Tag: tech

• Find the best local construction professionals at the lowest prices

  One of my closest friends, who also happens to be in the same industry, is currently testing out a new construction marketplace idea. It’s called Tenderlet and it’s an online platform that helps your average house or condo owner “find the best local construction professionals at the lowest prices.”

  Right now it’s just a basic website, but he is obviously thinking that it could grow into a far more robust online marketplace.

  The way it works is real simple:

  1. You tell Tenderlet about your construction job – everything from a water damaged ceiling repair to new hardwood flooring. 
  2. Tenderlet goes out and gets multiple quotes on your behalf (just like how the professionals do it). 
  3. Then Tenderlet comes back to you with at least 3 quotes and a recommendation. It’ll even handle scheduling and payments.

  Eventually he’s imagining that there will be a mobile app, reviews for the construction professionals, and a location dimension, which can make all the difference, particularly for smaller jobs. But you have to start somewhere.

  I think he’s on to something here. I know I want to use it. So I would encourage you to check out tenderlet.com and give it a try. If you have any feedback about the idea, I am sure he would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  2015.09.24

• Is venture-based real estate development coming to the Bay Area?

  

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  Chamath
  Palihapitiya is a Sri Lanka born, Canada educated, venture capitalist in
  Silicon Valley, who made a boatload of money as one of the early employees of
  Facebook. He now runs a VC firm called Social +
  Capital and owns part of the Golden State Warriors.

  The other
  night he was interviewed at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco and I think
  that many of his comments would also be of real interest to the Architect This City
  community. He’s super passionate in interviews and always fun to listen to.

  Below is what
  he had to say about the San Francisco startup scene. It really speaks volumes
  about what people will put up with in order to live in an awesome place/city that they love. All of his responses below are from this
  TechCrunch article.

  “The city has to be doing more, around
  transportation, around housing… You have to get rid of the nimbyism and you
  need to quadruple, if not quintuple, the amount of housing. You need to tell
  that engineer from the University of Michigan that he can live here on a salary
  of $80,000.

  [In the meantime], we look at our startups, and
  the minute that they start to spend more than 15 percent of their burn – good
  money that we give them – on rent, a huge red flag goes up. When they, on a
  per-head-count basis, are spending so much, we start looking at the
  productivity of the technical team. And if it’s good but not great and they’re
  spending this insane amount of money [versus] a different team in Redwood City,
  we start to ask ourselves: “Are you so convinced that success is going to
  happen in this city at 1.5x the cost?”

  Because for every dollar that someone in
  Mountain View or Redwood City is raising, you [in San Francisco] have to raise
  one-and-a-half to two times that just to get to the same point. So you’re cutting
  your half life in half. To prove that you can take an Uber from some fuckin’
  shitty bar to another shitty bar? Like, I don’t understand.”

  And here he
  talks about the possibility of his venture firm also getting into the real
  estate development business. I couldn’t resist blogging about this.

  “We made a big
  decision with our last fund to build an organization that looks really
  different than a venture firm, and that organization is going to be this
  hybrid, bastard stepchild of Berkshire Hathaway and Blackstone and BlackRock.

  What I mean by this is
  that we want to have a large permanent capital base and we want to make really
  long, discontinuous bets on companies and sectors and trends.

  And one of the things
  we talked about was having a real estate fund …[because] we owe it to our
  companies to alleviate some of these problems when no one else is going to. If
  we went and built one million square feet somewhere of mixed use, where you
  work and live, and we rethink what it means to have a modular living environment
  for a millennial cohort that wants to work at companies and doesn’t necessarily
  have kids, we can do that in a way and give that back to our CEOs as a benefit
  of working with us.

  And you can probably
  make the economics work. Because we only really care about the equity of the
  company anyways. And the equity in the real estate will take care of itself if
  you take the 30-year view. So we’re at the point now where we’re like, wow, we
  should raise a few billion dollars and get into the real estate business and
  solve this problem systematically for our companies. And maybe in that, it
  becomes a blueprint for how others should do it. We’re just basically going to
  act as our own city-state and decide how to do it ourselves.”

  It’s
  interesting to think about what the economics might look like if your primary goal is
  simply to provide space to your portfolio companies (entrepreneurs) so that
  they get more (financial) runway and, therefore, have a greater chance of success. I’d love to see that pro forma.

  2015.09.18

• The evolution of unions

  

  Today is Labo(u)r Day in Canada and the United States.

  It is the official end of summer for a lot of people, which is always a bit sad. (Unlike a lot of people I know, I’m not a huge fan of fall.) But primarily, today is a day to celebrate the labor union movement.

  Fred Wilson wrote an excellent post on his blog this morning about this topic. I agree with him and he put it far better than I could this morning. So here are a few snippets:

  When one looks back over the history of the development of the modern economy from the agricultural age, to the industrial age, to the information age, the development of a strong labor movement has to be one of the signature events. Capitalism, taken to its excesses, does not allocate economic value fairly to all participants in the economic system.
  

  I am a fan of the idea that labor needs a mechanism to obtain market power as a counterbalance to the excesses of markets and capitalism. I think we can look back and see all the good that has come from a strong labor movement in the US over the past 150 years.

  However, like all bureaucratic institutions, the “Union” mechanism appears anachronistic sitting here in the second decade of the 21st century. We are witnessing the sustained unwinding of 19th and 20th century institutions that were built at a time when transaction and communications costs were high and the overhead of bureaucracy and institutional inertia were costs that were unavoidable.

  Click here for the full post.

  On that note, I am in the market for new – ideally daily – blogs to read. Blogs such as this one, which generally focus on a particular topic but are written by one person and are a bit personal in nature. I find those are where the best online communities develop.

  If you know of any, please leave the link in the comment section below. A lot of readers have also asked me for similar recommendations, so I am sure they would appreciate the suggestions.

  Happy long weekend 🙂

  2015.09.07

• Towards a post privacy world — what the Ashley Madison hack could mean for cities

  

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  Ashley Madison is a website that helps married people have affairs. 

  Recently the website was hacked and over 33 million accounts were exposed. This included full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and so on. Not surprisingly, this has gotten a lot of press. The site was/is marketed as being private and secure. And clearly that is not what it is right now.

  But there are people in the tech community, such as venture capitalist Albert Wenger, who believe that is merely a glimpse into the future – a “post privacy future.” He even argues on his blog that we as a society should be more accepting of the leak and that the release of this data could lead to a “more measured view of affairs.” (There are many who argue that humans are not intended to be monogamous.)

  For many, or probably most of you, I’m sure this position seems pretty radical. After all, this leak will likely destroy many marriages.

  But Wenger’s position on privacy is a fascinating one and he’s written a lot on the topic. The tension he sees is one between individual privacy vs. collective intelligence. In this part of the world, our society values the former over the latter. But he believes that we are headed towards a world where almost everything, yes everything, will eventually become public. Again, radical position. But consider how much we publicly share about our personal lives today versus 10 or even 5 years ago.

  What’s perhaps more relevant to the Architect This City audience though is what this could mean for many other industries beyond tech.

  I often think about what a “post privacy future” could mean for city building. Imagine if every architect, real estate developer, engineer, and other participant made public all of their work. This would mean that all designs, financial models, sales data, and so on were made widely available to anyone who wanted to see them.

  The thought probably scares many of you in the industry, but consider what it would mean for our collective intelligence. There’s a strong argument to be made that we would all be better off and that the process of building would become far more efficient. In fact, if truly everything were public, it could in theory eliminate most of the market’s concerns about overbuilding, a condo bubble, and all the other stuff that gets talked about.

  The reason people speculate on these market factors is because we don’t have all the data. We don’t actually know what’s going to happen. We have no idea. I know I certainly can’t predict the real estate market.

  So why aren’t we quickly becoming more public?

  Wenger raises the game theory principle known as the prisoner’s dilemma:

  “So one way to think about secrecy is that it leads to lots of prisoner’s dilemma style situations. Individuals (or companies) would be worse off if they were the only ones disclosing, but if everyone disclosed (or at least the majority), then everyone would be much better off. In the language of game theory, we are in a bad equilibrium.”

  In other words, if only one real estate developer disclosed her project’s financial information to the public, then she would probably be worse off against her competitors. But if every developer in the city did it, then the market as a whole would be better off because everyone would then benefit from collective intelligence.

  Using the example of infidelity, if one person is caught having an affair, then that person is more than likely worse off. But if over 33 million people are caught having an affair and it reinforces the statistic that between 30-60% of married people in the United States will have an affair at one point in their lives, then maybe it forces us as a society to rethink what marriage means today. And maybe that makes us all better off.

  This is a pretty far out there argument, though the city building example is probably more palatable than the Ashley Madison one. Regardless, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. 

  Are we heading towards a post privacy world?

  2015.09.03

• Making alpha-bets

  

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  On Monday, Google broke the internet when it announced that it was reorganizing itself into a holding company structure called Alphabet.

  That means that Google, Inc. will now become a subsidiary, along with many other companies, of Alphabet Inc. and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares in Alphabet.

  This is huge, but also something that was likely inevitable given the passions of the founders. Apparently Larry Page has been thinking about this move for years.

  As it stands pre-Alphabet, Google (with its main internet products) is basically a cash cow funding all of Google’s other experiments. But this muddied the waters and made it difficult for investors to clearly see how much the main internet products were making and how much the founders were spending on self-driving cars, delivery drones (Project Wing), and other new ideas.

  Now everything will be separate.

  But what’s really exciting about the reorganization is that it sets the stage for Alphabet/Google – which is arguably already one of the most important companies in the world – to become even more impactful in a wide variety of industries and disciplines, some/many not traditionally associated with tech. Each wholly owned subsidiary will have their own CEO and the founders rightly believe, I think, that this overall structure will afford them more “management scale.”

  Within Google will remain search, advertising, maps, YouTube, and the Android mobile operating system. But already Alphabet is the parent company of the following other businesses:

  • Calico, an anti-aging life extension company
  • Sidewalk, a smart cities company whose mission is to improve life in cities
  • Nest, an “internet of things” company that makes connected devices for your home
  • Fiber, a company that offers super fast internet
  • Google Ventures (venture capital) & Google Capital (private equity)
  • Google X, which is the lab developing self-driving cars and delivery drones (Project Wing)

  If you can’t tell, I’m bullish on all of this. The approach really resonates with me and I can’t wait to see what Alphabet becomes. If you’d like to read the full and official blog post announcement, click here. 

  Cheers to trying new things and making big bets.

  2015.08.11

• Advancing green building technologies, one condo suite at a time

  This evening I had a fascinating conversation with Subhi Alsayed of Tower Labs. If you haven’t yet heard of Tower Labs, I would encourage you to check them out. Here’s their mission statement:

  Our mission is to facilitate the adoption of green building products, technologies and practices through pilot and demonstration projects in highrise buildings; and accelerate the evolution to a low-impact, sustainable urban environment.

  What they do is test out new green building technologies in one-off condominium suites. And since they were founded by both MaRS and Tridel (which is one of, if not the largest condo developer in Toronto), they have plenty of opportunities to do just that.

  This is important because the real estate industry is notoriously slow at innovating. I’ve written about this many times before. Whenever you try and introduce something new, there’s always a lot of change management that goes along with it. The construction trades, to use one example, need to get their heads around it. And until they do, they’re going to charge a premium for it.

  So by creating a one-off test case, everybody gets to see how it works, how it is built, and, most importantly, how it actually performs in the real world.

  One of the projects that they’re working on is something called NetZED, which stands for Net Zero Energy Dwelling. As the name suggests, it’s a condominium suite that produces as much energy as it consumes. 

  The way it works is by trading energy. At night when the sun isn’t out and the panels on the roof aren’t able to produce energy, the suite “borrows” electricity from the building. But during the day when the sun is out, the suite powers itself and then returns any borrowed electricity to the building. Click here to learn more about the suite. It’s being built in the Aqualina Condos on Toronto’s waterfront.

  

  I find all of this incredibly exciting. Not only because they’re working towards a more sustainable future, but also because they’re applying their efforts towards the multi-family building typology (towers). Given that most of the world now lives in cities, this is an important building typology to make even more sustainable.

  Image: Tower Labs

  2015.08.06

• Peer-to-peer solar startup

  Airbnb is a platform that connects people who have extra space with people who need space. It’s a peer-to-peer hospitality company.

  Yeloha, which is a startup I just discovered today, is a peer-to-peer solar company based out of Boston. 

  In the same vein as Airbnb, it connect people who have extra roof space (that’s suitable for solar collection) with people who want to buy solar energy (but may not have a solar friendly roof).

  Here’s an image from their website that explains how it works:

  

  Basically, if you have a solar friendly roof, Yeloha will come and install solar panels on top of your place for free. You get to keep some of the energy that’s generated (about 1/3 apparently) which becomes a credit to your electricity bill. You are then known as a “Sun Host.”

  The remaining energy gets fed back into the grid and, if you don’t have a solar friendly roof, you can purchase this excess energy, which also results in a credit to your electricity bill. The solar electricity is less expensive than the regular grid electricity. In this case, you are known as a “Sun Partner.”

  I think this is a pretty neat idea. Neither party has to pay anything upfront. Both parties save money. And the result is more solar through a distributed and virtual net metering setup.

  2015.08.01

• The taxi cartel

  

  Taxi by Roland R. on 500px

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  Early this morning Peter Cheney of the Globe and Mail published an article called: How Uber is ending the dirty dealings behind Toronto’s cab business.

  And I highly recommend you read it. He’s been investigating this industry for decades.

  Though the article is specific to Toronto, I know that there are middle people and archaic policies governing the taxi industries in many other cities around the world.

  Here it revolves around taxi licenses issued by the city (known as “plates”), which are expensive and almost impossible to get. Last year the average price of a plate was $118,235 (2014).

  The way it works is that people – typically non-drivers – buy/inherit/get these plates and then charge rent on them to drivers who want to use them. The result is a taxi cartel:

  In fact, Toronto’s taxi plate system is anything but free enterprise. Instead, it is based on the artificial restriction of a natural market, and the granting of licences to a fixed number of participants. Even those who paid top dollar for a plate used to enjoy an annual return of more than 12 per cent. And for those who inherited plates, the return was manna from heaven.

  So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the taxi industry is grouchy about companies like Uber. But the cost structure of the incumbents is going to need to change if they want to stay in business.

  Jeff Bezos of Amazon is famous for saying, “Your margin is my opportunity.” And that’s exactly what is happening here. A bloated legacy cost structure is being quickly supplanted by better/cheaper.

  2015.07.16

• The evolving gig economy

  This morning venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a post on his blog talking about the gig economy and Hillary Clinton’s economic speech last night. 

  Here’s a snippet from Clinton’s talk:

  Meanwhile, many Americans are making extra money renting out a small room, designing websites, selling products they design themselves at home, or even driving their own car. This on-demand, or so-called gig economy is creating exciting economies and unleashing innovation.

  But it is also raising hard questions about work-place protections and what a good job will look like in the future.

  So, all of these trends are real and none, none is going away. But they do not determine our destiny. The choices we make as a nation matter. And the choices we make in the years ahead will set the stage for what American life in the middle class and our economy will be like in this century.

  The headlines this morning are making it seem like Hillary Clinton is taking direct aim at companies like Uber. But the transcript suggests that she’s being far more balanced than that: these new companies are creating exciting opportunities, and they are not going away, but there are still things to figure out.

  That’s basically how I feel.

  Take, for example, Airbnb. I think Airbnb is a great idea and company. A lot of my friends use it both as consumers and as suppliers of space.

  But for many (most?) condos in Toronto, owners are strictly prohibited from renting out their units on leases that are less than six months. It’s a direct ban on short-term leasing and it’s written into the Condo Corporation’s Declaration.

  And there’s good reason for that. Who wants to buy a condo only to find out that next door is being operated as a nightly hotel? Most people would even prefer that their neighbor is an owner rather than a renter.

  That doesn’t mean I believe Airbnb should not exist. I think we’ll likely end up getting more transparent about how buildings (and portion of buildings) are operating, as opposed to it being a shadow economy. And that could help.

  If you have any ideas for how companies like Airbnb might be better integrated into urban life, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  2015.07.14

• Are there enough nerds in Miami?

  

  I was browsing through my online reading list this morning (as I do every morning), and I stumbled upon this Dezeen article talking about a big new 6.5 million square foot development being proposed in Miami’s Park West neighborhood. 

  The goal of the project is to transform Miami into “Florida’s Silicon Valley.”

  This sort of thing is happening all around the world. From Buffalo to Lisbon, cities everywhere are betting on tech, startups, and entrepreneurship to grow their economy in the 21st century. And I personally think that’s really exciting.

  But as I was reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of an old essay that Paul Graham wrote back in 2006 called, How to be Silicon Valley. (Paul Graham is a famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor).

  In his essay Graham argues that to be or to replicate the model of Silicon Valley in your city, you basically need two types of people: rich people and nerds. The idea, of course, being that the nerds work on the cool new ideas and the rich people then fund them.

  Using this logic, he specifically calls out Miami as a city where few startups happen and as a city not likely to become another Silicon Valley. Though there’s lots of money and rich people in Miami, there simply aren’t enough nerds. In Graham’s words: “It’s not the kind of place nerds like.”

  But that was back in 2006. 

  The iPhone didn’t even exist yet. Things have since changed. Now there are successful tech companies like Snapchat (valuation north of $15 billion) that are based out of cities like Los Angeles. And I think you could argue that Los Angeles and Miami do share some similarities.

  So while it may have seemed far fetched in 2006 for Miami to become a startup hub, is that really the case today?

  Image: Dezeen

  2015.06.14