Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1034

Amazon released its shortlist of HQ2 cities this morning. Below are the 20 metropolitan areas. They were selected from 238 bids, so this shortlist represents 8.4% of the original pool.

• Atlanta, GA

• Austin, TX

• Boston, MA

• Chicago, IL

• Columbus, OH

• Dallas, TX

• Denver, CO

• Indianapolis, IN

• Los Angeles, CA

• Miami, FL

• Montgomery County, MD

• Nashville, TN

• Newark, NJ

• New York City, NY

• Northern Virginia, VA

• Philadelphia, PA

• Pittsburgh, PA

• Raleigh, NC

• Toronto, ON

• Washington D.C.

I saw some people on Twitter say that they were surprised to see Toronto and Miami on this list. I was not. If you remember, I publicly predicted on this blog that Toronto would be selected for Amazon HQ2 .

That said, I thought it would be fun to guess at an even shorter list from Amazon’s shortlist. I have no knowledge of Amazon’s actual selections process, but if I had to guess, here is who I would cross off the list:

• Atlanta, GA

• Austin, TX

• Boston, MA

• Chicago, IL

• Columbus, OH

• Dallas, TX

• Denver, CO

• Indianapolis, IN

• Los Angeles, CA

• Miami, FL

• Montgomery County, MD

• Nashville, TN

• Newark, NJ

• New York City, NY

• Northern Virginia, VA

• Philadelphia, PA

• Pittsburgh, PA

• Raleigh, NC

• Toronto, ON

• Washington D.C.

That leaves us with a list that looks like this:

1. Boston, MA
   

2. Miami, FL
   

3. Montgomery County, MD

4. Newark, NJ
   

5. Northern Virginia, VA
   

6. Toronto, ON
   

7. Washington D.C.

So why this list? I’m probably wrong, but my reasons are as follows:

- I think Amazon will opt for a metro area on eastern time.

- There seems to be a predilection for areas around Washington D.C., so I left Montgomery County and Northern Virginia. 

- As wonderful as it is, New York City feels too center ice for Amazon – at least in my view. But maybe Newark places them in the catchment area.

- The area needs to be of a certain scale so Amazon doesn’t overpower it and they have enough human capital to draw from.

- Miami is my sleeper bet. Most people think of it simply as a resort town, but there’s a huge percentage of foreign born residents and powerful arts/design scene.

- Talent is number one, which is why I left Boston and Toronto and why I continue to believe in Toronto. Toronto is more dynamic than Boston.

If I had to pick just three from the above shortlist, my bets would be, in alphabetical order: Boston, Toronto, and Washington D.C. What are yours?

Steven Johnson has a terrific piece in New York Times Magazine called: Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble . Here is a snippet:

The only blockchain project that has crossed over into mainstream recognition so far is Bitcoin, which is in the middle of a speculative bubble that makes the 1990s internet I.P.O. frenzy look like a neighborhood garage sale. 

But the point of the article, as its title suggests, is to talk about what all of this craziness could mean for the future of the internet and how, in some ways, it could be a return to what the internet was always intended to be.

The real promise of these new technologies, many of their evangelists believe, lies not in displacing our currencies but in replacing much of what we now think of as the internet, while at the same time returning the online world to a more decentralized and egalitarian system. If you believe the evangelists, the blockchain is the future. But it is also a way of getting back to the internet’s roots.

Some are calling this new, decentralized internet version 3.0. We are currently living with internet 2.0. Practically speaking though, what could this shift really mean for us?

One example that is given in the article has to do with urban mobility – a topic that is particularly relevant to this audience. 

Internet 2.0 has created a winner-take-most economic model. And in the case of mobility – at least in the world of apps – that winner is Uber. But with internet 3.0 and the blockchain, this could be possible:

Just as GPS gave us a way of discovering and sharing our location, this new protocol would define a simple request: I am here and would like to go there. A distributed ledger might record all its users’ past trips, credit cards, favorite locations — all the metadata that services like Uber or Amazon use to encourage lock-in. Call it, for the sake of argument, the Transit protocol. The standards for sending a Transit request out onto the internet would be entirely open; anyone who wanted to build an app to respond to that request would be free to do so. Cities could build Transit apps that allowed taxi drivers to field requests. But so could bike-share collectives, or rickshaw drivers.

I don’t know about you, but I find this perspective a lot more interesting. I recommend you read Steven’s article . It will help you cut through a lot of the Bitcoin noise.

I really like the post that Seth Godin wrote on his blog today called:  The four elements of entrepreneurship .

He defines entrepreneurs through their actions and behaviors. In his view, this is what they do:

1. They make decisions.

2. They invest in activities and assets that aren’t a sure thing.

3. They persuade others to support a mission with a non-guaranteed outcome.

4. This one is the most amorphous, the most difficult to pin down and thus the juiciest: They embrace (instead of run from) the work of doing things that might not work.

As far as I can tell, that’s it. Everything else you can hire.

He then goes on to say:

All four of these elements are unnatural to most folks. Particularly if you were good at school, you’re not good at this. No right answers, no multiple choice, no findable bounds.

Perhaps this is why many VCs seem to favor young founders . They’re not old enough to think they know what will work and what will not work.