This is an excellent talk by NYU professor Scott Galloway about Amazon, online grocery, and many other aspects of the retail landscape. The bits about Amazon’s scale and reach are fascinating. There is about 30 minutes of him speaking quickly and then another 15 minutes of Q&A. If you can’t see it below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HyiY_m_YxI&w=560&h=315]
On Thursday night I spoke at Product Hunt Toronto about the overlap between real estate and tech. My slide deck will be made available online and I’ll be sure to tweet it out and link to it in the comment section of this post.
What was amazing to see was a room filled with 250 people coming together from almost two different worlds. I’m generalizing here, but you had the real estate people in suits and the tech people in t-shirts. But they were all mixing together to figure out how technology is going to disrupt the real estate industry. That is great to see.
This was not the case 5+ years ago when I started obsessing about the overlap between these two spaces. I remember pitching at a Startup Weekend here in Toronto where I was pegged as the fringe outlier for wanting to work on a real estate idea. Now I can’t keep track of all the startups who are tackling this space.
But this is a trend that is happening not only in real estate but in almost every other vertical. Here’s a quote from Fred Wilson that I used last night:
“One of NYC’s great strengths is the diversity of its economy – finance, real estate, media & entertainment, retail, fashion, health care, education, and now tech. And the reason tech is growing so fast in NYC is that it is embedding itself in all of these other industries.”
It’s an exciting time.
In any event, for those of you weren’t able to attend, the 3 startups that presented were Evercondo, PiinPoint, and MappedIn.
Evercondo is a condo communication and management tool for property managers and boards. PiinPoint is a data-driven tool that helps businesses find the best places to locate within a city. And MappedIn creates digital wayfinding solutions for (primarily) retail stores and venues.
If you know of any other interesting startups tackling the real estate space, please share them in the comment section below. Early stage companies need all the support and exposure they can get.
I’m going to be turning one of my blog posts ("Why Toronto should stop complaining about all its condos") into a talk at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management on March 10th, 2014 at 6:30pm. But since it’s an academic setting, they wanted me to make it more impartial and so the talk instead, asks a question, and is called: "Should Toronto stop complaining about all its condos?"
You can register for the event here. It’s primarily geared towards students, but I’m told it’s also open to industry and the public. I haven’t completely figured out what I’m going to talk about yet, but I plan to focus on the issues of supply and demand I raised in my blog post and then tie that into a discussion about the rise of midrise development—specifically through DUKE and Kingston&Co (both TAS projects).
If you have any other suggestions, I’m all ears.