Happy Monday!! Hope your weekend was lovely. The Urban Tech team spent the weekend celebrating the launch of our new website.
A couple of quick notes before diving in:
Sometime in the next week, our new subscription product's beta phase will be ready to go live.
The new additions to the Urban Tech product ecosystem will include more, exclusive content, a jobs board, and likely a private slack or discord channel.
I'll send out more details when I have them, but keep your eye out for an extra email from me this week telling you the product is officially live.
Now, let's dive into the important stories you need to know to start the week.
Last Monday’s most popular stories:
🥇City’s Today: Wave of US cities to pilot guaranteed income programmes
🥈Axios: How stalling growth hurts the planet
🥉San Antonio Express: A year after Texas' COVID restaurant shutdown, ghost kitchens have risen to fill the spaces left behind
Urban Tech Archives:
🎙 Podcast: Exploring The Rise of “Nomad Cities”
📝 Newsletter: Why Ads Can Help SMBs Recoup During the COVID Recovery
📝 Newsletter: 🧠 How Design Shapes Human Experience
Essential City + Tech Stories: 3.29.21
💰 The Real Deal: Compass seeks $10B tech valuation
💸 TechCrunch: ‘Instant needs’ delivery startup goPuff raises $1.15B at an $8.9B valuation
🦄 Bloomberg: Spencer Rascoff's Pacaso Vaults to Unicorn Status as Greycroft Invests
👵🏻 CityLab: Can Granny Flats Fill California's Housing Gap?
Essential City + Tech Stories: 3.29.21
📈 CNN: WeWork is finally going public through a SPAC
The big proptech story last week: WeWork will finally hit the public markets via SPAC.
It took a lot longer than expected, but WeWork is finally set to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company — and at a huge discount to what the startup was once worth.
WeWork announced Friday morning that is merging with BowX Acquisition, a blank check firm known as a SPAC, in a deal that values the office sharing company at $9 billion. Shares of BowX were up more than 10% in early trading.
WeWork was once valued at $47 billion, making it one of the most valuable unicorn startups in the world.
But the company shelved plans for an initial public offering in 2019 after questions about corporate governance emerged, eventually leading to the ouster of controversial co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann. Neumann is reportedly now set to get about a $500 million settlement as a golden parachute from SoftBank, WeWork's top investor.
💰 The Real Deal: Compass seeks $10B tech valuation
In concert with the WeWork news, E.B. Solomont at The Real Deal reported Compass is seeking a $10B valuation when it hits the market.
Compass is aiming to go public at a $10 billion valuation, positioning itself as a tech company rather than a traditional brokerage.
The New York-based firm said it will offer 36 million shares priced between $23 and $26 apiece, according to an updated S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. At that price, Compass will raise $936 million in its public debut.
Urban Tech question: How will the development of the Compass tech platform impact investors’ potential interests in this proptech angle?
WeWork and numerous other real estate tech plays have shown it can be difficult to back up the hype with the tech.
💸 TechCrunch: ‘Instant needs’ delivery startup goPuff raises $1.15B at an $8.9B valuation
As it turns out, helping small businesses become more profitable and optimize through tech is a good startup play. Anthony Ha wrote on goPuff’s latest funding news:
Last fall, delivery startup goPuff made a big splash by raising $380 million in funding and acquiring West Coast beverage retailer BevMo shortly afterward. Just a few months later, the Philadelphia-based company is announcing that it has raised another $1.15 billion in funding at an $8.9 billion valuation (compared to $3.9 billion in October).
Available in more than 650 U.S. cities, goPuff delivers a wide variety of products in under 30 minutes while charging a flat $1.95 delivery fee. Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola, who serve as co-CEOs, founded the company in 2013 while they were students at Drexel University. When I first spoke to Gola last fall, he told me that the pair thought, “There has to be a better way to get convenience products delivered.”
🦄 Bloomberg: Spencer Rascoff's Pacaso Vaults to Unicorn Status as Greycroft Invests
As homebuying in America has been on a tear the last year, Pacaso is betting on interests in a new model for getting equity in second homes. The company officially reached unicorn status last week:
Pacaso, a startup that offers shared ownership of residential properties, has raised $75 million in new capital at a valuation of $1 billion -- just six months since its launch.
The San Francisco-based company, founded by Zillow Group Inc. co-founder Spencer Rascoff and Dotloop founder Austin Allison in October, said it reached so-called unicorn status faster than any other U.S. company.
👵🏻 CityLab: Can Granny Flats Fill California's Housing Gap?
Accessory dwelling units are one tool showing progress to address California’s massive housing shortage. Kriston Capps wrote on the trend and one startup helping to propel building more ADUs even easier.
Now that they’re fully legal, backyard homes are big business in California.
For years, permitting figures languished for granny flats, garage apartments and other types of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, thanks to local restrictions that forced homeowners to submit to cumbersome discretionary approvals before local boards. Back in 2016, California passed a state law that required cities to ease these regulations and grant permits by set standards. Two more bills that followed in 2017 relaxed the rules around ADU construction. That’s when backyard apartments took off.
Four years later, ADUs account for a growing share of homes built across the state. California homeowners built some 12,000 backyard flats in 2019 — more than double the number permitted just two years earlier and a ten-fold increase since the state passed its preemption laws. Unlike other categories of housing in California, the numbers for new permits for ADUs are rising — with growth likely to continue thanks in part to efforts by local governments to help them go up quickly. In some cases, very quickly.
Several Interesting Social Posts
Thanks for reading today’s edition!
And also, thanks for letting me admit Urban Tech LLC came from the ashes of a failed screenplay, which quite possibly be the most stereotypical I’ve lived in Brooklyn and LA shit I’ve ever said. Please don’t judge me too hard lolz.
Have a good week and talk soon,
✌️ JT