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: podcast

  • Shopify’s mission is to be an entrepreneurship company

    Howard Lindzon has a podcast called Panic with Friends. It was started last March (hence the name) and he uses it to interview entrepreneurs, investors, venture capitalists, and other business people about what they’re up to. In today’s episode he speaks with Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, about the future of ecommerce and about how they’re positioning the company. What was interesting but not surprising to hear was that in the early years people didn’t believe that Shopify had a large enough total addressable market. Supposedly, there weren’t enough people out there who might be interested in starting their own online store. That, of course, has proven to be false and there are new and successful ideas emerging all the time. We’re also now talking about how ecommerce is reshaping the landscape of our cities. Given all of this, the company has grown to think of itself as an entrepreneurship company. If you’re at all ambitious, then you’re an entrepreneur in their eyes and Shopify wants to be the platform for you. As a Canadian, it’s great to see them doing so well. If you can’t see the embedded Spotify player above, click here.

  • Using Clubhouse to talk about real estate and proptech

    Okay, Clubhouse is pretty awesome. I participated in my first discussion room — thanks to my friend Evgeny, who has been a vocal supporter of the platform — and I have now seen the light. The topic was real estate and PropTech. And we hope to do it again.

    It feels a bit like Twitter to me, but obviously with audio and with greater controls and visibility in terms of who can participate inside of a discussion room.

    It also makes perfect sense to me that Twitter is piloting their own version of Clubhouse called Spaces. That feels like a natural extension and something that needs to happen. Perhaps some of the moderation features will also make their way into the rest of Twitter.

    As many of you already know, what makes Clubhouse unique is that the communication is free-flowing and impromptu. You are able to see what topics people are talking about and then jump in and out of those audio rooms, as well as invite people to join a discussion that you may be having.

    All of this makes the communication feel like you’re at a party or in an open office. Over there you can see/hear that someone is talking about the “Pensky file.” If that’s interesting and/or relevant to you, you have the option of jumping into that conversation.

    I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these features and behaviors translated over into workplace collaboration tools. I think it would be helpful to see what other discussions are taking place within a team or company.

    Maybe if we made things a little more free flowing, we wouldn’t need so many damn Zoom meetings.

  • Design makes everything better — architecture as product

    https://dmeb.castos.com/episodes/interview-with-david-wex

    My friend David Wex of Urban Capital Property Group — who I featured in my “BARED” blog series back in 2016 — was recently interviewed by architect Vincent Van den Brink (of Breakhouse) for the firm’s podcast called, Design Makes Everything Better. It’s a great listen and I particularly like the bit around branded vs. opportunistic real estate development. In the case of Urban Capital, David would describe his firm as being a branded developer. They build a specific product and it doesn’t really change when they build across Toronto and in other markets. Expect exposed concrete ceilings and exposed ducts, among other things. If you can’t see the embedded podcast above, you can have a listen over here.

  • The game of life

    “Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.” — Seth Godin

    I mention and quote Seth Godin fairly often on this blog and so it only seems right to share this recent podcast that he did on the Tim Ferriss Show. Broadly speaking, the conversation is about “the game of life, the value of hacks, and overcoming anxiety.” I think most of you will find it useful regardless of what you do and what you’re involved in. It’s over an hour long, but there’s a full transcript available if you’d prefer to read, rather than listen. If you’re looking for something even shorter, here’s a quick video by Tim Ferris that has Seth talking about why worrying isn’t productive and that it’s really in service of our need for status quo and reassurance.

  • Libra expected to launch within Indian WhatsApp

    I was at a wedding last night (congrats, again, Kate + Rob) and a group of us started talking about Facebook, or, more specifically, how most of us have stopped using it all together. I deleted my account last year, but ended up having to create a ghost account with no friends just so that I could run social ads. But other than that, I don’t go on. This, of course, is a problem for Facebook. Here are some stats on its declining user base.

    This trend line could be one of the motivating factors behind Libra (Facebook’s new blockchain-based currency). Payment infrastructure, if successful, should be a lot stickier than social infrastructure. But being the classic underachiever that he is, Zuckerberg’s ambitions run even deeper than this. Max Read published a fantastic article on Libra in New York Magazine last week. Here is an excerpt:

    As far as I know, there’s only one other entity out there developing a blockchain-based digital currency for a billion-plus-member economy: China. The People’s Bank of China has been amassing blockchain and digital-currency patents as it develops its own cryptocurrency — loosely pegged to a basket of other currencies, just like Libra — which could help it more efficiently monitor and control capital flows. (So much for the decentralized, anarchist dream of cryptocurrency.) Facebook doesn’t want to compete with Mastercard, or even with Goldman Sachs. It wants to be the currency platform Mastercard operates on. Facebook’s payment product is a whole new currency because its long-term competition isn’t PayPal or Visa or even WeChat, but the renminbi, the euro, the yen, and the dollar.

    Libra is expected to be first available to Indian WhatsApp users. The goal is to gain a foothold in the $689 billion global remittance economy, of which $80 billion flowed to India last year (2018). In the short-term, this probably won’t make any or much money for the company. But it should get people using and bought in to Libra in the medium-term.

    If you’re looking for more on Libra, including what checks and balances can expected to be in place regarding your privacy and personal information, have a listen to this podcast:

    Photo by Nitin Mendekar on Unsplash

  • How developers shape public life

    The most recent episode of The Urbanist is about the role of private developers in shaping public spaces and public life within our cities. How do you balance private and public interests?

    Much of the discussion focuses on the redevelopment of King’s Cross in London, which is generally considered to be a successful example of large-scale, developer-led, urban regeneration. Andrew Tuck is less complimentary of Hudson Yards in New York.

    One point that I found interesting was the remark that modern zoning tends to force buildings apart. It creates more in-between space. The result is that we are losing some of the more intimate public spaces found in older neighborhoods.

    To listen to the full 30 minute episode, click here.

    Photo by Josh Edgoose on Unsplash (King’s Cross, London)

  • Risk game

    “Francis is one of the most decisive people I know. He made a commitment to invest in our first venture capital fund in a five-minute cab we shared to work one morning.”

    —Fred Wilson, Co-Founder, Venture Capitalist, and Blogger, Union Square Ventures

    Francis Greenburger, who is founder and CEO of the real estate investment and development firm Time Equities, recently appeared on Barry Ritholtz’s Masters in Business Podcast.

    They touch on a number of topics, including why development sometimes produces more bankruptcies than billionaires; why development margins are compressed in Toronto; and how Francis popularized the co-op in New York. 

    Francis is also the author of Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur. So if you like the podcast – which is a great listen – there’s also a book for you. Click here for the podcast.

  • How we make the decisions that matter most

    I’m listening to the below podcast right now with Sonal Chokshi, Chris Dixon, and Steven Johnson. Steven recently published a new book called, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter Most. If you can’t see the embedded podcast below, click here.

    [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/497128947″ params=”color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]

    It is about the big and meaningful decisions that we make as individuals – such as where to live or who to marry – as well as the big and meaningful decisions that we make as a collective – such as how to plan a city or fight climate change. But most importantly, it is about how we can get better at them.

    Supposedly, part of the science (and art) behind deliberative decision making is using tricks to get our minds to see problems and their complexities differently. That could involve scenario planning and even considering the weirdest possible outcomes. In fact, Steven finds a lot of value in fictional storytelling.

    There could also be implications for city building. Tech is allowing us to collect a lot more data about the ways in which our cities operate today. But as we get better at running complex simulations, we should also get a lot better at understanding the long-term implications of our decisions.

    I may just have to get Steven’s new book.

  • “I hate golf”

    I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell, and not just because he’s Canadian and went to the University of Toronto (my alma mater), although those facts certainly don’t hurt.

    I’m late to his podcast, Revisionist History, so in case some of you are as well, I would encourage you to check it out. Every episode reexamines something from the past and questions: Did we get it right the first time? It’s very Gladwell. It’s a must listen.

    The episodes span a secret research project setup by the Pentagon in downtown Saigon during the Vietnam War to why rich people are obsessed with the game of golf. Spoiler: He hates golf.

    The golf episode will be of particular interest to many of you because it deals with real estate. Malcolm wades into something known as California Proposition 13, which is a constitutional exemption that keeps property taxes artificially low.

    It is what has allowed these “vast, gorgeous, and private” golf courses to continue to exist in expensive cities like Los Angeles. Otherwise they would have long ago drowned under the property taxes following reassessment.

    This also leads to a philosophical debate about what constitutes a change in ownership, since many clubs are member owned and Proposition 13 requires that there not be a change in more than 50% of the ownership. 

    But I’ll stop there. Give it a listen. Malcolm is just excellent.

    Photo by Rémi Müller on Unsplash

  • Mastering Bitcoin

    I’m still in the office right now (wading through Excel models) and I’m late for a Christmas party. So by necessity today’s post is going to be a short one.

    Below is a podcast from the Kevin Rose Show called “Bitcoin’s true potential”. It’s with Andreas M. Antonopoulos, who is the author of a number of books on the topic including: Mastering Bitcoin, The Internet of Money, and Mastering Ethereum.

    If you’re pressed for time, here are a couple of time stamps that may interest you:

    18:12 – Global opportunities and challenges for expanded Bitcoin use 
    28:00 – Why Andreas spends Bitcoin almost every day
    29:38 – How reduced volatility will help Bitcoin achieve mass adoption
    32:38 – Bitcoin’s potential market capitalization
    35:35 – Bitcoin versus Visa for consumer transactions
    1:06:10 – The most compelling application areas Andreas is tracking
    1:22:54 – The future of cryptography: ECDSA and SHA-256

    And if you can’t see the embedded podcast below, click here.

    https://embed.simplecast.com/bd660142