☀️ Essential City + Tech Stories: 12.28.20
Apple is Taking Cars Seriously, Opendoor IPO, and more
Hello! 🌇
Happy Monday, and welcome back to Urban Tech. The best place for people thinking about innovation and cities.
Hope you’re all staying safe and getting some rest before things pick back up in January. 🎊
Content schedule notes:
This Thursday, we will look at how innovation and COVID are altering restaurant retail and food commerce (deliveries, groceries, etc.). This will set us up nicely for next week.
Next Thursday, Urban Tech will focus on the wild world of ghost kitchens. I’m speaking with Russ Rosenband, principal of The Lot Next Door.
Russ is an advisor and investor helping growing venture-backed companies at the intersection of real estate, technology, and hospitality.
Here’s his background:
He works directly with founders to help raise capital and define real estate growth / go-to-market strategies. Russ' advisory portfolio consists of companies like Bbot (Restaurant Tech), Daily Goods (Grab-and-Go Retail), and Zuul Kitchens (Ghost Kitchen Operator).
He's also an early investor in City Dumpling, a virtual restaurant & marketplace that distributes the best dumplings in New York City to the masses. City Dumpling was born mid-pandemic out of a desire to help local restaurants, and has grown to 5 locations in Manhattan with plans to expand into Brooklyn & Queens by Q1 2021.
Subscribe to the Urban Tech Podcast to hear the full conversation. There will be an abridged version of the conversation in the newsletter next Thursday.
Places to listen:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Select Podcast App
Last Monday’s most popular stories:
🥇 The Information: How Johnny Boufarhat Built the Fastest Software Startup ‘Unicorn’ in History
🥈Axios: Hard Truth: American Dream deferred
🥉 LA Times: This capitalist commune is trying to cure L.A.’s loneliness. Plus there’s free coffee
Essential City + Tech Stories: 12/28/20
🚗 Reuters: Apple targets car production by 2024 and eyes 'next level' battery technology
💸 Bloomberg: Opendoor’s Market Debut Caps Roller Coaster Year in Housing
📉 CNBC: Covid pandemic: Restaurant revenue has fallen, despite delivery boom
🤖 Axios: 2021 could be the year automation and AI truly accelerate the economy
🤑 The Real Deal: 10 biggest proptech funding rounds of 2020
Reuters: Apple targets car production by 2024 and eyes 'next level' battery technology
Last week, news of Apple targeting production on specific automotive technology products sent waves through the business world.
Apple Inc is moving forward with self-driving car technology and is targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology…
…Apple has progressed enough that it now aims to build a vehicle for consumers, two people familiar with the effort said, asking not to be named because Apple’s plans are not public. Apple’s goal of building a personal vehicle for the mass market contrasts with rivals such as Alphabet Inc’s Waymo, which has built robo-taxis to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service.
Central to Apple’s strategy is a new battery design that could “radically” reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle’s range, according to a third person who has seen Apple’s battery design.
Bloomberg: Opendoor’s Market Debut Caps Roller Coaster Year in Housing
Opendoor, which had an early mission to allow users to “sell a home online in a few clicks,” officially went public last week. The company’s IPO is arguably one of the biggest stories in real estate tech this year:
Eric Wu made his first foray into real estate as a student at the University of Arizona, using scholarship money to make a down payment on a rental property. Now, he’s taken his company public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
Opendoor Technologies Inc. began trading Monday following the completion of the merger. The shares bounced between gains and losses and eventually closed at $31.25 in New York, 5.9% higher than the price on Friday.
CNBC: Covid pandemic: Restaurant revenue has fallen, despite delivery boom
This piece from Amelia Lucas highlights some of the most interesting, and frustrating, themes of restaurant retail in 2020:
UBS Evidence Lab found that dine-in restaurant sales plunged 69% in the week ended Nov. 29. In that same week, takeout and delivery sales soared 59%. But total restaurant revenue remained well in the red.
As we’ll explore in Thursday’s edition, the transformation to online delivery has been quick, yet it hasn’t been enough for many eateries to continue operating:
The National Restaurant Association estimates that 110,000 establishments have already closed due to the pandemic.
Axios: 2021 could be the year automation and AI truly accelerate the economy
It can be hard to appreciate how long it takes to reap the rewards of new technologies from the classic sense of economic productivity.
2021 seems like the year some longstanding innovation could reap productivity rewards for the broader economy, partly through consolidation.
The coronavirus pandemic hit the global economy hard in 2020, but the economy may be close to consolidating years of technological advances — and ready to take off in a burst of productivity growth.
…Productivity is the engine that makes the economy grow for everyone. If long-gestating technologies like AI and automation really are ready to fulfill their potential, we'll have the chance to escape the great stagnation that has choked our economy and poisoned our politics.
There are lots of essential data in the piece from Bryan Walsh at Axios (go check it out), but one part I wanted to call your attention to because of how it impacts real people:
By the numbers: A survey by the World Economic Forum in October found more than 80% of global firms plan to accelerate the digitization of business process and grow remote work, while half plan to accelerate automation.
About 43% expect those changes to reduce their workforces overall, which implies an expected increase in productivity.
The catch: If those gains don't filter down to workers — or worse, end up eliminating jobs without replacing them with better ones — even a faster, more productive economy won't ameliorate the inequality-driven political divisions that have dogged the U.S. in recent years.
The Real Deal: 10 biggest proptech funding rounds of 2020
E.B. Solomont at The Real Deal takes a look at the biggest deals in real estate tech this year. At a high-level:
All told, investors poured nearly $2 billion into the top 10 deals of the year, according to data compiled for The Real Deal by Pitchbook and the Center for Real Estate Technology and Innovation. Many were late-stage investments, and the average deal size was $198.7 million, according to the data.
Some of the common themes from the list:
Residential real estate tech and method for easing the home-buying process
Flexible space or unbundling of long-term real estate structures like home titles or mortgages (see above)
Investors including Softbank, Navitas Capital, Zigg Capital, Founders Fund, and Greycroft.
Several Interesting Tweets
Thanks for reading today’s edition! Hope you have a great start to the week. 🎉
Talk to you on Thursday,
✌️JT