If you’re interested in tech and tech products, you might be familiar with a platform called Product Hunt that helps you discover new products/startups on a daily basis. They launched back in 2013 and have since become an important part of the startup ecosystem.
Here in Toronto, the Product Hunt community has been incredibly active with organizing regular meetups. Every 2 months they host an event, which includes a keynote speaker, 3 product demos from local startups, a panel discussion, and of course the usual drinks.
The next Product Hunt Toronto event (#7) is scheduled for Thursday, November 26th at 6pm and the focus is on digital products serving the real estate industry. Back when I became obsessed with this space, this would have been considered pretty niche. But today there’s a tremendous amount of interest in the overlap between real estate and tech. And I’m thrilled to see that.
If you’re also interested in this space, you should grab a ticket right now. They just went on sale yesterday, but usually sell out within a few days. At the time of writing this post, there are only 82 tickets left. I’m also going to be delivering the keynote talk. So I hope to see you there :)
I am a fan and long time user of Foursquare – now known as both Foursquare and Swarm.
Foursquare has struggled against competitors such as Yelp.com when it comes to local business recommendations. And I have less than 100 friends on my Swarm. It doesn’t seem to be that popular here in Toronto.
But I’ve always loved the data collection aspect of Foursquare / Swarm. Even though most people don’t seem to care about that. When I check-in somewhere, such as the gym, it’ll tell me how many weeks in a row I’ve been there, whether it’s a new personal record, who else is nearby, and a host of other things.
I’ve always felt like there was so much potential in all of the data it was collecting.
Well the company is starting to make better use of that data. Recently they used their foot traffic data at Apple stores (I am assuming this goes beyond just check-in data) to predict the number of iPhones that Apple was going to sell globally following the launch of the 6s and 6s Plus.
They predicted between 13 to 15 million handsets and it turns out they were right:
This validates the accuracy of our prediction and while we’re proud of the result, we certainly aren’t surprised. Foursquare’s data is essentially the world’s biggest panel of foot traffic data — we have the best sense of the trends and patterns of the movement of people and their phones around the world.
This is powerful stuff. If there were a way for me to be bullish on Foursquare beyond just writing this post, I would be.
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lanka born, Canada educated, venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, who made a boatload of money as one of the early employees of Facebook. He now runs a VC firm called Social + Capital and owns part of the Golden State Warriors.
The other night he was interviewed at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco and I think that many of his comments would also be of real interest to the Architect This City community. He’s super passionate in interviews and always fun to listen to.
Below is what he had to say about the San Francisco startup scene. It really speaks volumes about what people will put up with in order to live in an awesome place/city that they love. All of his responses below are from this TechCrunch article.
“The city has to be doing more, around transportation, around housing… You have to get rid of the nimbyism and you need to quadruple, if not quintuple, the amount of housing. You need to tell that engineer from the University of Michigan that he can live here on a salary of $80,000.
[In the meantime], we look at our startups, and the minute that they start to spend more than 15 percent of their burn – good money that we give them – on rent, a huge red flag goes up. When they, on a per-head-count basis, are spending so much, we start looking at the productivity of the technical team. And if it’s good but not great and they’re spending this insane amount of money [versus] a different team in Redwood City, we start to ask ourselves: “Are you so convinced that success is going to happen in this city at 1.5x the cost?”
Because for every dollar that someone in Mountain View or Redwood City is raising, you [in San Francisco] have to raise one-and-a-half to two times that just to get to the same point. So you’re cutting your half life in half. To prove that you can take an Uber from some fuckin’ shitty bar to another shitty bar? Like, I don’t understand.”
And here he talks about the possibility of his venture firm also getting into the real estate development business. I couldn’t resist blogging about this.
“We made a big decision with our last fund to build an organization that looks really different than a venture firm, and that organization is going to be this hybrid, bastard stepchild of Berkshire Hathaway and Blackstone and BlackRock.
What I mean by this is that we want to have a large permanent capital base and we want to make really long, discontinuous bets on companies and sectors and trends.
And one of the things we talked about was having a real estate fund …[because] we owe it to our companies to alleviate some of these problems when no one else is going to. If we went and built one million square feet somewhere of mixed use, where you work and live, and we rethink what it means to have a modular living environment for a millennial cohort that wants to work at companies and doesn’t necessarily have kids, we can do that in a way and give that back to our CEOs as a benefit of working with us.
And you can probably make the economics work. Because we only really care about the equity of the company anyways. And the equity in the real estate will take care of itself if you take the 30-year view. So we’re at the point now where we’re like, wow, we should raise a few billion dollars and get into the real estate business and solve this problem systematically for our companies. And maybe in that, it becomes a blueprint for how others should do it. We’re just basically going to act as our own city-state and decide how to do it ourselves.”
It’s interesting to think about what the economics might look like if your primary goal is simply to provide space to your portfolio companies (entrepreneurs) so that they get more (financial) runway and, therefore, have a greater chance of success. I’d love to see that pro forma.