Amazon is sometimes criticized for its private labels. The way this generally works is that Amazon uses the data that it collects from its platform to see what customers are buying. It then goes out and makes its own version of these products and sells… Read More
All posts tagged “tech”
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… Read More
The 25 top-funded proptech startups in Canada
Proptech Collective has just published their inaugural 2021 Proptech in Canada report. Here are a couple of screen grabs that you all might find interesting: What these images should tell you is that the Canadian proptech landscape is fairly Toronto-centric, but that it’s also very… Read More
My 2021 predictions
Life will feel a lot more normal by spring/summer (Q2). By this time, the various vaccines should be broadly available (at least in the developed world). This is something that never happened during the Spanish Flu. From what I have read, the Spanish Flu lasted… Read More
The case for speculative asset bubbles (and happy new year)
This is an interesting perspective. It is from Fred Wilson’s annual what-happened-this-past-year post: But here is the thing about speculative frenzies – they are generally directionally correct but off in their order of magnitude. And they finance the trend that they are directionally correct about.… Read More
Amazon opens up its maps platform
More than half of Amazon’s US deliveries are now completed using its own fleet. So at some point, the company will no longer need to rely on FedEx and/or UPS. It’s also on track to quickly surpass them in terms of packages delivered per year,… Read More
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… Read More
Crossing the chasm in Austin
I can’t open Twitter these days without seeing someone in the tech industry talking about moving or talking about someone who just moved to either Austin or Miami. “What’s the best neighborhood in Miami for startups? My friend just moved to Edgewater. Where did so-and-so… Read More
Delivering happiness
I was both surprised and saddened to learn about the death of Tony Hsieh this weekend. Forty-six years old is far too young. Though best known as a pioneer of e-commerce (he was previously CEO of Zappos) and for his brilliant/wacky management ideas, Tony was… Read More
The value of boredom
I took a class during my undergraduate degree about the material culture of the Victorian era. I took it mostly for fun and because I found the lessons relevant to architecture. But it also allowed me to write papers about things like gin (though I… Read More