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.
The continued densification of Toronto means it is constantly becoming easier to schedule that morning coffee before going into the office or to pop into that meetup after work. And those sorts of things are hugely valuable in today’s economy.
I talked about a number of local startups in my presentation, including 500px, Wattpad and Wealthsimple. But I didn’t show any hard data. So I’d like to do that today. Below is a chart showing total venture funding (internet/software) and the number of deals (Seed to A/B/C/D) in Toronto since 2009:
It was taken from this Medium post. Supposedly this places us 12th in the world as far as startup cities go.
Again, who knows how much of this venture growth has been helped along by intensification. After all: “Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl.” But I would bet money that it’s moving the needle in the right direction.
All of this is important because some of these deals will spawn big companies. And those companies will the hire lots of people, as well as consume space.
Real estate developers like to talk about how they create jobs. And we do. But we can’t have a city of people just building buildings. People and businesses need to fill that space and that hinges on entrepreneurs who are willing to go out there and forge something new for themselves. Fortunately, Toronto seems to have a growing number of those kinds of people.
That could be writing a blog post, recording a podcast, coding an app, designing a building, making something tangible, or whatever. It is the act of creating something. And it’s one of the reasons I love what I do. At the end of the day, I have had a hand in (hopefully) creating something awesome that didn’t exist before.
I don’t think everyone feels this way but, for me, when I don’t block time to “make things” I can sometimes feel antsy. I need time to do creative things. It makes me feel like I’m being productive. It makes me feel like I’m producing output, as opposed to just sitting in meetings and making sure everything is on track. Maybe that’s the architect in me.
Paul Graham describes these two mindsets as that of a manager and that of a maker. And in a great essay published in 2009, he talks about how different these two people’s schedules can be. Below is a longish excerpt that I think you’ll find valuable for life and business.
“There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.”
This really resonates with me. It’s a great reminder, regardless of which schedule you’re currently on. Because even if you’re firmly ensconced in one of the two camps, chances are you work with people in the other one. And understanding where they’re coming from is important.
Paul then goes on to talk about speculative business meetings in his essay. These are the “let’s grab coffee” meetings. They’re costly if you’re on the maker’s schedule, but they’re expected if you’re on the manager’s schedule. I have learned to cap these throughout the week. They can easily overwhelm a calendar.
The big takeaway for me after reading Paul’s essay is that – if you make things – you have to be draconian about blocking time for that. I completely agree that even one meeting can derail an ambitious make session. So I am going to work harder at doing just that.
Would you consider yourself to be a manager, maker, or both? I aspire to be both.
Today the world lost one of the most important architects of our time: Zaha Hadid. She was only 65.
But the thing about architects, particularly famous “starchitects” such as Zaha Hadid, is that when they pass, they leave behind a rich legacy through their buildings. So probably the best way to write a sad post like this one is to just share her work. Courtesy of the Guardian (she was an Iraqi-British architect after all), here are: Zaha Hadid’s 10 best buildings in pictures.
I did, however, want to add a few more thoughts.
When I found out about her death I was sitting in the St. Lawrence Market having lunch. I had my phone out and the news had completely flooded my social feeds. I immediately started messaging a few people because, well, she was Zaha Hadid – a figure you don’t go through architecture school not talking about. But it also hit me because she was only 65. This is the age that some people retire at. It’s the age that some people work their entire lives for.
Whenever this happens I can’t help but think to myself: Why are we so afraid of risks? (I know that this is part of the reason.) And are we even focused on the right risks? So many of us are afraid of sticking our neck out and potentially failing, and yet we all have an expiry date, which means there’s the big risk of potentially dying without having done all the things we want to do. Logically, this should probably be the greater risk.
I realize that this may sound a bit trite, but it feels appropriate. Zaha Hadid took big risks. Her architecture was way out there and that meant she struggled early on. Not only was she a female in a male dominated industry (she was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize), but her work carved out an entirely new architectural language. She embedded technology into the world of architecture – something we talk a lot about on this blog.
The sad thing about death – besides the obvious death part – is that it can take someone dying to remind you of the shortness of life. So to end, I’m going to leave you all with an excerpt from a recent essay by Paul Graham aptly called, Life is Short.
“If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for granted, and then they’re gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I’d spent more time with her. I lived as if she’d always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I did.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Y Combinator, they are a super successful funding platform for early stage startups. They are located in Mountain View, California.
What’s unique about their approach is that they invest a relatively small amount of money ($120,000 for 7% of your company) in a relatively large number of companies. Their most recent cohort was around 85 companies and they do that twice a year.
The rationale behind this approach is that it can be incredibly hard to predict which people and ideas will produce the next great company. Oftentimes the best ideas appear really shitty at first. (Here’s a post by one of the cofounders of Airbnb talking about the company’s early rejections.)
So instead of putting all of their eggs in one basket, YC invests smaller amounts in more companies.
But beyond this being beneficial to them, it’s also a model that I think helps to reduce the barriers to people starting a company. It gives more people the chance to prove that their company has the potential to be something great.
And that’s precisely what makes this new YC Fellow program/experiment so interesting to me.
Instead of $120,000, YC fellows will receive $12,000 and they won’t have to move to the Bay Area (although it’ll be encouraged). They’ll still get mentorship and advice like the regular YC program, but it’ll be a kind of light version.
Though this is almost certainly just the beginning. Here’s how Sam ended his announcement post:
“Someday if it works, we’d love to fund 1,000 companies per year like this.”
Now all of a sudden that’s some scale.
What’s exciting about this is that I believe our cities have the potential to be far more innovative than they are today. Every city is trying to be the next Silicon Valley, but every city is not the next Silicon Valley.
I saw a great tweet the other day that went something like this (I wish I could remember who the author was):
“Entrepreneurs aren’t risk takers. They’re just rich kids with big safety nets.”
It’s a bit of a tongue-in-cheek generalization. But to unlock the full potential of our cities, we should be figuring out how to get everyone participating and building their ideas, not just those with a head start.
I think there are a lot of people around the world who could be doing great things, but they just haven’t been able to take that first step for one reason or another.
Hopefully organizations like Y Combinator will be able to help them take it.
I was browsing through my online reading list this morning (as I do every morning), and I stumbled upon this Dezeen article talking about a big new 6.5 million square foot development being proposed in Miami’s Park West neighborhood.
The goal of the project is to transform Miami into “Florida’s Silicon Valley.”
This sort of thing is happening all around the world. From Buffalo to Lisbon, cities everywhere are betting on tech, startups, and entrepreneurship to grow their economy in the 21st century. And I personally think that’s really exciting.
But as I was reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of an old essay that Paul Graham wrote back in 2006 called, How to be Silicon Valley. (Paul Graham is a famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor).
In his essay Graham argues that to be or to replicate the model of Silicon Valley in your city, you basically need two types of people: rich people and nerds. The idea, of course, being that the nerds work on the cool new ideas and the rich people then fund them.
Using this logic, he specifically calls out Miami as a city where few startups happen and as a city not likely to become another Silicon Valley. Though there’s lots of money and rich people in Miami, there simply aren’t enough nerds. In Graham’s words: “It’s not the kind of place nerds like.”
But that was back in 2006.
The iPhone didn’t even exist yet. Things have since changed. Now there are successful tech companies like Snapchat (valuation north of $15 billion) that are based out of cities like Los Angeles. And I think you could argue that Los Angeles and Miami do share some similarities.
So while it may have seemed far fetched in 2006 for Miami to become a startup hub, is that really the case today?
Startup guru Paul Graham writes really interesting essays. Judging by the date stamps on his website, he’s been easily doing it for more than a decade. And he’s gotten really good at it – everyone in the startup community reads them. Whenever he posts one, I know I read it. No question.
His most recent essay is called: Mean People Fail. And in it, he argues that the structural changes that have happened in our economy have also meant a reversal in the correlation between “meanness” and success. I know that might sound a bit funny, but hear him out:
For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.
That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.
That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with them. When you think of successful people from history who weren’t ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success.
This makes sense to me. But the other reason I find this interesting is because I’ve wondered before if I should be more of an asshole in my professional life. Some people are really good at being assholes. I’m not. It’s not in my nature. When I manage and work with people, I’d rather try and create intrinsic motivation as opposed to using some form of brute force. In my view, the latter burns social capital.
So if you happen to be of the same mindset, you might like to hear that you’re probably sitting on the right trend line. Don’t be mean.
In the spirit of Startup Weekend, I thought it would be interesting to go back in time and pretend to pitch one of the most disruptive innovations of the 19th century: the automobile.
Typically pitches start by first outlining the problem. The idea is to make your audience aware of the pain point, so that they feel excited when you ultimately pitch your solution.
In the case of cars, the incumbent technology would have been horses. So I can imagine somebody standing up and talking about how horses are slow and how they drop stinky poo all over our city streets. And that the time has come for a revolution in personal mobility! Enough of this crap! 🙂
But while many of us probably can’t imagine a world without cars, try and put yourself in the shoes of somebody at the end of the 19th century who can’t imagine a world without horses. And then think about all the things we have subsequently done to make cars thrive:
We paved roads and created networks of freeways.
We invented rules of the road to ensure that people were operating these new devices properly.
We created a licensing system to ensure that anybody who was operating a car was doing so relatively safely and following the rules that had been created.
We created schools that taught people how to be better drivers.
We started insuring cars for when accidents inevitably happened.
We started having to accept fatal car accident and pedestrian deaths.
We had to give over large land masses to parking. In fact, we reorganized entire cities so that the car could be better accommodated.
And we setup government transportation divisions to make sure the needs of the car were always being met.
This is a long list of things we had to do to make cars possible and I’m sure there are many others that I have missed. Today, we all know how disruptive cars have been and we’re certainly questioning many of the things we have done. But we also accept this list as being largely normative.
However, before they were the norm, they were insurmountable challenges. How will we teach everyone how to drive these new cars? How will we minimize accidents? How will we make it easy for people to refuel their cars? Where will people store them when they’re not using them?
Yesterday I wrote about the High Line Park in New York and the tremendous success that it has seen since the first section opened in 2009. It attracts somewhere around 5 million visitors a year and is thought to be responsible for over $2 billion a year in economic activity.
But the economic activity it’s generating and the future tax revenues it’s creating are really a byproduct of the fact that people, quite simply, love the High Line. It attracts people. And that reminded me of a short post I wrote earlier this year called: It’s all about people. Because if you think about it, that’s really the key metric for a lot of things in life and in business.
When you build a park like the High Line in New York or Millennium Park in Chicago, you’re designing it to attract people. When you build a mall, you seek out anchor tenants, because you know they drive foot traffic. When you build a new neighborhood, you’re trying to create street life from scratch. When you run a bar, you want headcount. And when you build a web or mobile app (or write a blog for that matter), you want registered users and eyeballs on your platform.
And you want these things because foot traffic, street life, eyeballs, impressions, users, and headcounts ultimately generate revenue. But here’s the thing: if you focus directly or too much on that end goal, you run the risk of missing an important step along the way, which is simply to delight real people.
In his most recent essay, startup guru Paul Graham put it perfectly when he said:
“The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you’re solving for them.
He’s obviously talking about technology products, but the same could be said for parks, streets, malls, plazas, and so on. To design and build better cities, we need to be experts on people. And we need to create spaces and environments that people actually want to occupy. Spaces that improve people’s lives.
Now, this may sound fairly obvious to some of you. But quite often I feel like we get sidetracked by things that don’t matter as much as people do.
In keeping with the recent theme about cities, their brands, and the messages they send, I thought I would revisit an old essay (2008) written by Paul Graham (of Y-Combinator) called “Cities and Ambition.” In it, he talks about the various messages that cities send us, such as:
You should make more money (New York)
You should be better looking (Miami?)
You should be smarter (Cambridge)
You should be more powerful (Silicon Valley)
But the most interesting part of his argument is the belief that we are largely products of our environment. No matter how strong or formidable our personalities might be, the message a city sends us is hugely important. In fact, it might be impossible to escape it. Here’s how Paul puts it:
How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference.
But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.
You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you’ve heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren’t genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?
If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardo couldn’t beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can?
I don’t. I’m fairly stubborn, but I wouldn’t try to fight this force. I’d rather use it. So I’ve thought a lot about where to live.
To some, this thought may depress you. I mean, if you happen to live in a city or place with the “wrong” message, you might feel as if you’re missing out. I know that thought certainly crossed my mind when I read his essay. But different messages resonate with different people, and so maybe the message your city is telling you is exactly the one you need to accomplish great things.
In Toronto, I’d say that the message is similar to that of New York: You should make more money. Oh, and also that you should buy more condos 😉
The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can actually discover startup ideas. You can use the need for growth as a form of evolutionary pressure. If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with.
