I watched the BlackBerry movie the other week and right away I thought, "whoa, is Jim Balsillie really like that?" Supposedly, kind of. Either way, it was a good movie that naturally ended with the fall of BlackBerry, with Balsillie not getting an NHL team, and with Mike Lazaridis dismissing the first iPhone as a toy. "Who wants to use a phone without a keyboard?"

We all know these stories. In fact, they feel trite in retrospect. There's Blockbuster, Kodak, and countless others. But these moments are clearly a lot harder to identify in the moment. And today, at least for me, it feels like this moment for crypto and blockchains.

It's easy to dismiss this space. Among other things, a blockchain is an objectively worse database. They're slower than today's alternatives. They require more computing power. There's no customer service when something goes wrong. And, it generally costs a lot more to save new information to a blockchain (this cost is called a gas fee).

At the peak of the market in 2021, the average quarterly gas fee (cost per transaction) on the Ethereum network reached about US$37. Given this, nobody wanted to use this database to buy a $2 coffee. (However, many people were, at least at the time, willing to use it to buy expensive NFTs.)

But as Tomasz Tunguz outlines in this great post called "Gas Gas Revolution", the cost of saving data to a blockchain has dropped dramatically over the last few years. And all signs indicate that this trend is only going to continue. So what happens when it becomes cheap/basically free to save to these worse databases?

Well, if you believe that "decentralized" and open databases are going to unlock powerful new innovations, the correct answer is probably: a lot. And then all of a sudden, they'll be better databases.

One way you could oversimplify the Canadian economy is to say that it revolves around three things: natural resources, real estate, and high immigration. (You can tell me I’m wrong in the comments below.) More recently, we’ve also been touting the growing number of tech workers in our cities. But in some ways this is a bit of a vanity metric. 

I think of it in terms of two different categories of workers. There are tech workers that are the result of foreign companies opening satellite offices to take advantage of the weak Canadian dollar and our more enlightened immigration policies. And there are tech workers that are the result of Canadian-based companies innovating, growing, and needing more talent. Think Shopify.

The former situation is not at all bad, but a lot of the value is going to accrue outside of the country. Whereas in the latter situation, we get to be the principal recipients and we get all of the positive externalities associated with innovation and entrepreneurship. One of these is a powerful compounding effect. Successful startups tend to beget even more new companies. 

So even though I work in and benefit from one of the three things that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I believe that we need to be much better at encouraging a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in Canada. We’ve become too complacent.

This is a critically important topic that we don’t seem to be talking about nearly enough. So I plan to do more of that here on the blog.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) has just published this report on shared micro mobility in the US from 2010 to 2021. And it's a good look at how this space has evolved over the years. According to the report, the first modern North American bike share system was installed in Montréal in 2009 and the first in the US was in 2010. Though a quick Google search has Washington DC claiming this title in 2008.

Whatever the case may be, bike share ridership started somewhere around 321k per year in the US and trip volume is now close to 50 million per year. Electric scooters also joined the mix in 2018, and 2019 was a banner year for this mode of transportation. The report suggests this was due to cheap VC money subsidizing these rides. Electric scooters have seen their average trip cost 2x between 2018 ($3.50) and 2021 ($7), despite the average trip distance remaining more or less flat (1.3 to 1.2 miles).

Naturally, the pandemic was bad for shared mobility. But it is interesting to see how much this space has rebounded and how resilient it seems to be. Prior to the pandemic, bike share usage had clear morning and evening peaks, coinciding with people commuting to work. Since then, we have seen a shift to both a wider range of trips (i.e. to do things like get groceries) and more trips throughout the day.

To download a full copy of the report, click here.