Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: zoom

  • Construction site day

    Thursday mornings have become my construction site time. I start off at Junction House. I walk the site with the team. We meet and use a lot of profanities. And then I head over to One Delisle for a similar set of activities. It is one of my favorite times of the week because, as a developer, you get to see all of your work coming together in a real and physical thing.

    The views can also be pretty nice. Here is photo of the downtown skyline from Junction House this morning (there was a bit of fog):

    I know this goes without saying, but I think it is crucial to walk one’s sites. There’s no way to do this in sweatpants over Zoom. You need to see the details. You need to build relationships. And you need to problem solve with the team. It’s also a great opportunity to learn — generally and from mistakes — and get better as a professional.

    Here’s the thing about development: sometimes you’re flying at 10,000 feet and sometimes you’re talking about how many layers of drywall are appropriate for demising walls. It’s a lot of fun.

  • Using Clubhouse to talk about real estate and proptech

    Okay, Clubhouse is pretty awesome. I participated in my first discussion room — thanks to my friend Evgeny, who has been a vocal supporter of the platform — and I have now seen the light. The topic was real estate and PropTech. And we hope to do it again.

    It feels a bit like Twitter to me, but obviously with audio and with greater controls and visibility in terms of who can participate inside of a discussion room.

    It also makes perfect sense to me that Twitter is piloting their own version of Clubhouse called Spaces. That feels like a natural extension and something that needs to happen. Perhaps some of the moderation features will also make their way into the rest of Twitter.

    As many of you already know, what makes Clubhouse unique is that the communication is free-flowing and impromptu. You are able to see what topics people are talking about and then jump in and out of those audio rooms, as well as invite people to join a discussion that you may be having.

    All of this makes the communication feel like you’re at a party or in an open office. Over there you can see/hear that someone is talking about the “Pensky file.” If that’s interesting and/or relevant to you, you have the option of jumping into that conversation.

    I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these features and behaviors translated over into workplace collaboration tools. I think it would be helpful to see what other discussions are taking place within a team or company.

    Maybe if we made things a little more free flowing, we wouldn’t need so many damn Zoom meetings.

  • Zoomed out

    Joining a Zoom (or other video) meeting is as frictionless as opening up the calendar invite and clicking the link. No need to login or do much else, except maybe fiddle with the audio for a bit. “Can you hear me now?” The benefits to this are obvious. But if you’re Zoom (or another video conferencing company) there could be a slight problem: I don’t really care where that link is taking me, as long as it’s taking me to the meeting I was supposed to join 4 minutes ago. In other words, there aren’t really any network effects. The service doesn’t get any better for me as more people use it, because anybody can join the link that I send them. Benedict Evans recently made this argument, here, and he goes on to posit that video calls, like voice calls, are destined to become a commodity. All that will matter is how you package them up. Makes sense.

  • The future is unknowable

    I am sure many of you are getting tired of the news. I know I am. But it turns out that when you’re in a global pandemic and you spend the entirety of your day looking at Zoom — while fidgeting your leg, I might add — there’s only so much else you can talk and write about.

    One of the more interesting things you could read is Howard Marks’ memos. Howard is the co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management and, from what I can tell, he’s been writing since 1990. Some years it’s an annual memo and some years — like this year — he writes a bunch more. His most recent is regarding, “Knowledge of the Future.”

    If I had to summarize it: The future is unknowable and none of us can say with any certainty what the next quarter or the next year is going to look like. In Howard’s words: “These days everyone has the same data regarding the present and the same ignorance regarding the future.”

    Most of the time, he explains, we simply extrapolate from the past and then apply our own biases to come up with a prediction. Howard describes himself as more of a worrier, whereas I would describe myself as more of an optimist. I believe, to a certain extent, in creating self-fulfilling prophecies.

    Notwithstanding our inability to predict the future (which isn’t a new phenomenon), I think it’s important to have opinions and take positions. Any decision is better than no decision, right?

    For a full archive of Howard Marks’ memos, click here.

  • Working from somewhere

    From the outset, people have been predicting that the internet would become a decentralizing force for cities. That is, technology would allow us to spread out and work from anywhere — perhaps from a small mountain town in the BC interior. While working from home (WFH) and working from anywhere (WFA) does appear to be on the rise, it hasn’t made cities irrelevant. (US Census data from 2018 estimates that only about 5.2% of Americans work entirely from home.) In fact, the “new economy” seems to have made superstar cities, such as London, seemingly even more important. It has concentrated economic activity; so much so that we’re searching for ways to spread out income and wealth more evenly.

    But could it be that the technology simply wasn’t there yet? Fred Wilson posited on his blog today that right now might be video conferencing’s moment. Between not wanting to travel (coronavirus, carbon footprint, time, etc…) and advancements in the actual technology, companies such as Zoom are changing the way people and companies engage over long distances. It is happening in our offices. And come to think of it, there are probably a bunch of meetings that I could and should switch over to Zoom. I’m not yet convinced that it will become a decentralizing force for cities. But it does seem to be empowering less travel and more flexibility.

    Photo by Nastuh Abootalebi on Unsplash