Scott Galloway, professor of Marketing and Brand Strategy at NYU Stern, recently delivered a presentation on the Gang of Four: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. These dominant companies are also often referred to as the “Four Horsemen.”
The video is about 16 minutes long and I would highly recommend that you give it a watch.
It’ll be like drinking from a firehose, but there are so many fascinating takeaways. You’ll also quickly discover how far reaching the societal impacts of these companies have been and will likely be in the future.
If you can’t see the video below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfjg0kGQFBY?rel=0&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,
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 :)