Category: Tech

• Listed.fun (and something else)

  This is a fun little passion project by Airbnb-engineer Andrew Pariser and someone known as Potch. The way it works is that it shows you a picture of a recently sold property, and you have to guess what it sold for. You get a bunch of guesses, and after each one, you are given more information about the property and some feedback on how close you are. To win, you need to get within 1%.

  When I tried it out, my initial guess was way off (too high). Toronto has trained me well. I also wasn’t sure where Evansville, Indiana was, so that bit of information didn’t really help me. But the arrows telling me I was way too high, certainly did. The reality is that it’s pretty hard to guess the value of a home if you don’t know where it is, you can’t see interior photos, and you generally don’t have enough information.

  But what if you were from Evansville, Indiana and what if you did have enough information? I bet that the guestimates would actually be pretty accurate. This idea of crowd-sourcing market information and pulling wisdom from crowds has long interested me, because price discovery is a major pain point for real estate. Sure you can look at comparable sales and current listings, but that is not an exact science. Neither are algorithms.

  But what if there was a way to test the market and get pricing feedback before you actually list? Would you trust it more than Zillow’s algorithm? This is something that I’m working on testing right now through a passion project called Unlyst. Myself and a few others are working on a very simple product that will be released this fall. If you’d like to follow along, sign up here.

  2022.09.09

• A discussion about Adam Neumann’s new residential apartment startup — Flow

  This an interesting discussion about Adam Neumann’s new startup Flow (which I recently wrote about here).

  More specifically though, the discussion is about venture capital firms backing “failed” entrepreneurs, and whether or not Flow can really be that much more valuable than your typical apartment REIT.

  In its simplest form, Flow might just end up being an apartment company with a strong national brand and a consistent resident experience. But maybe that’s all it needs to be.

  If the link doesn’t already do it for you, jump to the 7:19 mark to start with this discussion. After Flow, the podcast moves on to housing policy in the Bay Area, Houston, and Miami. So you may also want to stick around for that.

  Thank you Ocean Jangda for sending this over.

  2022.09.01

• Adam Neumann raises $350 million to revolutionize the apartment market

  Today it was announced that venture firm a16z has made a $350 million investment in Adam Neumann’s new residential rental company called Flow (which is kind of ironic).

  The company is set to launch in 2023 and nobody on the outside seems to be entirely clear on how it plans to revolutionize the multi-family rental market, but supposedly this funding round values Flow at more than $1 billion and supposedly Neumann will be rolling in the 4,000 or so apartments that he has been buying up.

  In any event, here’s how a16z described the opportunity (I think the key sentence is probably the one about creating a system where renters become like owners):

  Only through a seismic shift in the way industry relationships are structured and the mechanisms through which value is delivered can we hope to address the underlying problems of the current system and build the solution. Doing this requires combining community-driven, experience-centric service with the latest technology in a way that has never been done before to create a system where renters receive the benefits of owners. This means rethinking the entire value chain, from the way buildings are purchased and owned to the way residents interact with their buildings to the way value is distributed among stakeholders. And given the fragmented nature of the ecosystem today, we can only hope to accomplish any of this by bringing every aspect of the living experience together.

  What I will say is that I think it’s great to see this amount of innovation-focused money flowing into the residential real estate space, which is, after all, the biggest asset class in the world and one that could certainly use some fresh ideas. Apparently it’s also the biggest funding round that a16z has ever done.

  But I also find a16z’s characterization of the problems a bit odd. Renting an apartment is described as this soulless and profoundly lonely experience where you’re so ashamed of where you live that you’re even hesitant to invite friends over. They also conflate house with home, as if to say that you can’t have the latter without the former.

  On second thought, maybe these are exactly the right problems to be solving. It is our biases that we need to do something about.

  2022.08.15

• AI-generated street transformations

  Massachusetts Street (Lawrence, Kansas) pic.twitter.com/wYZnq8uM1s

  — Will Davis (@wlldvs) August 1, 2022

  One of the most effective ways to encourage change in our cities is to run a pilot. I think people find comfort in knowing that if chaos ensues, things can be easily reversed. So that is exactly what Phoenix has been doing with its “cool pavement” pilot program; what Seattle did (or is doing) with electric scooters; and what Toronto is doing with the pedestrianization of Market Street. Let’s try it out and see how things go.

  But there are other options emerging beyond just physical pilots. Better Streets AI, for example, is using artificial intelligence to instantly transform streets and give people an idea of what might be possible. If you haven’t yet seen any of these images, I would encourage you to check out their Twitter account. The rendered images aren’t hyper-realistic, but they are instant and they are all magically generated by a computer.

  As these sorts of tools become more sophisticated and widespread, it isn’t a stretch to imagine them having an impact on the way we think about and plan our cities. And I think that will happen. They also get me excited about the potential of augmented reality (which is something that interests me a lot more than full VR). Being able to quickly and accurately pilot the future is a powerful thing.

  2022.08.02

• It sounded stupid when I said it

  https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1553901007964442624?s=20&t=gRvygaF5RVVcIY-d_IHHeQ

  Click here if you can’t see the embedded tweet above.

  This is your daily reminder that many/most of the things that are ubiquitous today were once difficult to explain and understand (in the above example it’s email and the internet). Once a new idea or technology becomes widely adopted, its inner workings and technical aspects tend to recede into the background.

  Most people, for instance, probably aren’t familiar with all of the various internet protocols and how they work. Could you explain the difference between TCP and IP and SMTP? If you can’t, it doesn’t matter. The various protocol layers of the internet now work behind the scenes to power our daily lives. And the innovation that continues to be built on top of them is getting increasingly more user friendly as time goes on.

  The same thing will happen with crypto, which is talked about today in much the same way as the above folks are talking about email and the internet. New ideas will continue to emerge and we will all start deriving more and more utility from it (beyond just NFT art). And at that point, most people will stop caring about how all the sausages are made. They’ll just like eating them.

  P.S. One of the nice things about blogging every day is that I’ll be able to look back on this post in ten years and see how right or wrong I was.

  2022.08.01

• A headquarters in the cloud

  Venture firm a16z just announced that it will be “moving its headquarters to the cloud.” At the same time, it announced 3 new offices in Miami Beach, New York, and Santa Monica. These will be in addition to their existing offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco.

  Part of their argument is that hybrid work is weakening the network effects and agglomeration economies associated with being right in Silicon Valley. So they’ve deiced to be virtual, but still have offices where they can “materialize physically” when needed.

  They acknowledge that physical presence is important for developing a company’s culture, building relationships, and helping entrepreneurs (their core business).

  What’s interesting about all of this is that it’s further validation for Miami (Beach). Here is one of the most important venture firms out there saying that when they quickly materialize in real life, they want to be able to do that in Miami Beach.

  It also raises some interesting questions. Because even if the network effects of Silicon Valley are weakening when it comes to tech, this announcement still speaks to the importance of agglomeration economies. These three new office locations were chosen for a reason.

  2022.07.21

• Autonomous trucks are coming

  I hate driving. So I’m looking forward to the day when autonomous vehicles will be able to take me where I need to go, such as out for a late-night poutine.

  But as we all know, autonomy has proven to be a trickier problem to solve than most people initially anticipated. Though I do believe that we’re getting there, especially for certain use cases.

  The WSJ recently published an interesting article talking about why autonomy is likely to reach the trucking industry well before it reaches general consumers. And that feels right to me:

  Here’s the promise of robot trucks: While full self-driving in all conditions is still a pipe dream, engineers seem to be close to achieving it in limited circumstances, such as on highways on clear days. And highway driving, in good weather, happens to be exactly the context in which long-haul trucks operate for a substantial portion of the time.

  The article also gets into some of the economic benefits of figuring this all out:

  Adding even $20,000 of hardware, in the form of additional sensors and powerful computers, to a long-haul truck is quickly offset by the elimination of labor costs, which typically represent 15% to 20% of the cost of operating a truck. Another big economic impact is that by law a human driving a truck must stop and rest. That means every truck, which can cost between $100,000 and $200,000, is only being used about 30% to 40% of the time. Just running them 24 hours, stopping only for fuel and maintenance, increases their utilization by a factor of two or more.

  For the full article, click here (paywall).

  2022.06.21

• Augmented reality is coming — will it finally reach construction sites?

  Apple has been working on new virtual reality and/or augmented reality headsets for at least 6 years. This has been widely reported. But in typical Apple fashion, nobody knows anything about them, even though something is set to be revealed as early as this fall. I also don’t know anything about them, but I already want one. I am sure Tim Cook will get up on stage at some point and convince me that I need it immediately, so I’m trying to get ahead of that moment.

  VR/AR headsets are, of course, not new. Google tried and failed. Nobody wanted to wear them besides nerds. I had a pair of Focals by North but they were far too cumbersome to use and about as comfortable as having a smartphone duct-taped to your face. Meta’s headsets currently control the market. They have about 78% market share. But the overall market remains small. It’s mostly gamers. But the same could have been said about tablets before Apple did its thing.

  The promise is that these AR headsets might replace our phones as the dominant personal device. AR > VR. And that feels to me like a reasonable assumption once the requisite tech arrives. But even before that, there are a ton of great use cases for highly-functioning AR — everything from online shopping and digital fashion to finally fulfilling the dream of walking around a construction site and visualizing the design and coordination clashes.

  Technically these things are already possible, but the technology remains fairly niche. I hope Apple changes that.

  Full disclosure: I am long Apple.

  2022.06.05

• State of Crypto

  Everybody wishes that they bought companies like Amazon way back when they first went public, and then held them until today. If you did that, you would of course now be rich. But what would you have had to deal with along the way?

  Well, for one, you would have had to stomach an 80% decline in its share price when the dot-com bubble burst. And so while hindsight is always 20-20, do you really think that, faced with this cliff, you would have held on, not freaked out, and not sold? Yeah, who knows.

  Moving to today and the crypto space, the price of Ether is down 51% over the last 6 months. That’s not quite 80%, but 51% is still a big number, especially if you dumped all of your savings into it and/or borrowed money to do so.

  But does this decline really mean that crypto is rat poison?

  Last year when the market cap of crypto was rising, I believed that crypto had the potential to become the next big thing for the internet. And I still believe that today, which is why I continue to dollar cost average and why I continue to collect NFTs that I like.

  I may be wrong with the conviction I have (and this post will serve as permanent evidence of it), but it’s what I believe. And my conviction doesn’t depend on today’s price. It depends on what I think it could happen with crypto in the next 10 years.

  So with that, here is an interesting “State of Crypto” report that venture firm a16z just published. I think the key message here is that this is a longtime coming. And while it is still early days, momentum continues to grow. But of course, you should decide for yourself what you believe.

  2022.05.17

• Remote work & innovation

  Here are two interesting studies that explore the relationship between remote work (distributed teams) and innovation:

  1. This one explores how distributed teams have impacted “disruptive scientific discoveries” from 1961 to 2020. To measure this they look at scientific discoveries that end up becoming widely cited, which they take to mean that the work has supplanted an existing body of knowledge. Here they find that distributed work is inversely correlated with disruptive innovation. It is fine for incremental improvements, but it is less than ideal for new foundational ideas. That said, they do note that new technologies — stuff like Zoom — have started to minimize the innovation gap by helping people communicate as if they were co-located.
  2. But stuff like Zoom isn’t perfect. The second study looks at the impact of virtual communication on idea generation. And what they find is that videoconferencing is bad for that, largely because it focuses people on a screen and “prompts a narrower cognitive focus.” So if your job involves coming up with new ideas, Zoom may not be the best forum for that. But you probably already knew that.

  2022.05.10