Tag: scott galloway

• Pulling the future forward

  I like the way that Scott Galloway describes entrepreneurship in this recent post about why he’s bearish on Tesla:

  Entrepreneur is a synonym for salesperson, and salesperson is the pedestrian term for storyteller. Pro tip: No startup makes sense. We (entrepreneurs) are all impostors who must deploy a fiction (a story) that captures the imagination and attracts capital to pull the future forward and turn rhyme into reason. No business I have started, at the moment of inception, made any sense … until it did. Or didn’t. The only way to predict the future is to make it.

  He then goes on to describe the difference between an entrepreneur and a liar:

  This is not the same as lying. There’s a real distinction between an entrepreneur and a liar: Entrepreneurs believe their story will come true, as they are laser-focused on making it true. A liar, well, they know they’re misleading people with false data. Usually for money (i.e., fraud). This is where Tesla turns gray.

  Scott continues to say things about Elon and Tesla. But that’s not the point of today’s post.

  The point I would like to make is that real estate development is an inherently entrepreneurial endeavor. You need to be a salesperson and a compelling storyteller, because that’s the only way you’ll be able to create the future. And creating the future is what developers do.

  2024.10.20

• Airbnb still has a lot of accommodations

  There are a lot of headwinds facing Airbnb. Cities around the world seem to be systematically making it more difficult to be a host. New York City, as many of you know, recently made it so that you need to be physically present while the dwelling is being rented. That is pretty limiting. Similar things are happening in non-urban markets too. North of Toronto in Muskoka, there’s a draft by-law that will, among other things, limit short-term rentals to 50% of the total number of days within certain time periods. That eliminates the possibility of doing this as a business. So in many ways, it’s easy to be pessimistic about the future of Airbnb.

  But at the same time, if you step back and look at the bigger picture, there are over 7 million active listings on Airbnb. This effectively makes it the largest hospitality brand in the world. There are more accommodations on Airbnb than with Marriott, Hilton, Intercontinental, Wyndham, and Hyatt combined. (The below chart is from Scott Galloway.) It’s also important to point out that while Airbnb doesn’t own any of its own supply, the same is true of most hotel brands. They are, brands. The difference is that Airbnb created a more scalable platform and a more decentralized approach to aggregating supply.

  

  The numbers also don’t suggest that things are slowing down for Airbnb. (Here’s their Q3 2023 shareholder letter.) Active listings on the platform grew 19% YoY in Q3 2023 (or by almost 1 million listings). Revenue is up. Free cash flow is up. And in Q3 of last year, the company repurchased $500 million of stock, bringing their one year total to somewhere around $3 billion. So despite all of the efforts to curb short-term rentals within our cities, the company, at least for now, seems to be holding up just fine. And if they can successfully diversify beyond their core business, there could even be reason to be bullish on the world’s largest hospitality brand.

  Full disclosure: I am long $ABNB.

  2024.01.18

• There’s something to be said about hard assets

  Here is a recent post by Scott Galloway comparing Uber and WeWork. In it, he praises the virtues of asset-light business models:

  For most of business history, having assets was good, and having more was even better. However, one of technology’s tectonic unlocks has been elevating information (bits) over objects (atoms). In the information age, owning assets is one business, while operating them is another, and each demands distinct capital structures, management approaches, and operational skills. Businesses offering the greatest return on invested capital don’t have much capital (assets) and can scale up faster, as they don’t bind themselves to cars, apartments, or even inventory.

  We know this. Uber doesn’t own cars. Airbnb doesn’t own rental properties. And most hotels, as Galloway mentions, also don’t own their real estate. Generally speaking, hotels are brands that enter into fee-earning management contracts with people who own real estate.

  However, WeWork is not this. According to Galloway, WeWork had $47 billion of pre-IPO lease obligations. These ran/run through to 2038. In this regard, WeWork is more bank-like: they have a similar mismatch of short-term assets and long-term liabilities.

  Galloway also argues that asset-light businesses offer the greatest ROI because they can scale up faster. And this is certainly one of the virtues of tech businesses. In more asset-heavy businesses like real estate development, each project/asset is largely a discrete effort.

  But there are significant advantages to owning real estate; one of them being that, at the end of the day, you own a hard asset.

  Venture capitalist Fred Wilson once wrote on his blog that one of his big lessons from the dot-com bubble was that he learned to take his tech wealth and funnel portions of it into hard assets — namely real estate in New York City.

  This, of course, comes with its own set of risks. But clearly there is something to be said about owning real estate.

  2023.11.18

• Scarcity and stories

  Scarcity. FOMO. Scott Galloway is right. In this recent post, he talks about why humans are programmed to chase scarcity and why blockchains (specifically NFTs) could represent something incredibly meaningful for not just the art world but for many other asset classes. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

  People like scarcity — a lot. Owning something scarce makes one feel unique, and signals success and worthiness as a potential mate. Scarcity is also an instinctual trigger for obsession — when we sense a scarcity of something, be it food or a mate, we are programmed to become obsessed with finding it. Art auctions, the (pre-pandemic) lines outside Supreme, and the margins on a Panerai Tourbillon prove this point.

  A Van Gogh and a Rothko are both unique, and therefore scarce, because they are made of atoms, and it is impossible to arrange a second set of atoms in an identical configuration. Print artists, whose lithographs are made to be reproduced without alteration, use a small “17/100” written in the corner, to distinguish each print and bestow scarcity upon it.

  To hold value, scarcity must be credible. The dirty (not-so) secret of the art world is that art buyers, and even professional art appraisers, struggle to discern originals from forgeries. A well-made forgery provides the same practical value as an original — you can hang it on your wall and bask in its profundity. Yet the art world invests millions of dollars in identifying the “real” version of valuable works; once unmasked, forgeries are nearly worthless.

  I have always found this fascinating about art (but really, it applies to most other things). Is the price you pay so that you can “bask in its profundity” or because the object in question signifies something — it tells a story? In addition to scarcity, we also obsess over stories. They help create meaning for us.

  The interesting thing about all of this is that it’s really just a question of perception. When a work of art is discovered to be a fake that is, indeed, detrimental to value. But what changed? The art itself hasn’t changed. We just no longer enjoy it and derive as much value from it because the story is not what we thought it was.

  2021.04.09

• Income-to-expense ratio

  Professor Scott Galloway’s recent post called “The Algebra of Wealth” makes the argument that there are four key factors in the creation of wealth: focus, stoicism, time, and diversification. Some of you may argue with his points around diversification. I’ve heard Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger say before that diversification is really just admitting that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing. Because if you did, you wouldn’t need diversification to protect you.

  That said, I like a lot of the points that Galloway makes on his blog. For one, he calls bullshit on the age-old advice that you should just “follow your passion.” Finding something you love to do is important and ideal. I feel incredibly fortunate that I found something (there were pivots) that I want to be my life’s work. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t and that I don’t think about money. As I’ve said before, I never understood why money is often a taboo topic in architecture schools.

  Galloway also takes a stab at defining, what is rich?

  “I know a lot of people who make an extraordinary amount of money, but few people who are rich. Rich is having passive income greater than your burn. People on a path to money focus on their earnings; people on a path to wealth also focus on their burn. Joseph Heller said, “It takes brains not to make money.” (Note: I think he was casting a favorable light on his starving artist friends). This may be true, but it definitely takes brains to hold onto it (i.e., money).“

  “My father receives $48,000 per year from Social Security and his Royal Navy pension (he was a frogman). He spends $40,000, and it’s enough to make him happy. He swims every day, watches a shit-ton of hockey (Leafs fan), and on Fridays goes to The Taco Stand (an actual restaurant in La Jolla) where he orders something called a michelada. (Apparently it’s medicine delivered in a chilled salt-rimmed glass — he claims his hair is regrowing and that he’s sleeping better. I believe half of that so … I believe it.) Anyway, it’s not your income, but your income-to-expense ratio, that determines if you’re rich.“

  When I was growing up, my dad used to always tell me that it doesn’t matter how much money you make, it matters what you do with the money that you make. That is another way of saying, focus on your income-to-expense ratio. Spend less than you make and be strategic with what’s leftover. This is a good principle to follow for real estate as well. As a rule, it’s generally a good thing when your revenue is greater than your operating expenses and your NOI is positive.

  But there’s another important message in Galloway’s excerpt: you don’t necessarily need a lot to be happy. (Sign me up for The Taco Stand on Fridays!) And if you’re in position where your passive income is greater than your burn, then you also have something called freedom.

  For Scott Galloway’s full post about The Algebra of Wealth, click here.

  2021.02.14

• The Great Dispersion

  It’s that time of year again. It’s time to make predictions for the upcoming year and time to look back on the ones we all got wrong from a year prior. I don’t recall many people (if any) predicting that a pandemic would cripple the global economy.

  I like how Scott Galloway put it in his 2021 predictions post. It’s obviously better to be right than wrong, but it’s okay to be wrong. The value in writing down your thoughts is that it forces you to think. It’s the reasoning that matters. (It’s one of the reasons why some people write blogs.)

  A key theme in Galloway’s predictions post is something that he calls “The Great Dispersion.” This involves two things: (1) The physical distribution of products and services over wider areas and (2) the bypassing of gatekeepers and other intermediaries (which is something the internet has always been good at).

  You could interpret this as being directly antithetical to cities. Urbanism, after all, is all about agglomerations. But I think it’s more nuanced that that. Cities have generally always had both centralizing and decentralizing forces. The two can co-exist.

  I will get into this in more detail in my own 2021 predictions post. But in the mean time, I would encourage you check out what Scott Galloway recently published, over here. And if any of you have any thoughts about what’s in store for us in 2021, please leave a comment below.

  Don’t worry, it’s okay if you’re not right.

  2020.12.29

• A post corona world

  There’s a lot of speculation (that’s all you can really do) about what our world is going to look like on the other side of this pandemic.

  I think it’s easy to overreach at a time like this and prognosticate dramatic change — such as the demise of cities and urbanity as we know it. But while I do believe that there are bound to be changes, I also know that after 9/11 most of us eventually stopped being afraid of flying and of being in tall buildings. We forgot and moved on.

  So, what might change?

  Scott Galloway argued on his blog today that “things won’t change as much as they will accelerate.” In other words, this pandemic is simply going to make the future happen faster. And one of those things is going to be a faster shift to online for higher education. It is untenable for education costs to continue increasing at the pace that they have been.

  In this recent Intelligencer interview with Chamath Palihapitiya, he puts forward the idea that medical data might start to be used publicly. Meaning that, after this is all done, we might be willing to give up a certain amount of our personal freedom in exchange for knowing whether we’re in a restaurant with someone who is shedding a communicable disease.

  And finally, Richard Florida recently published this online talk about how cities can bounce back from COVID-19. In it, he argues that, yes, cities will survive and that it could actually reinforce the “winner-take-all urbanism” that we have already been seeing.

  This, of course, is really just the start of the conversation.

  2020.04.03

• A non-zero probability of copycats

  Software businesses are generally high margin businesses. But along with this feature comes some risks. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post by Scott Galloway (which is actually about FedEx):

  With any software start-up, there is a non-zero probability that you wake up the next day and find that a better-resourced firm (Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe) has deployed 200 engineers to copy your product, bundle it with their stack for free, or near free, and … welcome to zero. I believe this is happening to Slack, but more slowly than Netscape, as Microsoft’s General Counsel has likely coached Satya to charge a nominal fee for Teams and let Slack bleed out, instead of putting a bullet in its head and stirring the DOJ from a 3-Ambien slumber.

  Real estate, by comparison, doesn’t get disrupted in quite the same way. A location/city can lose its economic purpose (Great Grimsby is just one example), but as long as there are growth tailwinds the real estate should do well.

  Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has on many occasions written about how he (and his firm) made a fortune in the dot-com era, only to lose it all and have to remake it again over the subsequent decades.

  One the lessons learned from that experience (according to his blog), was to take some of that second tech fortune and invest it into hard assets — namely real estate. That feels right to me.

  2019.12.21

• Amazon and retail

  This is an excellent talk by NYU professor Scott Galloway about Amazon, online grocery, and many other aspects of the retail landscape. The bits about Amazon’s scale and reach are fascinating. There is about 30 minutes of him speaking quickly and then another 15 minutes of Q&A. If you can’t see it below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HyiY_m_YxI&w=560&h=315]

  2018.09.26