Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1274

The Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto recently published a new report that looks at worldwide venture capital investment by city. The report is called Rise of the Global Startup City .

The data is from 2012, because that’s what was available from Thomson Reuters, so keep in mind that there might be some variation in the rankings if we were to look at more recent data. Some of the cities sit fairly close.

Nonetheless, here are a few of the broader takeaways (from the report page ):

“The United States accounts for nearly 70 percent (68.6 percent) of total global venture capital, followed by Asia (14.4 percent) and Europe (13.5 percent).”

“Just two broad regions — the San Francisco Bay Area and the Boston-New York-Washington Corridor — account for more than 40 percent of global venture investment.”

“Global venture investment is highly uneven and spiky — it is concentrated in a small number of large cities and metros around the world.”

Here are the top 20 cities by total venture capital investment (in USD millions):

And here are the top 20 cities according to venture capital investment per capita:

Given the variation in these two lists, you realize that some cities are largely benefitting from sheer size. London, for example, drops off the list when you look at venture capital investment per capita. 

In fact, in this second list, 19 of the 20 cities are in the United States. The only non-American city that remains is Toronto.

I am more than happy to trade-off living space (that I don’t really need) for a better location. It means I get the benefit of driving less and enjoying the city more.

But as more of us move to urban centers, we are finding ourselves having to do more with less space. Often this means creating flexible and multi-purpose spaces.

One strategy for this that I really like – which I just learned about through 5 Kids 1 Condo – is the idea of square foot hours. Here’s how it works:

“The concept behind ft2hours (square-foot hours) is to add a time-based measurement to how we assess and use our space. So if your 10′ x 12′ bedroom is used only eight hours a day (i.e., when you’re sleeping), your actual usage is 120 ft2 divided by three (one-third of the day), which is just 40 ft2hours of used space.”

In many ways, this happens intuitively. If you really want to maximize a space, you figure out how to use it more often throughout the day. But I like the idea of applying some math to it.

Of course, this runs counter to the notion that some spaces should be reserved for specific uses. In the case of a bedroom, it’s sleeping and sex. This is so that your mind doesn’t start associating it with things like work, which might start to disrupt your quality of sleep. But perhaps that’s about to become an anachronism in the modern city.

Without having the above formula in mind, I have thought along similar lines for my own apartment.

When I think about where I spend most of my waking hours, it’s bouncing between the kitchen and the living room. And yet my kitchen isn’t up against the windows; it’s recessed towards the back. Instead, my bedroom – where the blinds are almost always drawn – got the windows. (Access to light is a code requirement.)

If it were up to me, I would have flipped my bedroom and the kitchen. But typically in the real estate world, “recessed bedrooms” are considered less desirable. 

I don’t think I’ve heard many people complain about a recessed kitchen, but maybe that will change once we start thinking more about things like square foot hours.

I just backed this project on Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wmougayar/the-business-blockchain-books/widget/card.html?v=2

I haven’t backed a lot of projects on Kickstarter, but I definitely enjoy the process of discovering a project that I’m interested in and then providing a small, seemingly insignificant, sum of money to help make it a reality.

In this case, it’s a collection of two books by William Mougayar about Bitcoin, blockchains, cryptocurrency, and decentralization.

These are all topics that I’ve touched on before on this blog, albeit with much less rigor than what I’m sure William will be applying to his books. I wrote this post about 2 years ago , when I first started wrapping my head around Bitcoin. And more recently, I wrote posts about how the blockchain could transform home buying and how Honduras is building a decentralized land registry system using the blockchain technology.

So while at first glance it may seem like these books having nothing at all to do with city building and real estate, I am betting that they will over the long term, which is why I am doing my homework today.

Here’s a snippet from William’s Kickstarter page :

“The fundamental characteristics of blockchains are puzzling to consumers, corporations, governments, policy makers and regulators, because their implementation challenges centrally orchestrated trust, and enables a new kind of trust: one that is distributed, decentralized, from peer to peer, and not centrally managed by any single entity. Take any service, and add “without previous center-based authority”, and replace by “peer to peer, trust-based network”, and you will start to imagine the possibilities.”

If all of this isn’t enough to pique your interest, then you should also know that William is from Toronto. Great things come out of this city :)