Crisis Fuels Innovation

Issue 20 - February 19th, 2021

2020 was a monumental year with the start of Covid-19, and now 2021 is off to an interesting start here in Texas and many parts of the country with the epic snow storms, power outages, and water issues plaguing people all over the place. It is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel when you are in the middle of a crisis, but things always do eventually get better. Humans are incredibly resilient, and it is awesome to watch people adapt, innovate, and help each other in times of need and distress. We will emerge stronger as a nation from these insane events happening, and I look forward to some boring days (hopefully) in 2021. My hope for future thoughts later this year: “Man today was so boring, I had dinner with friends then went to a concert without a mask on and went home to my house that had electricity and running water.”

That being said, crisis fuels innovation. Entrepreneurs thrive on solving problems, and some of the most innovative companies and ideas emerge in the years after some of the worst times in history. The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have compressed 10 years of technology adoption and innovation into 12 months. This current crisis in Texas will hopefully spawn similar innovation to help us thwart a crisis like this from ever happening again. I realize this is a multi pronged crisis on many fronts for various reasons, and it will take time to sort through the madness.

For fun and some idea brainstorming, I have written down some ideas this week that would be cool to see in the future.

• Remote building monitoring solutions should become a mandatory part of building code to help people assess damage or divert potential crisis in buildings like apartment complexes, condo buildings, hotels, and office properties. We have the technology available to easily make this happen, and this should be a priority in all climates as weather continues to evolve and change all over the world.

• It should be much easier to shut off water to a property.

• Public alert systems are absolutely pathetic and need to improve.

• We need to reexamine our 911 and 311 systems. They seem like they have not changed or improved at all in my lifetime. It should be much easier to open a 311 app for example, snap a photo of a tree that has fallen across a street, and zap it off to the appropriate person, so they can manage their clean up efforts post storm? Cities could give their citizens credit for reporting issues in a video-game like fashion and give some “good citizen points” that could be redeemed towards a future speeding ticket? Just thinking out loud. Cities need to be held accountable for innovation just like capitalistic markets. The excuse that cities are not companies doesn’t fly with me. There is no excuse for poor municipal management in today’s world.

• There should be a public database of people over a certain age who live by themselves, so people can check on them in times of crisis. Family members could register their family members, and we would have a simple to use database that would be much needed right now to qualm people’s fears about their elders.

• What ideas come to mind for you?

We need to do a better job preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. We cannot simply “hope the worst never happens” and then just sit by on our hands when it does. I am always an optimistic person, and I believe our best days are ahead of us even though there is much work to be done. Our country is the best in the world, and I look forward to seeing the ways we evolve, change, and improve from the depths of these horrible times. Cheers to the future and boring days ahead!

Newsworthy Links To Share

1. Nativ, a transaction management startup that’s taking on industry leader Dealpath, has raised seed funding from an investor that backed CompStak and VTS. San Francisco-based Bling Capital invested $3 million into Nativ, valuing the New York City startup at around $14 million, according to co-founder Jeff Saul. Dealpath — which claims its platform has helped clients close $5 trillion in deals — is backed by Blackstone, JLL Spark, LeFrak and Milstein, among others.“We think we can really vie to be the leading deal management platform for commercial real estate,” Saul said. Founded in 2018, Nativ is aimed primarily at lenders. Early users include AllianceBernstein, Silverstein Capital Partners, Benefit Street Partners and Prime Finance.

2. CoStar announces it is launching its own scheduling tool via Homesnap for real estate agents to rival Zillow’s acquisition of ShowingTime for $500 million (read more about that acquisition here). Homesnap is owned by CoStar, a real estate data and software company behind platforms like Apartments.com and auction.com.

3. Compass acquires Bold, a 10-year-old New York City-based luxury leasing firm with more than 100 agents serving Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The acquisition is Compass’ first significant acquisition in its home city since it acquired Stribling & Associates, a top New York City rival, in April 2019, amid of period of insane growth by acquisition for the company.

4. The OpenDoor mafia is starting to spin out and launch new companies now that OpenDoor has gone public. This is exciting to me because some of the best companies are started by early employees at successful startups (the PayPal mafia being the most famous). Nomad which has been dubbed “the iBuyer of rentals” just announced a $2 million dollar seed round. Nomad provides property management services to landlords, and their main value driver is the fact that they guarantee a landlord 2 years of rent. To date, it has received requests from more than 1,000 landlords and has served over 100 customers in the broader Denver metro area and Boulder, the only two markets in which it currently operates. In the next year, Nomad plans to launch in several additional markets outside of Colorado.

5. Milken Institute releases their list of “Top Powerhouse Cities for 2021”, and the list looks entirely different from the previous year (shocking!). Provo, Utah takes the top spot while San Francisco, San Jose, Reno, Seattle and Dallas fall out of the "top 10" places for job creation, wage growth, and innovation. Check out the list and article HERE.