Tag: tech

• Tech salaries and brain drain

  The Globe and Mail recently ran an article arguing that tech salaries in Toronto are significantly less than those in the US and that it is leading to “alarmingly high rates” of brain drain. The claim is that the average tech salary in 2017 was US$73,000 in Toronto, compared to US$140,000 in the Bay Area or US$129,000 in New York City. 

  However, if you adjust these salaries for each city’s cost of living, the numbers look like this (chart taken from the same article):

  

  Now all of a sudden Toronto is lumped together with the Bay Area and New York City. It was adjacent to London even when you didn’t adjust the salaries. As Tobi Lütke – CEO of Shopify – points out in his Twitter rebuttal of the article, housing is the determining factor in this adjustment: “Toronto is a very expensive city, and Austin isn’t.”

  Lütke also points out, in case you’re in the market, that Canadian-based Shopify pays its tech employees well above market, provides stock compensation, and is currently “hiring like crazy”. But perhaps more importantly, he stresses the importance of Canadians building the economy of the country in which they are from. I feel exactly the same way.

  2018.05.05

• First day of summer

  Today was the first day of the year that truly felt like summer here in Toronto. It also happens to be my birthday. 

  So I did the only sensible thing one should do on a day like this. I went to a rooftop patio after work, with my family, for two of my favorites: a bowl of spaghetti al limone and a negroni. Simple.

  

  In other news, Fred Wilson wrote a great post on his blog today about why he loves Canada and why it is an increasingly important place for the tech sector. 

  For those of us who already know that Canada is the greatest country on earth, it’s a noteworthy post not because it is likely to tell you a lot of new things, but because it was written by Fred fucking Wilson.

  2018.05.03

• Writing is thinking

  Steven Sinofsky recently tweeted out this thread where he talks about the virtues of writing in business. His argument: writing is thinking.

  Writing is difficult. It takes a lot of time. I’ve been writing posts – albeit short ones – on this blog every day for almost 5 years and I can tell you that somedays it is downright painful. Somedays I ask myself: Would I be better served spending this time elsewhere?

  It’s much easier to talk, throw down bullet points on a slide, or send out pithy emails. And because, today, we’re all so focused on “agility” and “execution”, it is easy to dismiss writing as being slow and cumbersome. 

  But the act of writing is indeed thinking. To write about something you have to wade into the details and actually understand what you’re talking about. It’s far more nuanced.

  One of Sinofsky’s arguments is that “execution is in a constant state of diverging as more expertise deals with more details that fewer people understand.” Business becomes “I just know.” Writing can fill in those missing parts.

  He goes on to argue that agility is also not mutually exclusive with writing. In fact, when you write, clarify, and collaborate early on, overall execution speeds up because now people get the details and better understand the context.

  I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but my Grade 4 English teacher used to make us write a daily journal. He would tell us that it didn’t matter what we wrote or how long it was, but we had to write something every day.

  I did it and I enjoyed keeping those journals, but at the time I didn’t really appreciate was he was trying to get us to do. I do now.

  2018.04.22

• Meet Replica

  Sidewalk Labs is currently building out a platform called Replica that will support them in their development plans here in Toronto. Replica is: 

  “a user-friendly modeling tool that uses anonymized mobile location data to give planning agencies a comprehensive portrait of how, when, and why people travel in urban areas.”

  Here is a preview of the Replica dashboard showing a section of Main Street in Kansas City. I hope the animated GIF shows up for you.

  

  The platform uses a combination of mobile location data (~5% of the population) and on-the-ground checks, typical stuff like manual traffic counts and transit boardings.

  The goal is to understand in real-time who is using a street, as well as how (driving? cycling?) and why (going to work?).

  Their introductory blog post obviously stresses the importance of personal privacy, but I am curious how they determine where people are going.

  I suppose if they pair journeys with destinations (and the durations at those destinations) they can make reasonable assumptions around the why.

  I think the benefits to all of this are clear. But does any or all of this worry you from a privacy standpoint?

  2018.04.07

• Top US metro areas for VC investment

  Below is a list of the US metro areas that saw a billion dollars or more in venture capital investment last year (2017). It is taken from a recent CityLab article by Richard Florida where he talks about the “geographic inequality of high-tech venture capital.”

  

  It’s worth noting that San Francisco – not San Jose (Silicon Valley) – is at the top of the list with nearly 1/3 of the US total last year. It’s also interesting to note that when you look at each metro’s share of the total change from 2006-2017 (the chart below), you get Los Angeles now punching above San Jose. 

  

  Florida also gets into which economic and demographic variables seem to be associated with higher levels of venture capital investment. For the rest of the article, click here. 

  2018.04.04

• Autonomy, sometimes

  Benedict Evans raises a number of good points and asks a bunch of good questions about the “steps to autonomy” in his recent blog post.

  Right now we’re all talking about autonomous vehicles in terms of their level of autonomy – namely 1 through 5. L1 is some degree of autonomy, but in almost all situations, you still need a human driver. L5 is no human driver needed, ever.

  But as Evans points out, the level of autonomy depends on the place, and it is unlikely – at least initially – that L4 or L5 will mean L4 or L5 in all environments. Here is an excerpt from his post:

  It naturally follows that we will have vehicles that will reliably reach a given level of autonomous capability in some (‘easy’) places before they can do it everywhere. These will have huge safety and economic benefits, so we’ll deploy them – we won’t wait and do nothing at all until we have a perfect L5 car that can drive itself around anywhere from Kathmandu to South Boston. And so, if we call a car even L4, we have to say, well, where are we talking about? We might mean ‘most of this country’. But more probably, it will be L4 in one neighborhood, L3 in another and only L2 in a third – and a car might encounter all three of those on one journey. Put your route into the map and it will tell you if today is an L5 day or not.

  Thinking about the Gartner Hype Cycle, there’s often (always?) a “peak of inflated expectations”, as well as a chasm that new technologies need to cross as they are being adopted.

  Benedict’s article reminded me that we’re probably coming off that peak with autonomous vehicles and about to enter the so-called “trough of disillusionment.” 

  Autonomous vehicles represent a monumental shift in mobility, which will in turn impact our cities. That’s going to seem like an insurmountable challenge – until it doesn’t.

  2018.04.02

• What’s the realtor jiu-jitsu move?

  Today’s post is a set of related questions for all of you.

  Fred Wilson has a post up on his blog today called, The Jiu-Jitsu Move. It’s about how people often dismiss new technologies, market entrants, and/or consumer behaviours as silly; whereas the real power move is to embrace and leverage them. That’s what he is calling the jiu-jitsu move.

  He gives a few examples, but for obvious reasons this one stood out to me:

  I spent the day yesterday at a real estate industry event and talked to a lot of agents about the fact that their clients are often more informed than they are these days. I encouraged them to embrace that fact and use it to their advantage and not fear it. It is hard when you have grown up in an industry when your advantage was information and you no longer have that working for you.

  For all the agents (and real estate consumers) who read this blog, I am curious if you agree with the above. Are consumers increasingly more informed than agents? I am sure that many of you will disagree. But if things are really changing, what should the jiu-jitsu move be?

  2018.03.29

• My new gig…

  

  So this is interesting.

  Earlier this month, Travis Kalanick – co-founder of Uber and its former CEO – formed a new venture fund called 10100. According to the WSJ, it was funded with his own money after he sold 30% of his position in Uber for a cool $1.4 billion. 

  Ten-one-hundred’s spartan website explains that the goal of the fund is “large-scale job creation, with investments in real estate, ecommerce, and emerging innovation in China and India.” On the non-profit side, the initial focus will be on “education and the future of cities.”

  Then this week, Travis tweeted out “My new gig…” and disclosed that 10100 had entered into an agreement to buy a controlling interest in a real estate holding company called City Storage Systems (CSS) for $150 million. 

  He also announced that he would become CEO.

  The focus of CSS is on the redevelopment of distressed real estate, particularly parking, retail, and industrial assets. He goes on to say: “There are over $10 trillion in these real estate assets that will need to be repurposed for the digital era in the coming years.”

  This whole series of events is a big bet on some significant changes in the real estate space.

  Photo by Martin Reisch on Unsplash

  2018.03.23

• UNStudio announces new tech architecture company (and thoughts on the smart home)

  

  Dutch architecture firm UNStudio has just launched a new company called UNSense, whose purpose is to explore and develop “new sensor-based technologies that are specifically designed to positively impact people’s physical, mental and social health.” They are calling the new business an “arch tech company” and it is their belief that, at some point, all architecture firms will become arch tech companies. You can learn more about UNSense, here.

  This announcement got me thinking about the state of smart home technologies, which, of course, is this massive buzzword that everyone is throwing around these days. Many of us have smart thermostats, voice assistants (that may be listening to our every word), wifi lights, and so on. And you can do some pretty neat things with software like IFTT, such as program your lights to come on at sunset or when you walk in the door.

  But as cool as they may be, these smart home devices have always felt like patchwork add-ons to me. I understand that this is partially driven by what customers can easily adopt and I don’t mean to discredit the value that they bring, but today’s post is about reminding us to also think more fundamentally, as opposed to just incrementally.

  Smart thermostats, for instance, give us the functionality to adjust our heating/cooling from our phone. But at the end of the day, they still control the same underlying system, which, by the way, is a fairly simple one. When it gets cold (because of our R-3 windows), the heat turns on. When it gets warm enough, the heat turns off. Zoned systems certainly add another layer of sophistication, but are we optimizing for the right variables?

  UNSense works at three scales: Cities, Buildings, and Interiors. And if you look at what they are trying to do at the building scale, it is around the interface between inside and out. Designing transformable facade systems and buildings that can respond to their environment and our changing needs. These are not new ideas, but in today’s tech-driven world, the timing may just be right.

  If you think about the climate we have here in Toronto, it is actually an incredibly difficult design problem. We have cold winters and hot humid summers, which means we have to solve for two different extremes. Mechanical systems have made that a lot easier to do, but if we’re going to meet the energy and greenhouse gas emission targets that we’re all talking about, we’re going to need a hell of a lot more than just smart thermostats.

  Image: UNSense

  2018.03.17

• Amazon buys video doorbell company

  So Amazon is buying Ring (they make video doorbells, among other things) for north of $1 billion. Supposedly, it is the second largest acquisition that Amazon has ever made – the first was Whole Foods.

  If you consider that Amazon is also looking to enter the delivery business, it should be obvious that they want to control everything related to the home delivery process.

  For one, it likely enhances Amazon Key and helps with the “porch pirate” problem. Apparently Amazon has had to restrict same-day delivery from some high crime neighborhoods because of this exact problem.

  And there’s already speculation about what this could mean for grocery deliveries. Amazon needs to find a frictionless way to get your food orders into your refrigerator. 

  There are also many possible tie-ins to Alexa/Echo. It’s probably safe to assume that Jeff Bezos sees a lot more than just a doorbell with a camera in it.

  2018.03.13