Tag: tech

• What motivates us

  Earlier this week it was announced that Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have resigned from the company. Supposedly it had to do with weakening independence from the parent company, Facebook. But I’m not really in a position to comment on the specifics.

  Fred Wilson wrote a good post about the news this week. The point he makes is that it is extremely rare for founders to stay on, at least for extended periods of time, after their company has been acquired. So it is actually quite remarkable that Instagram’s two founders stayed on for 6 years.

  But what I really want to talk about today is this quote from Fred’s post: 

  “The truth is that many entrepreneurs don’t make for great corporate citizens. Entrepreneurs like to be in charge, to be able to move quickly without a lot of friction, and they like to feel a deep sense of ownership in what they are working on.”

  It stood out to me for two reasons. One, because I agree with it. And two, because it reminded me of Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. His overarching argument is that motivation is intrinsic and that we are best driven by the following: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

  That sounds pretty similar to the things that entrepreneurs also seem to like.

  2018.09.27

• Uber to invest $200 million in Toronto

  Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was in Toronto today, where he announced that the company plans to invest more than $200 million over the next five years to expand the autonomous vehicle research lab that it already has here in the city. 

  The Toronto outpost of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) – which is its only international outpost – is led by renowned University of Toronto professor, Raquel Urtasun. She is also the cofounder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and splits her time between Uber and UofT.

  With this investment, Uber also expects to open its first engineering facility in Canada and grow its local headcount to 500, up from the 200 or so it has today. Some of these hires will be local. Some will be international. And some will be transplants from Uber’s other offices.

  Also notable about the announcement is that Khosrowshahi mentioned that he thinks fully autonomous vehicles roaming the streets of our cities is a good 10 years away. But I wonder if that isn’t political PR speak intended not to spook its drivers. So are we closer to the mid-2020′s?

  Either way, as a proud Torontonian and UofT alumnus, I was happy to see this announcement. I think it’s far more exciting than the Apple event that took place earlier this week.

  2018.09.14

• Tridel unveils smart condominium in South Core

  

  A few weeks ago, Canadian developer Tridel unveiled its first “smart condominium” at Ten York – a recently completed 69 storey building in the South Core neighborhood of Toronto. Above is an archive photo of the building under construction. I chose this one because its siting between the Gardiner Expressway (left) and Harbour Street (right) is also noteworthy.

  Smart anything is one of those tech buzzwords that is, I know, starting to feel vapid. But Tridel has done some interesting things here with their Tridel Connect platform (a collaboration with SmartONE Solutions). And if you happen to also be in the business of designing and constructing multi-family buildings, I think you’ll find it to be a useful case study.

  At Ten York, you can now use your phone as a key fob. People buzzing up are shown to you on your wall pad so you can confirm identity. The suite entry doors use digital locks, which means you use an access code instead of a key. Additional codes can be created for family and friends or for service providers like dog walkers and cleaners. You’re also given a log of who has come and gone. And of course there’s an automated parcel delivery system.

  If you’d like to see all of the features in the live, I suggest you take a look at the “b-roll video” that was included as part of their press release. Tridel is excellent at implementing new technologies and I know that they frequently reserve test suites in their projects to try some of them out. This is a great thing for the industry and for consumers.

  Image: Tridel

  2018.09.09

• A more distributed startup geography

  The Economist recently argued that Silicon Valley’s innovation hegemony is waning and that it is a product of two factors: there appears to be more innovation happening elsewhere (good news), but that innovation in general also seems to be harder to achieve (bad news). Here is an excerpt from the article:

  Other cities are rising in relative importance as a result. The Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit group that tracks entrepreneurship, now ranks the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area first for startup activity in America, based on the density of startups and new entrepreneurs. Mr Thiel is moving to Los Angeles, which has a vibrant tech scene. Phoenix and Pittsburgh have become hubs for autonomous vehicles; New York for media startups; London for fintech; Shenzhen for hardware. None of these places can match the Valley on its own; between them, they point to a world in which innovation is more distributed.

  Part of the problem, of course, is rising costs in the Bay Area. Everything from the cost of living to the cost of operating a business. The article cites a recent survey where nearly half of all respondents said they are planning to leave the Bay Area in the next few years. This is up from 34% only two years ago.

  I don’t doubt that rising costs are causing some people to look to other cities, as well as other countries in the case of draconian visa policies. But I am suspect of the claim that we’ve heat peak “innovation” – however you want to define that.

  2018.09.05

• Is Tesla the new iPhone?

  

  Benedict Evans just published a great post on his blog about “Tesla, software and disruption.” I recommend a full read. In it, he tries to answer whether Tesla is really “the new iPhone” and if it will be as disruptive to the car landscape as some/many people think.

  In his line of thinking, electric (as opposed to an ICE vehicle) feels a lot more like a sustaining innovation, rather than a disruptive innovation. In other words, it something that incumbents will be able to incorporate. So it will not change the “basis of competition.”

  The more critical aspect is instead autonomy. Here are two snippets from the piece:

  All of this takes us to autonomy. Electric is compelling but will probably be a commodity, whereas Tesla’s improvements on top of electric may not be commodities but are not necessarily decisive. Autonomy changes the world in profound ways (I wrote about this here), and it’s a fundamentally new technology that doesn’t look at all like a commodity. And Tesla is doing this, too. Sort of.

  In this competition, Tesla’s thesis is that the data it can collect from its cars will give it a crucial advantage. The only reason that anyone is interested in autonomy today is that the emergence of machine learning (ML) in the last 5 years probably gives us a way to make it work. Machine learning, in turn, is about extracting patterns from large amounts of data, and then matching things against those patterns. So how much data do you have?
  

  But even if we are to all agree that autonomy is the “disruptive innovation”, it is not yet clear who will get there first. Maybe it is Tesla. Maybe it is Waymo. Regardless, many or most people seem to agree that it will arrive in 202x.

  Image: Tesla

  2018.09.02

• Public access at Martin’s Beach

  I just learned about the ongoing legal dispute on Martin’s Beach (south of San Francisco) through this New York Times article. 

  To briefly sum it up, tech billionaire Vinod Khosla bought a 53-acre beachside village known as Martin’s Beach in 2008. On the land is about 47 beach houses, a shop that sold ice cream at one point in its life, and a road that provides the only access to the beach. The road is private, but over the years and before Khosla purchased the property, it provided both parking for and access to the beach. 

  After acquiring the property, the county told Khosla that he had 2 options with respect to the road:

  (1) Keep it open (there’s a gate that controls access). And charge no more than $2 a car for parking, which was the rate charged in 1972.

  (2) Apply for a Coastal Development Permit to change how the access works.

  Khosla opted to do neither and in turn the residents of Martin’s Beach sued him. He’s been in a legal battle ever since. But according to the New York Times, he has about $3 billion sitting in his war chest. For him it is both a matter of principle and a matter of protecting property rights.

  Not surprisingly, tech billionaire fighting to keep people off a public beach makes for a sensational headline in the media. The NY Times argued that every generation has some sort of rich Californian fighting to privatize the waterfront. Khosla is this generation’s “beach villain”.

  But beneath the headlines lies a fascinating legal debate that you can read more about through a blog post that Khosla published earlier this year. For you property lawyers out there, I would be curious to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

  2018.08.31

• Five year anniversary

  Today is the five year anniversary of this daily blog. That’s over 1800 posts. 

  It’s almost hard to believe that it has been that long. It seems like just yesterday I was on year 2 or 3. But at the same time, it’s almost hard for me to remember a time when I didn’t blog every day. I guess we’re calling it a habit at this point.

  One of the most common questions I get regarding this blog is: “Do you pre-write posts?” The answer is never. Okay, almost never. Sometimes I’ll pre-write a post if I know I’m going to be on a plane for 12 hours and I won’t make the timezone cutoff. But generally as a rule I don’t.

  Part of the reason I don’t is because it breaks the habit. This is something I do every day. And I like that routine. I also want the posts to be timely and I want to be able to write about things that may be on my mind that day.

  Momentum is a powerful thing. And when you’ve been doing something for a number of years, and especially something as public as this daily blog, there’s a powerful incentive to keep doing it. That’s how streaks work.

  However, in the world of development, five years is perhaps not that long. It’s maybe one project. Streaks take a lot longer to establish.

  This summer One Delisle by Studio Gang went public and you’re now starting to see (bright neon) teasers for Junction House. Both of these projects are many years in the making. The Junction House story started in early 2016.

  So I reckon that this blog needs at least another five years so that there’s enough time for the really juicy stories to surface. I’ll endeavor to do exactly that. 

  Thanks for reading and making this community what it is. See you tomorrow.

  2018.08.28

• Economies of scale in the car and housing industries

  Over the weekend I watched this interview discussion between Elon Musk and Marques Brownlee. If it doesn’t show up below, you can find the video here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevKTPN4ozw&w=560&h=315]

  Elon figures that if Tesla works really hard they could probably come out with a USD 25,000 car in about three years. The key to that affordability is twofold: (1) design & technology improvements and (2) scale. 

  So part of the answer is just time. As design and engineering iterations continue to take place, the components will become better and cheaper, just as they have for things like cell phones. Elon estimates that we’re in the 30th iteration of the cell phone today.

  But the second factor is simply volume. And that got me thinking about housing production and the similar importance of scale and density. We do a lot to limit volume, despite saying we want more affordable housing.

  2018.08.21

• Winner take all

  We have talked a lot on this blog about the concentration of economic activity in global cities. Here is an old post about a paper called “winner-take-all-cities”, which documents the overrepresentation of talent, economic activity, innovation, and wealth creation in a select number of alpha cities.

  But this same phenomenon is playing out in a myriad of different ways. Aaron Renn calls this the “superstar effect” and has been writing about it for years. Another more recent example is this post by Richard Kerby called: Where did you go to school?

  Kerby looked at where venture capitalists in the US went to school and discovered that around 40% of them have gone to one of two schools: Stanford or Harvard. His argument is that not only is the venture capital industry lacking in gender and racial diversity, but it’s also lacking in cognitive diversity.

  My point with this post, though, is one of hyper-concentration. Tech is a dominant force in today’s economy. And in 2017, nearly 45% of all venture capital investment in the US went to companies located in the Bay Area – meaning San Francisco and San Jose.

  So here is an example of a select number of schools training a select number of minds that then go on to invest in a select number of cities. Fred Wilson, who is a venture capitalist, has a good response to this problem of diversity in the VC industry.

  But, of course, this is bigger than just the VC business.

  2018.08.10

• Apple and the humanities

  

  This morning I came across two news item that are interesting in their own right, but also have a noteworthy relationship.

  $AAPL now has a market cap that exceeds $1 trillion. And not surprisingly, everyone, from the New York Times to Bloomberg (photo essay), is talking about it.

  But the one thing that continues to stand out for me about this story is what Steve Jobs said back in 2011 when he unveiled iPad 2.

  He said that fundamental to Apple’s DNA is its ability to marry technology with the liberal arts and the humanities. Its secret sauce is not technology alone.

  Now let’s move on to the second piece of news that caught my attention.

  As of 2017, less than 5% of college and university students in the US were studying one of the big four humanities majors – a sharp cliff-like drop from 2011 according to this data.

  That’s almost certainly because business degrees and STEM degrees are thought to be more valuable and in demand in the labor market. And I’m sure they are right out of school.

  But perhaps we shouldn’t forget Apple’s trillion dollar lesson. And I think this goes for both the tech space and the real estate industry, as well as others.

  2018.08.06