Today’s post is a set of related questions for all of you.

Fred Wilson has a post up on his blog today called, The Jiu-Jitsu Move. It’s about how people often dismiss new technologies, market entrants, and/or consumer behaviours as silly; whereas the real power move is to embrace and leverage them. That’s what he is calling the jiu-jitsu move.

He gives a few examples, but for obvious reasons this one stood out to me:

I spent the day yesterday at a real estate industry event and talked to a lot of agents about the fact that their clients are often more informed than they are these days. I encouraged them to embrace that fact and use it to their advantage and not fear it. It is hard when you have grown up in an industry when your advantage was information and you no longer have that working for you.

For all the agents (and real estate consumers) who read this blog, I am curious if you agree with the above. Are consumers increasingly more informed than agents? I am sure that many of you will disagree. But if things are really changing, what should the jiu-jitsu move be?

So this is interesting.

Earlier this month, Travis Kalanick – co-founder of Uber and its former CEO – formed a new venture fund called 10100. According to the WSJ, it was funded with his own money after he sold 30% of his position in Uber for a cool $1.4 billion. 

Ten-one-hundred’s spartan website explains that the goal of the fund is “large-scale job creation, with investments in real estate, ecommerce, and emerging innovation in China and India.” On the non-profit side, the initial focus will be on “education and the future of cities.”

Then this week, Travis tweeted out “My new gig…” and disclosed that 10100 had entered into an agreement to buy a controlling interest in a real estate holding company called City Storage Systems (CSS) for $150 million. 

He also announced that he would become CEO.

The focus of CSS is on the redevelopment of distressed real estate, particularly parking, retail, and industrial assets. He goes on to say: “There are over $10 trillion in these real estate assets that will need to be repurposed for the digital era in the coming years.”

This whole series of events is a big bet on some significant changes in the real estate space.

Photo by Martin Reisch on Unsplash

Fred Wilson has a great post up on his blog today about open protocols. By open protocols he is referring to things like TCP/IP (transmission control protocol and internet protocol), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol). Whether you realize it or not, you rely on these protocols every single day if you go on the internet, browse the web, and write emails.

If you’re interested in these sorts of nerdy things, I recommend you read his post. I’m not going to write about open protocols today – though I do find them fascinating. Instead, I would like to talk about the last paragraph of his post. 

Here it is:

“I believe that business model innovation is more disruptive that technological innovation. Incumbents can adapt to and adopt new technological changes (web to mobile) way easier than they can adapt to and adopt new business models (selling software to free ad-supported software). So this new protocol-based business model feels like one of these “changes of venue” as my partner Brad likes to call them. And that smells like a big investable macro trend to me.”

This is interesting to me for 2 reasons.

First, business model innovation is incredibly powerful. Once a company has built itself up around an existing model, it can be painfully difficult to change. Imagine you have a 200 person sales team that would become unnecessary should you pivot your business model. Are you going to fire them and make the switch?

This is also one of the reasons why some tech companies can exist for so long before they make any money. Sometimes – but not always – it’s because the investors believe that if the company has users, attention or whatever it may be, that they will figure out a way to monetize them/it. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll be a business model that no one has ever thought of before.

Second, look how he is publicly sharing his investment thesis. Why would he do that? Shouldn’t he just go off and do it and not tell anyone? Clearly, he too believes that there’s greater value in being open and transparent.