The average salary of a teacher in the United States was approximately $61,730 last year. This can make homeownership in high cost areas a challenge. Here is a chart from Curbed: Landed is trying to solve this problem by offering downpayment assistance to “essential professionals”… Read More
$UBER went public on Friday. Notwithstanding the initial stumble, Uber will go down in history as one of the most lucrative venture capital investments of all time. The stock is down from its IPO price of $45 per share, but at that price, the initial… 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
This recent post by Sam Altman (of Y Combinator) on how to achieve outlier success was just passed around our office. And it’s so fucking good that I decided to regurgitate it here on the blog by listing all 13 of his thoughts along with… Read More
Earlier this month it was announced that the on-demand electric scooter and bike startup, Lime, had closed a $310 million series D round. This values the 18-month old company at around $2.4 billion and brings its total raise to $867.1 million. For comparison, Bird —… Read More
Bloomberg recently published a good summary of Zillow’s business and their move into algorithm home buying and flipping. (They are trying to avoid the “flipping” moniker because of the negative connotations associated with it.) Zillow started buying homes directly from owners last spring. They charge… Read More
Over the weekend I received an Amazon Echo as a gift. I set it up in my kitchen on Sunday morning and had it playing music and telling me the weather in no time. I also setup a couple of “routines” so that when I say… Read More
I have been writing about the real estate startup Opendoor for many years here on the blog. Another promising startup in this space is Knock, and today it was announced that they just raised a $400 million Series B round (led by Foundry Group). They share… Read More
Toronto-based Drone Delivery Canada has just signed a $2.5 million agreement with the Moose Cree First Nation. This will bring the company’s drone delivery platform to the Moosonee and Moose Factory communities in northern Ontario (about 19 km south of James Bay). Here is an excerpt… Read More
This is not new. It has been reported on before. But I just finished reading this article about Jeff Bezos’ relentless commitment to “high-quality and high-velocity decision making” at Amazon. Here are a couple of high level points: – There are decisions that cannot be easily… Read More
