Tag: technology

• Civic leaders, here’s why people need to love your city

  I was planning to write about something else today, but then I saw Fred Wilson’s post on revitalizing urban cores and I had to switch topics, because I think he makes a great point about turning around declining cities:

  I’ve been asked by civic leaders from places like Newark, Cleveland, Buffalo, and a number of other upstate NYC cities that have suffered a similar fate how they can do the same thing. They all talk about tax incentives, connecting with local research universities, and providing startup capital. And I tell them that they are focusing on the wrong thing.

  You have to lead with lifestyle. If you can’t make your city a place where the young mobile talent leaving college or grad school wants to go to start their career, meet someone, and build a life, all that other stuff doesn’t matter.

  It’s exactly the same point I made in my post entrepreneurship as economic development strategy. You can throw as much money as you’d like at startups, but if young people don’t want to live in your city then you have a serious problem.

  Fred goes on to talk about Tony Hsieh’s (founder of Zappos) initiatives in downtown Las Vegas:

  When Tony moved Zappos from the suburbs to the former City Hall in downtown Vegas a few years ago, he decided to invest $350mm in a massive urban revitalization project. He set aside $200mm to purchase land at bargain prices and the other $150mm to invest in three areas, arts and culture, small businesses (restaurants, cafes, bars, markets, boutiques, etc), and tech startups. $50mm is going into each area.

  It’s an example of leading with lifestyle, urbanism and city building, rather than purely economics. And I think it’s the way to go. But to be clear, I’m not suggesting that the focus should be on large capital projects, such as stadiums and infrastructure. I’m not convinced those are the most effective catalysts. There’s no silver bullet here.

  Instead, I think the answer is in building, from the ground up, a real sense of community and place. People need to love your city. That’s easier said than done though.

  2014.03.16

• 80% of New York’s 150 million taxi trips could be shared

  I’ve been a big fan of MIT’s Senseable City Lab since I was a grad student at Penn. Their work sits at the intersection of cities and technology, and so I’ve always found it incredibly fascinating.

  Recently, the lab examined data from all of New York’s 13,586 registered cabs and looked for ways that technology and mobile tech could potentially optimize the way the system works today. In particular, they were interested in examining instances where people were heading to the same place at the same time, and were within no more than a 3 minute walk of each at the start of the trip.

  What they found was that, of the 150 million taxi rides taken in New York City during 2011, almost 80% of them could have been shared.

  That is, 80% of the time, there was an overlap in both time and route. That’s an hugely interesting stat because it starts to show just how much waste and inefficiency there currently is in the system. Think about all the trips and carbon emissions that could be potentially eliminated through optimization.

  Here’s a video they produced on the project. Click here if you can’t see it below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyq_Zr96uzs?rel=0]

  It’s a great example of how technology is and will continue to creep into every segment of the economy. It’s exactly what I was talking about in my post, “Disrupting everything.”

  2014.03.12

• Entrepreneurship as economic development strategy

  It’s no secret that a lot of cities out there want to become the next Silicon Valley (or San Francisco, since a lot tech companies seem to be now setting up shop there instead). With the shift towards a knowledge/information/networked economy (pick your favorite name), cities around the world are betting that entrepreneurship is going to be the key to future economic growth.

  As an example, I was reading yesterday about a Buffalo-based business plan competition called 43North. It’s allegedly one of the biggest business plan competitions, ever:

  With $5 million in cash prizes, including a top award of $1 million, six $500,000 awards and four $250,000 awards, 43North is setting out to turn the best new business ideas from around the globe into reality.

  In addition to cash, winners will receive mentoring and free office space for a year. But while the competition is open to anyone in the world, you have to relocate to Buffalo for a minimum of one year if you win. 

  It’s a bold move. $5 million is a lot of money. But it strikes me as a step in the right direction to reinvent a city that was once the 8th largest in the US. I’m a big believer in the power of entrepreneurship.

  But 2 considerations do come to mind.

  The first is that this move can’t, or at least shouldn’t be, purely about business and economics. To create an entrepreneurial hub, I think you need to also ensure that you have a city that young people would love to live in.

  I’m not saying that Buffalo isn’t one of those cities (I don’t know it well enough to comment), but I am saying that it should be part of any economic development strategy. Why do you think more and more startups are moving from Silicon Valley to San Francisco?

  The second is that I worry we may end up with too many cities trying to become the next Silicon Valley. The industrial economy allowed for the creation of a certain number of thriving metropolitan regions (see: The Rust Belt).

  But I’m not so sure the networked economy will require as many. I could be wrong, but the data seems to suggest that we’re heading towards a spikier economic landscape—both within cities and across nations.

  In any event, here’s my question for the community: Would you move to Buffalo?

  2014.03.04

• It’s all about people

  Yesterday evening I met up with a talented Toronto-based technology entrepreneur who also happens to be passionate about cities. The conversation meandered between both worlds, but we ended up coming back to one central theme: It’s all about people.

  Facebook didn’t just buy WhatsApp for the technology. It spent $19 billion on almost half a billion active users. That’s what matters. Do people want to occupy your (real or virtual) space? Have you created a community? Whether it’s an app, a building or a neighborhood, you’re useless without engaged participants.

  And to be perfectly honest with you, that’s my ultimate goal for this blog. Ideally I’d like each and every post to inspire conversation and debate (just like this one did on gentrification). A one-sided conversation can only take you so far. The real value happens within communities.

  2014.02.22

• Is laneway housing a good idea or a bad idea?

  As a follow up to my recent post called “Disrupting everything”, I thought I would share this talk by venture capitalist Chris Dixon at Y Combinator’s Startup School. In it, he talks about why good ideas often seem like bad ideas at first.

  Chris frames the discussion by saying that when you have a good idea—that everyone else thinks is a bad idea—you effectively know a secret. But by a secret, it’s really that you believe something that nobody else believes to be true. So much so that when you try and tell everyone else about your secret, they all think you’re crazy, which is frustrating because it seems so obvious to you.

  He then provides a number of characteristics that can help you identity good ideas that seem like bad ideas:

  • Powerful people dismiss them as toys.
  • They unbundle the functions done by others.
  • Did it originate as a hobby?
  • Do they challenge social norms?

  Now, he’s obviously talking about startups, but I think the framework can apply outside of the technology world. I think it can apply to cities. 

  To give you one example, let’s consider laneway housing. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’m a big supporter of laneway housing in Toronto. But that it’s something the city generally does not support.

  However, there are laneway houses being built and they’re being built by architects and progressive urbanists. Some might even call it a hobby, because it remains a pretty tough business model at the moment.

  Personally, I think one of the main reasons the city is unwilling to formally allow laneway housing is because it challenges social norms. I’ve read the staff reports and the meeting minutes: people think it’s weird to live off a laneway. In fact, in one case somebody asserted that since laneways are generally undesirable urban spaces, anybody who would want to live off one is almost surely a social degenerate.

  But there’s absolutely nothing inherent to human beings that says we can’t live off a 5m wide street or that we can’t have a “house located behind another house.” Those are simply constructs we’ve created for ourselves.

  So the next time you hear about an idea that you think seems like a bad idea, ask yourself: Is it really a bad idea or does it just make me feel uncomfortable because it contravenes the norm? Taking yourself out of your comfort zone is a good thing. It’s how we grow.

  2014.02.15

• Disrupting everything

  Last year when I started working on Dirt—which was really my first startup—I had a number of people say things to me like: “Wow, that’s quite a change, going from real estate into tech.” But that’s not the way I saw and see it.

  I don’t think you can silo industries like that anymore. Technology is touching everything. Some would even go so far as to say that every company in the world is, or will be, a software and technology company.

  The way I looked at it was that I was starting a technology-enabled real estate company. I was hoping to leverage the internet to improve the way things are done in an existing industry. Of course, by improve I really mean disrupt—which is arguably the biggest buzzword in the tech community today:

  “Disruption is not so much a trend as an especially lucrative world philosophy favored by technophilic entrepreneurs. It’s the only path towards progress. If you’re not disrupting something you might as well go collect kindling and roast raccoon meat in the hills of Cupertino.”

  A good example of how disruptive innovation is reaching all sectors of the economy, including government, is the New Haven-based startup called SeeClickFix (which I discovered via This Big City). What it does is allow citizens to report non-emergencies (like potholes) to their local government. Governments can then respond and manage these tasks. (Sorry Rob Ford. Now you don’t need to return all those phone calls.)

  But moreover, I think it shows that technology is not only going to disrupt business and industry, it’s going to disrupt the way cities function and the way we live. I don’t know what that’s ultimately going to look like, but I can already feel it underway.

  Albert Wenger, of venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, recently argued—in a talk at DLD—that we are still in the midst of a transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. And I buy that. With every new disruption, we’re one step closer to completely making that transition. But we’re not quite there yet.

  The Industrial Age drove people out of cities. It made cities dirty and undesirable. But in the Information Age, cities are damn important and it’s where people want to be. Look at all the people rushing back to urban centers.

  So if technology has the power to disrupt business, industry, and cities, I suggest we stop just thinking about technology in isolation and remember the powerful words of Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” Don’t just focus on the obvious or you’ll miss a tidal wave of change happening beneath the surface.

  2014.02.13

• A culture of transparency

  One of the things I think the real estate industry is notoriously bad for is transparency. It’s getting better, but we’re nowhere near as transparent as some other industries, such as tech. In tech, you get companies like San Francisco-based Everpix who fail and then release all of their private documents to the public, including revenue, subscribers, cap table and so on.

  Could you imagine a real estate developer failing and then releasing all of its financials? This is what we paid for the land. This is how many units we sold. And this is why we failed. It doesn’t happen (or at least I’ve never seen it).

  Sure you might be able to get some of this information with a publicly traded real estate company, but that’s because they have to be more transparent. Everpix was 7 employees working out of a co-working space. They didn’t have to do this. But they did it because they wanted to help the larger startup community. They didn’t want to let a good failure go to waste.

  But at the same time, I actually don’t think that transparency is all about being altruistic. Transparency can also drive the bottom line. Every company wants to stand out from the competition and engage with its customers on a deeper level. But in order to do that, I think you need to give your customers something to engage with. You have to put yourself out there.

  One way to do that is to be more open and transparent. Be genuine and tell your customers who you are, what you believe in and, perhaps most importantly, why you’re doing the things that you’re doing. I like Simon Sinek’s philosophy that “customers don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

  2014.01.22

• BlackBerry started our forest

  A friend of mine posted this article on my Facebook wall yesterday: “A Snowier Silicon Valley in BlackBerry’s Backyard.”

  It essentially talks about the fact that despite the rapid decline of BlackBerry (it just reported $4.4 billion in losses), the Kitchener-Waterloo region is thriving. Many companies—both local and international, such as Google and Motorola, Square, Desire2Learn, Kik and others—have all hung their shingle in the area. 

  Part of this certainly has to do with the University of Waterloo, but much of it also has to do with the legacy of BlackBerry. In fact, you could argue that BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion) is what started at all.

  In reading the New York Times article I was reminded of a post that Fred Wilson wrote last year called, “The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs.” It’s a great post. In it he talks about how he looks for the company that gave birth to the hub. In Silicon Valley he argues that it was Fairchild Semiconductor and in New York it was Doubleclick.

  Once started, he likens the hub to a growing forest. The big trees (mature companies) start dropping seeds and new trees then start to grow (more startup companies). This is important, because it kick-starts a non-linear cycle of entrepreneurial growth.

  Here’s how he maps out Silicon Valley:

  “In my mental model of Silicon Valley, the first “tree” was Fairchild Semiconductor (founded in 1957) which begat Intel (founded 1968) which begat Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977), which begat Sun (1982), Silicon Graphics (1981), and Cisco (1984) which begat Siebel (1993) and Netscape (1994), which begat Yahoo! (1995) and eBay (1995), which begat Google (1998) and PayPal (1998), which begat YouTube (2005), Facebook (2004), and LinkedIn (2003) which begat Twitter (2006) and Zynga (2007), which begat Square (2010), Dropbox (2008), and many more.”

  Using this logic, Fred Wilson argues that Silicon Valley is about 10 cycles in and New York is at about 2. So what about Kitchener-Waterloo? Well if you buy into the argument that BlackBerry is what started it all, we’re really only into our first cycle. BlackBerry created a lot of wealth and talent, and now it’s being deployed into local startups. Our forest has begun.

  Part of me worries, though, if Kitchener-Waterloo is the right place for a startup hub over the long term. Sure it has the University of Waterloo, but does young talent want to be there? At about 320,000 people, it’s no San Francisco, New York or Toronto. And we’re already seeing a significant pull towards urban centers.

  But let’s look at it from the perspective of Southern Ontario as a whole. We’re at a critical moment in our evolution. The mother tree has caught a disease and it’s starting to take its toll. It may be able to fight it off, but right now it’s not looking promising. Thankfully, there are many young trees sprouting up to replace it. But we’re going to need to take special care of them, because they’re probably our best shot at creating our own thriving forest.

  2013.12.24

• Wrapping my head around Bitcoin

  There’s been a lot of talk about Bitcoin over the past year, particularly as of late when the value of one bitcoin peaked at over USD $1,200.

  Truthfully, it’s only been over the past few months that I’ve really started to wrap my head around how Bitcoin works and what the implications of it might be. But the more I learn about it, the more it strikes me as something enormous in the making.

  If you’re not yet familiar with Bitcoin, you can check out this video (simple version) or this video (complicated geek version).

  Essentially though, it’s a decentralized and open source digital currency that’s managed using networked computers, as opposed to any one government. And functionally, it works as a distributed public ledger that logs every single bitcoin transaction. What this means is that when you buy or sell something using bitcoin, no exchange of bitcoin actually takes place. Instead, the distributed public ledger (called a block chain) gets updated to show who owns which coins both today and previously. 

  This is potentially a big deal for 2 reasons.

  The first is that many people view Bitcoin as the first internet native currency. The decentralized architecture of Bitcoin matches the decentralized architecture of the internet. And so it has the possibility of becoming the transactional protocol for the internet and global commerce.

  The second reason (and this is where your mind will really get blown) is that transactions can be logged in the block chain/ledger with additional information embedded into each bitcoin. What this means is that you can use Bitcoin to create contracts, such as deposits, escrows, loans and so on. And since Bitcoin is designed to function in low trust environments (ie. where nobody knows each other), there’s an opportunity to really optimize the way we buy and sell almost anything.

  In fact, if you dig deeper into what’s being contemplated with Bitcoin, you’ll find things like “smart property.”

  “Smart property is property whose ownership is controlled via the Bitcoin block chain, using contracts. Examples could include physical property such as cars, phones or houses.”

  Of course, it’s still early days for Bitcoin. But if it truly does become the transactional protocol for the internet, then I certainly do think we’ll see dramatic changes in the way we buy things like cars and real estate.

  2013.12.21

• Tech irony

  I came across an interesting op-ed in the New York Times this morning called “What Tech Hasn’t Learned from Urban Planning.” It basically talks about how, despite the fact that tech companies are increasingly moving from the suburbs to the city, they haven’t yet figured out how to be urban.

  “The tech sector’s embrace of urbanist lingua franca and its enthusiasm to engage with urban problems is awesome, and much welcomed. But these folks need to become better urbanists.”

  The problem—Allison Arieff argues—is that they create sterile and insular environments. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are served to employees so they don’t need to leave the building. And private social spaces are created just for them.

  It strikes me as being terribly ironic that these companies—a great number of which are committed to making the world more open and connected—actually suck at doing that in real life.

  2013.12.15