Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know that I like to incorporate tech into the topics I cover here and that I follow a lot of venture capitalists. 

Well, I was reading Mark Suster’s recent post on why confidence is so important in (venture capital) fund raising and immediately thought that this audience may also find it interesting.

Maybe you’re trying to raise money for a real estate development project. Maybe you’re trying to start a small business. Or maybe you’re just interested in human psychology.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

But confidence is CRITICAL in fund raising. Investors are human and humans want what they can’t have and what they perceive other people want. It’s human nature — just read Cialdini and others on this topic. We don’t think we work that way, we do. If you don’t act in demand, people will subconsciously know you’re not in demand.

It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies (which I have posted before on this blog):

“Now the trick is that we gotta look like we don’t need this shit and they give us the shit for free.“ -Mike Peters

There’s a lot of truth to that.

I have long told myself that if I ever needed to rent self-storage space, it would mean that I own too much stuff and that I need to get rid of some of my shit. But I recognize that there are many reasons why someone might need extra storage and I recognize that the storage market in the United States alone is something to the tune of $30 billion a year.

Here is an interesting case study about the storage company MakeSpace, which to-date has raised almost $60 million in equity funding. Their model is likely one that you’ve heard of or used before. Instead of you yourself going to the “self-storage” facility, they do the pickup and delivery. So they call themselves a logistics business, like Amazon, except that it works in reverse. Instead of you receiving deliveries, they take your stuff from your home back out to their warehouses.

Because of the route management software that they’ve been building over the last 4.5 years and because there’s enough density in the areas that they service, their pick-up and drop-off routes are apparently profitable. You no doubt need a certain amount of scale for that to happen, but they seem to have it. By the end of this year, they expect their reoccurring revenues to be in the $10′s of millions. That’s coming from the volumes of green boxes you see at the top of this post.

What’s particularly relevant for this audience are the built form and real estate implications. Because their customers aren’t physically visiting their facilities, they’ve been able to locate all of their distribution centers on the outskirts of the cities in which they operate. And because of this, their physical real estate costs are said to be less than 50% of traditional self-storage firms and they believe this number will trend to around 20% as volumes continue to grow.

All of this has me thinking about some of the other implications of the on-demand economy on cities and on real estate.

Image via Both Sides of the Table

Venture capitalist Mark Suster has a great post on his blog called: Lead, Follow or Get the Fuck Out of the Way. It’s a relevant read no matter what kind of organization you happen to be a part of. I think the lessons are universally applicable.

Here are two paragraphs on leadership that I really liked:

The problem with hard decisions is that you can never make everybody happy. There is always somebody impacted or somebody who thought “plan B” was better. Leadership is about listening to multiple opinions but in the end trusting your instincts and deciding. Leadership is about not worrying about how people will think about you for hard calls. It is about being willing to be wrong.

Leaders have well-formed opinions that go against the grain, the temerity to sell their vision to skeptics, the tenacity to stick to their ideas when they are inevitably criticized, the resiliency to wake every day when they’re being kicked by everybody for their beliefs but also the willingness to look at data and re-chart their course when they got it wrong.

In business school they teach you to privilege decisiveness over inaction. They teach you that no decision is actually a decision and that you shouldn’t wait around for the perfect solution. It’s rare to have all of the information. So make a decision and go. Sometimes, of course, this can cause problems. Mistakes will happen. But I generally subscribe to this approach. 

One of the ways I am trying to develop these skills – which may not be obvious to some of you – is by writing on this blog every day. I’m not always happy with result. Sometimes it really pains me to hit “Post now” when I’ve run out of time and I have to get to the office. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s okay. It’s more about the discipline of putting myself out there every single day.

Hopefully this approach creates as much value for you as it does for me.