Bloomberg columnist Barry Ritholtz recently interviewed Richard Barton about his startup companies. Barton founded Expedia while he was an executive at Microsoft (Gates and Ballmer era) and then went on to cofound Zillow (real estate site) and Glassdoor (jobs site). 

I’ve been following the work of Barton for many years now because I admire the common thread among his startups: They’re about bringing transparency to industries where transparency is lacking. I used to try and dissect his thinking when I was working on my own real estate/tech startup.

I believe there’s still a lot of room for transparency in the real estate space, but that doesn’t negate the work that Barton has done. He’s all about using technology to bring “power to the people.” That’s a good thing.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

I woke up this morning to this view:

I then went for a swim. The water tends to be on the cooler side in the Georgian Bay, but with the weather we’ve been having it’s pretty perfect right now.

At this point I’m thinking about a beer and some reading. I have Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty sitting in my car. It’s next in the queue.

I am telling you all of this simply to be transparent. 

Recently I had someone caution me that I should be careful about being too public and too open. I won’t get into specifics, but I was told that sometimes it’s better to just fly under the radar.

I recognize that there have to be limits to transparency, but as a rule of thumb I subscribe to the opposite approach. When possible and when appropriate, I would rather be more, rather than less, transparent. 

This blog is who I am. It’s indicative of how I think. And it discloses what I’m doing. So I don’t see a lot of downside. What you read is what you get. You’ll know if we should be friends and/or do business together.

After I wrote about what I’m doing next I had a bunch of emails come in from various people telling me what they’re doing and, in some cases, suggesting that we work together. Some people had development sites that they thought I should take a look at. And some people immediately asked if I was hiring.

I am grateful for each of those emails. But I also know that they’re an outcome of openness and transparency.

Dutch architecture firm MVRDV recently converted an old industrial building in Hong Kong into new office space. The overall project size is roughly 200,000 sf. What’s unique about the project is the obsessive focus on transparency and glass.

Here’s what the interior looks like:

And here’s how the architect has described the project:

“We are moving into a transparent society, businesses are becoming more open with the public, and people care more about what goes on behind closed doors. In that way, a clear workspace leaves nothing questionable, nothing hidden; it generates trust.” Tells MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas, “But also it is an opportunity for the building to become a reminder of the industrial history of the neighbourhood, monumentalised in a casing of glass.”

I have written quite a bit about how I believe we are shifting towards a more transparent world – perhaps even a radically transparent world. And so it’s interesting to see an architect pick up on this broader theme and translate it into physical space.

The floor is transparent. The partitions are transparent. The furniture is transparent. And you can clearly discern the interfaces between old and new.

Good architecture, at least in my opinion, should reflect what is happening in our broader society. That’s why I believe that studying the history of art and architecture is really like studying the history of the world.

For more photos of the project, click here.

Image by Ossip van Duivenbode via MVRDV