▶️ Essential City + Tech Stories: 1.11.21
Amazon invests in affordable housing, Hipcamp raises new funding, An NBC show on mayoral life
Good morning! John, here. 👋
Welcome back to Urban Tech, the best place for people interested in how innovation is changing cities and the ways we experience them. A few notes before diving into today’s edition.
If you haven’t gotten the chance, be sure to check out my conversation last week with Russ Rosenband, principal at The Lot Next Door. He provided me with a ton of insights on how innovation is changing the local food landscape.
On Thursday, we’ll publish a 🔥 conversation with Lime’s Global Head of Policy, Katie Stevens.
Katie is the definition of a transportation guru. She spends her days thinking about an incredibly complicated landscape in an emerging sector that is highly regulated by cities, states, and federal governments worldwide. 🏙
We discussed micromobility’s resiliency in the face of COVID and much more. Trust me; you’re gonna love the conversation.
Where to listen to the Urban Tech Podcast
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Last Monday’s most popular stories:
🥇 The Atlantic: The Anti-growth Alliance That Fueled Urban Gentrification
🥈Streetsblog: Eyes on the Street: All Rise for the New Moynihan Train Hall (Because You Can’t SIT There!)
🥉 The Wall Street Journal: SoftBank to Get Majority Stake in Katerra With $200 Million Bailout
Essential City + Tech Stories: 1.11.21
💯 Crunchbase News: Why Miami Is The Next Hot Tech Hub: ‘This Is Not A Retirement Decision’
🏕 The Information: Hipcamp, ‘Airbnb of the Outdoors,’ Raises $57 Million
🏠 The Verge: Amazon will spend $2 billion to try to fix affordable housing crises in three major employment hubs
❌ The Verge: Waymo says it’s ditching the term ‘self-driving’ in dig at Tesla
🎥 The New York Times: ‘Mr. Mayor’ Review: A Political Comedy From Sitcom Royalty
Axios: 2020 changed America's startup landscape
The legacy of 2020, and the pandemic, on cities will take decades to understand fully. One long-term change does seem clear: distance matters less to tech investors for gauging new venture opportunities.
Axios’ Dan Primack explored this trend last week:
Venture capitalists have been historically reluctant to invest in startups based too far from home, thus making it it easier for "good ideas" to get funded in the Bay Area or the Acela corridor than anywhere else. 2020 may have finally changed that dynamic.
Why it matters: This could create a virtuous cycle of economic opportunity in cities and regions that have been largely left out of America's tech boom.
The history: Many venture capitalists used to abide by the so-called "20 minute rule," whereby they wouldn't invest in a company located more than a 20-minute drive away from their home or office.
One Boston-area investor had his own subway spin on it, saying he wouldn't even meet with companies located past a certain subway stop on the MBTA's Red Line.
Frankly, it's pretty mind-boggling — and frustrating — it's taken a global pandemic to shift tech investors' focus to opportunities outside of status quo tech cities like San Francisco, Boston, or New York. The prospects have been there for a while.
Crunchbase News: Why Miami Is The Next Hot Tech Hub: ‘This Is Not A Retirement Decision’
While I’m excited about the opportunity for new tech hubs like Miami, I want to wait a bit for data showing the changes are real — and lasting. Last week, Sophia Kunthara from Crunchbase News used some data to add texture to the Miami tech conversation.
The piece gives concrete data and significant insights that help cut through the online noise hyping Miami as the next great American tech center.
Venture-backed companies based in the city of Miami raised $972 million across 57 deals in 2020 (final figures could eventually be higher due to reporting delays). Interestingly, while the deal count last year was the lowest in five years, the dollar volume of venture capital invested in Miami was the highest there had been for that same period.
The Information: Hipcamp, ‘Airbnb of the Outdoors,’ Raises $57 Million
Cory Weinberg at The Information broke news last week that emerging consumer camping platform Hipcamp raised new funding:
THE TAKEAWAY
• Hipcamp valued at more than $300 million in new round
• Investors in Series C funding include Bond Capital, Index Ventures
• Bookings rebounded last summer as outdoor-focused travel boomedOn the surface, this might not seem like an example of Urban Tech because the product targets getting people out of cities.
Yet, Hipcamp’s primary customers are people who live in cities, so it’s a great example of why the broader ‘urban tech’ space this newsletter is named after is so interesting. Tech and cities intersect in many different ways.
Final note: The participation of Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital in the round stuck out to me. If Meeker is getting involved, the market should probably take the opportunity pretty seriously.
Axios: Why the decline of business travel matters
While certain parts of the travel sector are recovering and look prosperous (see above), business travel remains uncertain. Erica Pandey at Axios explored the situation more in-depth.
Driving the news: Business travel will drop by up to 36% in the post-pandemic world, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis that individually examined different categories of travel, like sales, conventions and intra-company meetings.
Bill Gates is even less optimistic. He recently projected business travel would decline by more than 50%, saying there will be a "very high threshold" for trips now that salespeople, consultants and others have shown that they can do their jobs without traveling. On top of that, cutting business travel saves companies lots of money.
"Basically, no matter what we do, this pandemic has wiped out a chunk of business travel," says Charlie Leocha, president of Travelers United, a passenger-advocacy organization, and one of the architects of the Journal's analysis. "That is a big problem for the airlines."
The stakes: Business travelers only make up around 10% of airline passengers across the major global carriers, but they account for 55%–75% of revenue because they're typically the ones who spend big on last-minute tickets or book premium seats, the New York Times' Jane Levere reports.
The piece was a great reminder to me that business travel is a much more complicated ecosystem than just traveling for one-off events like conferences or retreats.
The Verge: Amazon will spend $2 billion to try to fix affordable housing crises in three major employment hubs
A significant story that was easy to miss in the chaos of last week was Amazon’s new commitment to affordable housing in several cities:
Amazon has pledged to spend more than $2 billion over the next five years to build tens of thousands of affordable housing units in three of the e-commerce giant’s major employment hubs, underscoring the ongoing housing crises affecting parts of the US where large, high-paying tech employers reside. Amazon’s pledge, announced on Wednesday, follows similar commitments from Apple, Facebook, and Google, all of which previously promised between $1 billion and $2.5 billion each to tackle similar issues plaguing the San Francisco Bay Area.
The parts of the US Amazon plans to invest in include Washington state’s Puget Sound region that encompasses Seattle, as well as Arlington, Virginia and Nashville, Tennessee where Amazon has opened fast-growing offices…
Keep in mind the underlying context around tech’s role in making housing more expensive:
The unspoken reality of these large housing pledges is that tech companies often play a major role in gentrification and displacement of local communities. That’s often through a complex interplay of factors related to disproportionately high wages and unmatched benefits that allow employees to live in and around city centers despite sometimes working in more rural or suburban settings, where housing is cheaper and in less demand. And as part of its long-term strategy to help attract and retain talent, a company like Amazon has an incentive to make the urban centers and regions it turns into major employment hubs more affordable places to live.
The underlying context aside, it’s good for cities and society if Amazon, worth over $1.5 trillion, is committing itself more to local issues like housing. To maximize the potential for cities, we need all major players to be involved, and it’s safe to call Amazon a major player in the world at this point.
The Verge: Waymo says it’s ditching the term ‘self-driving’ in dig at Tesla
A big lesson from last week’s events in Washington is communication and language truly matter. This lesson is essential for emerging technology and sectors like autonomous vehicles.
Last week, Waymo committed to some subtle word changes that I think are important because of the intentions they communicate. From Andrew Hawkins at The Verge:
The Google sister company says it is through using the term “self-driving cars” to describe its fleet of autonomous vehicles. And it is subtly pointing fingers at Elon Musk’s Tesla as the reason why.
Waymo says it is committing to “using more deliberate language” in its marketing, educational, and promotional materials going forward. This means the company will no longer refer to its vehicles as “self-driving,” Waymo says. For example, the company is changing the name of its three-year-old public education campaign from “Let’s Talk Self-Driving” to “Let’s Talk Autonomous Driving.”
Considering the safety issues around autonomous vehicles, being precise in language, descriptions, and goals seems like a worthy endeavor. Also, I did love the Tesla shade involved….
The New York Times: ‘Mr. Mayor’ Review: A Political Comedy From Sitcom Royalty
Today's last story is a bit more fun but connects to some larger context on the importance of cities in modern life. Last week, a new Ted Danson starring sitcom debuted on NBC.
NBC is the same network that gave us local gov lovers Parks and Recreation, so it's not like this is new territory.
As a total dork for local politics, I'm going to give it a try and see if the network can tell some interesting stories about local government and leadership at a pretty interesting time for cities.
Several Interesting Tweets
Thanks for checking out today’s edition! Please continue to share Urban Tech with your networks. We’ll be back on Thursday featuring my conversation with Lime’s Katie Stevens.
Talk soon,
✌️JT