Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: fred wilson

  • Car or smartphone?

    I was browsing my Tumblr feed this morning and I found a link to an interview with Marc Andreessen posted by Fred Wilson.

    I liked Marc’s response to a question relating to people’s love of cars and so I decided to post it to Facebook. I then received an email notification from Fred Wilson’s AVC blog titled “The New Freedom.” Turns out that he liked the quote as well. With so much love for this quote, I figured it was worth reposting here.

    The interviewer started a question to Marc with, “But people love their cars.” This is his response:

    “Ask a kid. Take teenagers 20 years ago and ask them would they rather have a car or a computer? And the answer would have been 100% of the time they’d rather have a car, because a car represents freedom, right?

    Today, ask kids if they’d rather have a smartphone or a car if they had to pick and 100% would say smartphones. Because smartphones represent freedom. There’s a huge social behavior reorientation that’s already happening. And you can see it through that. And I’m not saying nobody can own cars. If people want to own cars, they can own cars. But there is a new generation coming where freedom is defined by “I can do anything I want, whenever I want. If I want a ride, I get a ride, but I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to make car payments. I don’t have to worry about insurance. I have complete flexibility.” That is freedom too.”

    This ties in well with the return to city centers and downtowns. When people live in walkable neighbourhoods, cars can be more of a liability (car payments, insurance, parking, and so on). In fact, I think of them as a liability all around. Banks think of them as an asset, but I like my assets to increase in value.

    The other interesting point that Marc makes about cars is that supply and demand are not very well matched using the current model. If you only use your car to drive to and from work, it sits idle 90% of the time. This is where the sharing economy comes into play: How can people better optimize that 90%?

    My smartphone certainly doesn’t sit idle 90% of the time.

  • Urban bifurcation

    In light of Bill de Blasio being elected yesterday as the new mayor of New York City, I thought I would post this interesting graphic I found on Atlantic Cities:

    image

    What it shows is a clear split.

    If you live in Manhattan or nearby areas in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, you most likely saw your property values rise from 2008 to 2012. However, if you live on the outskirts of the city, you may have seen your property values fall as much as 20% (the darkest red areas).

    This shift back to city centers has been well documented and labeled, by some, as The Great Inversion. But in many ways it’s a symptom of a greater phenomenon at work: rising income inequality.

    It’s happening in New York. It’s happening in Toronto. And in many other global cities. New York VC Fred Wilson believes that the solution lies in the three Es: education, empowerment and entrepreneurship. That sounds like a great start to me.

  • Tech is now the second largest job sector in New York City

    According to a recent report called Building a Digital City, which I found via Fred Wilson’s blog, tech is now the second largest job sector in New York City behind financial services (which includes real estate). There are an estimated 262,000 tech workers in the city earning wages in excess of $30 billion.

    This is a really interesting stat that speaks to the diversity of New York’s economy and the ability for it to continually reinvent itself. But what I found particularly interesting, was the following comment by Fred Wilson:

    “And the reason tech is growing so fast in NYC is that it is embedding itself in all of these other industries. It’s not entirely clear to me whether Gilt is a tech company or a fashion/retail company, it is not clear to me whether ZocDoc is a tech company or a health care company, it is not clear to me whether Codecademy is a tech company or an education company.”

    This is very much the way I think about so called tech companies today. I recently had a Rotman colleague say to me that he felt the startup world was becoming saturated. Everyone is now seemingly working on some new app.

    But I like to think of it slightly differently. As Fred’s comment above suggests, a lot of startups today aren’t purely tech companies. They’re just out to solve a problem and it just so happens that technology and the internet are creating all sorts of opportunities for new solutions.

    I also read a blog called Platform Connected and the author put it like this:

    “In the future, every company will be a tech company. We already see this change around us as companies move to restructure their business models in a way that uses data to create value. We are moving from linear to networked business models, from dumb pipes to intelligent platforms. All businesses will need to move to this new model at some point, or risk being disrupted by platforms that do.”

    So there you have it. Software really is eating the world.

  • Why I decided to start blogging

    New York VC Fred Wilson wrote a blog post yesterday called “Writing It Down.” In it he talks about why he blogs everyday. It’s worth reading. If you’re into tech, you should also read his linked post on Twitter.

    After reading it, I thought I should come clean about something: He’s one of the main reasons I decided to start blogging. I saw what he was doing and I felt inspired. The other reason is that I started blogging for Dirt and really enjoyed it. I’m trying to also do it daily, but so far I haven’t made any public promises on that front. I’d rather under promise and over deliver.

    I’ve been an avid reader of Fred’s blog for awhile now. What I find really powerful is that it has become a mechanism for him to get his thoughts out and into the world and to get feedback on them. Sometimes his posts can be a definitive how-to (such as his MBA Monday lessons) and in other cases it’s clear that he himself isn’t sure of the answer, but that he wants to put it out there for discussion. And I think that’s a great way to be. There’s wisdom in crowds.

    At the same time, when I decided to start blogging personally, I told myself that even if nobody reads my stuff that I’d still be getting value out of it. That’s because writing forces you to think about things to a greater extent than if you, well, just sat and thought about them. I like that.

    However, I do hope that my blog will end up getting read by others because I’m interested in happenstance. I’m interested in the chance that like-minded individuals will read one of my posts about cities and reach out to me, or introduce me to somebody I should meet. 

    When you put yourself out there, I think you also open yourself up to opportunities.

  • Labour Day thoughts…

    Today is Labour Day (or Labor Day for my American friends).

    Many of us simply think of it as the official end of summer, but it’s also the day we’re supposed to celebrate the labour union movement and the achievements of workers. Given this, and the fact that yesterday’s post was about Detroit, it seems like an appropriate time to talk about jobs.

    In many ways, the woes of Detroit are simply an extreme example of what’s happening in many advanced economies. The loss of manufacturing based jobs is creating a void that is not being filled – or is being filled differently – by new industries.

    The first piece to this is what I mentioned yesterday: education.

    Manufacturing jobs allowed unskilled workers to make good middle class salaries. But other than a few remaining instances – such as in Fort McMurray, where high school graduates can make six figures working in the Canadian oil sands and the average price of a home is pushing $800,000 – I think it’s pretty clear that the opportunities for unskilled workers is on the decline.

    Therefore (and this is old news), we clearly need to figure out ways to retrain existing workers and ensure that the next generation is equipped with the skills and knowledge to compete in this new world. The problem though – and this is the second piece – is that I’m not sure the new economy will require the same raw number of people.

    What I mean by this is that scaling up production of an automative plant is quite different than scaling up an internet platform like Twitter or Tumblr. You just don’t need as many people, which is why the returns to being smart have grown massively for those few. And this is part of the reason we’re seeing rising income inequality across the board.

    Now, I don’t know what the answer is, but I think we’ve already shown that the transition to a new economy isn’t going to be a smooth one. To that end, I’ll leave you with one last thought which came from a former professor of mine at Rotman, Walid Hejazi.

    His argument is that it’s actually unethical for governments to subsidize unproductive sectors of the economy, such as a manufacturing, in order to sustain jobs. The reason being that you then have high school students telling themselves that they don’t need to go to University because they can simply go work at the local plant and make decent money. But what they don’t realize is that there’s a very real expiry date to those opportunities and, when it comes, it’ll be much harder for them to be retrained.

    What are your thoughts?

    Here’s what venture capitalist Fred Wilson had to say today.

  • I was watching this fireside chat with Fred Wilson the other day and he brought up something that I thought was pretty neat: 1 slide pitches.

    It got me thinking. What’s the most important slide in the Dirt pitch deck? Could one of them stand on its own?

    Well here it is. Dirt’s 1 slide pitch.

  • I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can’t make money by being wrong. And you can’t make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong. I really like that framework.

    @fredwilson

  • Single User Utility In A Social System

    One of the most important lessons we took from delicious was the value of single user utility in social systems. It might seem odd that systems designed to leverage interactions between people can have (should have?) single person utility. But I strongly believe they should.

    Single User Utility In A Social System

  • What a CEO does

    “A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.”

    What a CEO does