I have heard a number of people describe this blog as covering all that is new. That wasn’t my explicit goal when I started writing it. My goal was simply to focus on cities and all the wonderful things that shape them. But it turns… Read More
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,… Read More
Today, Amazon ships approximately 72% of its own packages. This is up from about 47% in 2019. Ben Thompson of Stratechery recently published an excellent article talking about why this is important and how the company’s investments in logistics are, yet again, paying dividends. The… Read More
It was recently announced that Amazon plans to start opening large brick-and-mortar retail stores that are akin to department stores. They won’t be quite as big. Supposedly they will be around 30,000 square feet. But this is still a meaningful commitment to physical retailing. The… Read More
Blair Welch, co-founding partner of Slate Asset Management, was recently interviewed by Don Wilcox of RENX about the company’s recent acquisition of the Commercial Real Estate Business of New York-based Annaly Capital Management. As part of the deal, we also acquired $0.4 billion of grocery-anchored… Read More
Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it plans to return to an “office-centric culture” as its baseline. Its rationale was that being in an office allows the company to better “invent, collaborate, and learn together.” All of this was laid out in an announcement that… Read More
Amazon is sometimes criticized for its private labels. The way this generally works is that Amazon uses the data that it collects from its platform to see what customers are buying. It then goes out and makes its own version of these products and sells… Read More
I was speaking with a writer from the Globe & Mail today about the future of office. We were half talking about a new AAA strata office building — called Capital Point — that we (Slate) are in the midst of launching in the Metrotown… Read More
Every year, Benedict Evans publishes a presentation about the “big macro tech trends” impacting the global economy. They are always excellent and I usually share them here on the blog. It’s also becoming harder and harder to differentiate tech trends from the rest of the… Read More
With the recent announcement that Jeff Bezos will be stepping down as CEO of Amazon later this year, there have been countless articles about the legacy that he will be leaving behind, as well as about the next act that is expected to follow. A… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 