Vietnam has a building typology known as tube housing.

It is characterized by narrow building frontages, often in the range of 3 to 4 meters, and multiple skinny levels. From what I've read, tube housing first appeared in the 17th century in cities like Hanoi. Its ubiquity over the years, however, has been aided by a myriad of factors, including Vietnam's transition from capitalism to socialism. This change meant that far fewer apartment buildings were being constructed, and so households had to take matters into their own hands and build what they could.

I've also read that this building type may have something to do with the way properties were taxed based on their frontage rather than their site area, though I haven’t been able to find a reliable source for this. Whatever the case, the end result is exactly what we discussed in this recent post — The 9-Step Rule: Why Simple, Narrow Buildings Are Good for Cities. Except with these frontages, it wouldn’t even take nine steps if the average building width is closer to 3–4 meters.

What is equally interesting about this housing type is that it represents a ground-up intervention (as opposed to the result of top-down urban design) and it is highly adaptable. It is not uncommon for additional floors to be added to these tube houses as needs change, and for the ground floors to serve as garages, living rooms, thriving commercial spaces, or as all three at once. It is an entirely flexible space that fuels entrepreneurship and allows households to make money.

Just think about how much easier it would be to open your own shop if you already owned the space. Conversely, how many of these ground-floor businesses wouldn’t exist if only there were a single line in the zoning regulations that said: “Nah, sorry, you can’t start and operate your own business here.” That is what I often worry about when it comes to land-use policy: what human potential are we quashing as a result of our decisions?

I was just reading about Simple Ventures. They are a Toronto-based venture builder that has raised $15 million to help create 25 high-growth companies headquartered in Canada by 2030. Some of their investors include TD Innovation Partners, Sun Life, Sobeys, and Harley Finkelstein (President of Shopify).

Now, I'm not a venture capital expert, but this seems to me like a relatively small amount. (They plan to raise another $5 million by the end of the year.) So I would encourage more institutions and rich people to step up with their wallets, because you have to applaud their mission:

“We are coming together to issue a call to action - bring Canadian talent home,” said Rachel Zimmer, exited founder and Co-Founder and CEO of Simple Ventures. “This funding will allow us to build great Canadian Headquartered companies. Now is a crucial time to join our mission to put fire in the Canadian engine.”

Canada still has 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs than it did 20 years ago, despite the population increasing by over 10 million during the same period. At the same time, nearly one-third of Canadian immigrant entrepreneurs move to the U.S., citing limited support for scaling businesses at home. Simple Ventures tackles this problem by sourcing new company ideas, validating them, and pairing them with Canadian leaders to co-create ventures.

There's absolutely no shortage of smart, ambitious, and entrepreneurial Canadians. Where we need to improve is in commercializing and scaling our ideas. And it's crucial we do this as quickly as possible because there are powerful compounding benefits to entrepreneurship.

When a new company scales, it creates jobs, wealth, and knowledge. These ingredients can, and usually are, used to start a growing subset of even bigger companies. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson once referred to this as The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs.

If you study Silicon Valley, what you see is something that looks like a forest where trees grow tall, produce seeds that drop and start new trees, and eventually the older trees mature and stop growing or worse, die of disease and rot, but the new trees grow up even taller and stronger.

If you drill down a bit deeper, you see that the founders, investors and early employees generate a tremendous amount of wealth from these big successes. The later employees don't make as much wealth but they do learn a ton and make enough money that they don't need to work for someone else and so they strike out on their own and are often funded by the folks who made the big money in the prior startup. That's how the seed drops from the tree and starts a new tree growing. This continues on and on and on.

When you think of startups and entrepreneurship in this way, you start to see just how important it is for us to keep growing our forests, instead of chopping down our trees and shipping them to the US. This is an exercise in city and nation building. And so I wish the team at Simple Ventures nothing but success.

LFG, Canada. If you're working on something and would like to pitch SV, click here.

I spent the past week listening to this Bankless podcast with Vitalik Buterin (the Canadian programmer and co-founder of Ethereum). It took me a week because I was listening to it off and on while I was in the car, headed to and from One Delisle and other meetings. But it's a fascinating episode. I think Vitalik is easily one of the most important minds of our generation.

But let me be honest and say that I wasn't able to follow everything in the podcast. I clearly still have a lot to learn when it comes to cryptography. For this reason, I'm not going to recommend that you all watch/listen to the episode — not unless you're prepared to go in deep. This is also supposed to be a blog for city builders (at least most of the time).

But I did want to share one takeaway that I found interesting.

In the episode, Vitalik describes Ethereum as the world's ledger. This maybe won't mean very much if you're not familiar with crypto, but the goal is a universal, permissionless, and censorship-resistant place for recording and securing basically everything: property title records, financial assets, AI-generated cat videos, and so on. Put another way, Ethereum wants to become a foundational layer of trust for the world.

Then, later in the episode, they somehow get onto the topic of dictators. There was a general acknowledgment that dictatorships do have their benefits, but that they also have obvious downfalls. Ideally, we would have a best-of-both-worlds scenario. We want the efficiencies of dictatorships, with all of the benefits of capitalist democracies.

Vitalik refers to this scenario as "dictators in a box," and he argues that we already have them: they're called entrepreneurs. When you start a company, you get to run within your box, and that is the power of entrepreneurship. But importantly, these boxes exist within a broader framework that includes the rule of law, property rights, freedom of speech, and all the other benefits of capitalist democracies.

This is how Ethereum sees itself — as a foundation on top of which "dictators in a box" can build new ideas, businesses, and opportunities. And because of this layering, it will be Ethereum that provides the backstop against people doing bad things, like stealing someone's crypto or falsely claiming that they hold title to a property when they don't.

I found this analogy fascinating, and I think it offers a glimpse of what's at stake if/when Ethereum becomes what it's aiming to become — the world's ledger.

Vietnam has a building typology known as tube housing.

It is characterized by narrow building frontages, often in the range of 3 to 4 meters, and multiple skinny levels. From what I've read, tube housing first appeared in the 17th century in cities like Hanoi. Its ubiquity over the years, however, has been aided by a myriad of factors, including Vietnam's transition from capitalism to socialism. This change meant that far fewer apartment buildings were being constructed, and so households had to take matters into their own hands and build what they could.

I've also read that this building type may have something to do with the way properties were taxed based on their frontage rather than their site area, though I haven’t been able to find a reliable source for this. Whatever the case, the end result is exactly what we discussed in this recent post — The 9-Step Rule: Why Simple, Narrow Buildings Are Good for Cities. Except with these frontages, it wouldn’t even take nine steps if the average building width is closer to 3–4 meters.

What is equally interesting about this housing type is that it represents a ground-up intervention (as opposed to the result of top-down urban design) and it is highly adaptable. It is not uncommon for additional floors to be added to these tube houses as needs change, and for the ground floors to serve as garages, living rooms, thriving commercial spaces, or as all three at once. It is an entirely flexible space that fuels entrepreneurship and allows households to make money.

Just think about how much easier it would be to open your own shop if you already owned the space. Conversely, how many of these ground-floor businesses wouldn’t exist if only there were a single line in the zoning regulations that said: “Nah, sorry, you can’t start and operate your own business here.” That is what I often worry about when it comes to land-use policy: what human potential are we quashing as a result of our decisions?

I was just reading about Simple Ventures. They are a Toronto-based venture builder that has raised $15 million to help create 25 high-growth companies headquartered in Canada by 2030. Some of their investors include TD Innovation Partners, Sun Life, Sobeys, and Harley Finkelstein (President of Shopify).

Now, I'm not a venture capital expert, but this seems to me like a relatively small amount. (They plan to raise another $5 million by the end of the year.) So I would encourage more institutions and rich people to step up with their wallets, because you have to applaud their mission:

“We are coming together to issue a call to action - bring Canadian talent home,” said Rachel Zimmer, exited founder and Co-Founder and CEO of Simple Ventures. “This funding will allow us to build great Canadian Headquartered companies. Now is a crucial time to join our mission to put fire in the Canadian engine.”

Canada still has 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs than it did 20 years ago, despite the population increasing by over 10 million during the same period. At the same time, nearly one-third of Canadian immigrant entrepreneurs move to the U.S., citing limited support for scaling businesses at home. Simple Ventures tackles this problem by sourcing new company ideas, validating them, and pairing them with Canadian leaders to co-create ventures.

There's absolutely no shortage of smart, ambitious, and entrepreneurial Canadians. Where we need to improve is in commercializing and scaling our ideas. And it's crucial we do this as quickly as possible because there are powerful compounding benefits to entrepreneurship.

When a new company scales, it creates jobs, wealth, and knowledge. These ingredients can, and usually are, used to start a growing subset of even bigger companies. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson once referred to this as The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs.

If you study Silicon Valley, what you see is something that looks like a forest where trees grow tall, produce seeds that drop and start new trees, and eventually the older trees mature and stop growing or worse, die of disease and rot, but the new trees grow up even taller and stronger.

If you drill down a bit deeper, you see that the founders, investors and early employees generate a tremendous amount of wealth from these big successes. The later employees don't make as much wealth but they do learn a ton and make enough money that they don't need to work for someone else and so they strike out on their own and are often funded by the folks who made the big money in the prior startup. That's how the seed drops from the tree and starts a new tree growing. This continues on and on and on.

When you think of startups and entrepreneurship in this way, you start to see just how important it is for us to keep growing our forests, instead of chopping down our trees and shipping them to the US. This is an exercise in city and nation building. And so I wish the team at Simple Ventures nothing but success.

LFG, Canada. If you're working on something and would like to pitch SV, click here.

I spent the past week listening to this Bankless podcast with Vitalik Buterin (the Canadian programmer and co-founder of Ethereum). It took me a week because I was listening to it off and on while I was in the car, headed to and from One Delisle and other meetings. But it's a fascinating episode. I think Vitalik is easily one of the most important minds of our generation.

But let me be honest and say that I wasn't able to follow everything in the podcast. I clearly still have a lot to learn when it comes to cryptography. For this reason, I'm not going to recommend that you all watch/listen to the episode — not unless you're prepared to go in deep. This is also supposed to be a blog for city builders (at least most of the time).

But I did want to share one takeaway that I found interesting.

In the episode, Vitalik describes Ethereum as the world's ledger. This maybe won't mean very much if you're not familiar with crypto, but the goal is a universal, permissionless, and censorship-resistant place for recording and securing basically everything: property title records, financial assets, AI-generated cat videos, and so on. Put another way, Ethereum wants to become a foundational layer of trust for the world.

Then, later in the episode, they somehow get onto the topic of dictators. There was a general acknowledgment that dictatorships do have their benefits, but that they also have obvious downfalls. Ideally, we would have a best-of-both-worlds scenario. We want the efficiencies of dictatorships, with all of the benefits of capitalist democracies.

Vitalik refers to this scenario as "dictators in a box," and he argues that we already have them: they're called entrepreneurs. When you start a company, you get to run within your box, and that is the power of entrepreneurship. But importantly, these boxes exist within a broader framework that includes the rule of law, property rights, freedom of speech, and all the other benefits of capitalist democracies.

This is how Ethereum sees itself — as a foundation on top of which "dictators in a box" can build new ideas, businesses, and opportunities. And because of this layering, it will be Ethereum that provides the backstop against people doing bad things, like stealing someone's crypto or falsely claiming that they hold title to a property when they don't.

I found this analogy fascinating, and I think it offers a glimpse of what's at stake if/when Ethereum becomes what it's aiming to become — the world's ledger.