuff. Some might call it hoarding. But for him, the space helps him think laterally and also remain “childlike.” (Where we work apparently matters.)

    Children, as we know, are honest, curious, and free in a way that adults aren’t. They don’t have the same reference points and that can be very empowering. Forget the way that things are currently done and challenge yourself: “What if?” I like that a lot.

    To listen to the Monocle on Design episode, click here.

    Photo by Boris YUE on Unsplash

  • Making sense of public ledgers

    One of the things about crypto and blockchains is that they are mostly public. Every transaction gets logged in a public ledger, which means that if you know the address of a particular wallet, you can see its balance, all the in and out $/crypto flows, any NFTs that it may own, as well as probably many other things that I am still working to get my head around. In all likelihood you won’t know who the wallet belongs to, but you’ll be able see what’s going on at that particular address.

    This is a pretty radical feature if you compare it to the way things generally work today. And what it signals to me is that we are headed towards a world with a lot more transparency and real-time data. Today I learned of a company called Dune Analytics. It is an analytics company built around open blockchain data (there’s no proprietary data). At the same time, it’s also a community. And it is this community (think of them almost as analysts) that helps to make sense of the open data.

    To give you an example, here is a chart from Dune showing monthly volume by NFT marketplace. OpenSea looks to be running away with things right now. And there’s no guessing. Here is all of the data.

    But, of course, this is just one example. Blockchain data could also be used to generate something like a real-time profit and loss statement for a company, which again, is pretty radical when you compare it to the way (and how slowly) that things are done today. It’s hard to not to see all of this and think about the far reaching implications of what’s unfolding right now. Everything from healthcare to real estate will almost certainly be transformed by this next iteration of the internet.

  • Architect Bjarke Ingels announces new “design living” company

    News has just dropped that architect Bjarke Ingels, Roni Bahar, and Nick Chim are launching a new “design living” company called Nabr. Their website says that it is “coming soon to Silicon Valley” and so presumably there will be tech involved and we should actually be calling it a startup.

    The video embedded at the top of this post (link here) will tell you a little bit about it. But from what I can glean from their website, the focus is on using technology and modular construction to deliver housing that is more personal / adaptable, more sustainable, and more attainable. There is a note on their site about buying with only 1% down.

    We have talked a lot on this blog about the antiquated and slow-moving nature of design, development, and construction. So what it absolutely clear is that there are many problems to be solved here. I am excited to see what the team brings forward.

  • America’s return to the office

    Envoy, which is a workplace platform that offers products such as these, recently used its data to publish a kind of return to work index. More specifically, they used millions of anonymized employee and visitor sign-ins from their platforms to figure out who was returning to the office. Their dataset covers over 14,000 locations and all 50 states. And what they found was what you see at the top of this post, which is a look at workplace foot traffic in the top 10 US metropolitan areas compared to a May 2020 baseline. On average, traffic is up over 200%. And for some metropolitan areas, like the Philadelphia metro, it is up over 360%. There was a blip around January, but I think the trendline here is pretty clear.

    For more on Envoy’s return to work index, click here.

  • Is entrepreneurship contagious? (And a bull case for urban clustering)

    The research isn’t absolutely conclusive, but Matt Clancy — who is an assistant teaching professor of economics at Iowa State — makes an interesting case (over here) about entrepreneurship being mostly contagious.

    The article cites a long list of studies that have more or less found that being around entrepreneurs can have a measurable positive effect on whether you yourself might also become one.

    There is evidence to suggest that this is true whether you’re a scientist working with someone who has previously commercialized a piece of research, a community with entrepreneurial neighbors, a student with an entrepreneurial mentor, or a child with parents who have started their own business(es).

    According to one Swedish study, the children of entrepreneurs are about 12 percentage points more likely to start a business at some point in their life compared to people with non-entrepreneur parents.

    But as I said at the beginning of this post, the research isn’t entirely conclusive. Could a proclivity for risk and independence be instead genetic? Could it be that entrepreneur types simply seek out other entrepreneurs to hang out with? Perhaps these associations aren’t causal. Maybe.

    But my gut tells me that there has got to be some contagiousness. Here’s an excerpt from Matt’s article:

    …being around someone who has done it plants the seed in your mind that it’s a possibility, something you really could do. For most of the studies, the population exposed to entrepreneurship is a population that wouldn’t normally consider it. For them, exposure has a measurable positive effect.

    What this once again tells me is that there’s immeasurable value in people clustering in cities, local communities, offices, coffee shops, and many other spaces. It’s a hard (probably impossible) thing to replace. And it could be the difference between taking initiative and starting a business, and not doing that.

  • DDG Partners + GS Invest = Azur

    Last week I wrote about a project in New York by DDG Partners called 100 Franklin. If you missed it, go here.

    I didn’t, however, say much about the developer. Though at the time I was wondering why their website was no longer up.

    DDG Partners is a firm that I have written about several times over the years. They are a firm that I have always admired because of 1) their commitment to design and 2) their vertically-integrated approach to development. They do things like design, construction, and asset management all in-house.

    So I was interested to learn that back in May they announced a merger with French real estate firm, GS Invest. Prior to the union, GS had a portfolio of more than 3 million square feet across Europe. The new investment and development company is called Azur.

    Also interesting is the fact that Azur has started making proptech investments. Their first investment is in a company called Whiterock AI.

    For more about Azur, click here.