Fred Wilson’s latest blog post about “grinding” tells the story of how Twitter solved the infamous “fail whale” problem that plagued its platform in the early days. I remember that whale, as I’m sure many of you do as well. It was a problem and,… Read More
The Wall Street Journal estimates that, from now until about 2037, roughly 21 million homes in the United States will be vacated by seniors. To put this number into perspective, it’s about 25% of the US for-sale housing stock and more than double the amount… Read More
Developing a building can often feel like you’re trying to solve a rubik’s cube. Among other things, you have to manage a myriad of different stakeholders, all of which — naturally — operate in their own self-interest. There’s the city, community, politicians, various agencies, consultants,… Read More
The below graphs are taken from a recent (June 2019) report by Knight Frank on “prime” residential pricing across the world. They define “prime” as generally being the top 5% of each market by value. What these graphs show are the spread between the average… Read More
For two reasons, I really like Fred Wilson’s recent blog post on hypothetical value to real value. Firstly, it is structured in the way that I think good blog posts are structured. He starts with a personal story (about this son) and then uses that… Read More
On Monday, Slate Asset Management announced a minority investment from Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Petershill Program. This is great news, so here’s a copy of the full press release that went out. Toronto, August 19, 2019 – Slate Asset Management L.P. (Slate), a leading alternative… Read More
Inc. Magazine just did a profile on Opendoor, which is a company that we have, of course, talked a lot about on this blog and that I continue to follow closely. It’s interesting to read about some of the challenges that they’ve been having as… Read More
Shane Dingman’s recent Globe and Mail article about “the investment case for mid-rise condos” is a good summary of why this housing type has become so popular in Toronto. Mid-rise buildings tend to attract more end-users because of their boutique scale. That is, they attract… Read More
MIT’s Self Assembly Lab and Invena (which is an organization based out of the Maldives) are trying to invent a system of underwater devices that naturally harness wave energy to restore and/or create new beaches, sandbars, and islands. The hope is that this line of… Read More
The word on the street is that Sonder — the marketplace for vacation rentals and competitor to Airbnb — is close to finalizing a $200 million investment round that would value the company at $1 billion. I first wrote about Sonder back in 2016 after… Read More
