Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 570

I was having coffee with a developer friend of mine this morning and we got onto the topic of asking a lot of questions. We joked that that's what we do all day.

Development projects happen because of teams of very smart people all working together toward a common goal. It's a beautiful thing. And as a developer, there are certain expertises and competencies that you should have .

But for the most part, we usually sit in rooms as the least qualified person. We are not structural engineers. We are not geotechnical engineers. We are not architects ( though I sometimes pose as a fake one ). We are not planners. And we are not façade specialists, among many other things.

But we are the ones taking on most of the financial risk and trying to bring everything together . And what that means is that you end up asking a lot of questions. You collect information, you try and consider what could go wrong, you lean on past experiences, and then you make a decision -- often without perfect information or 100% certainty.

This is how projects move forward. You have to rely on others and you have to make decisions. Because not making a decision is even worse. It burns time, which is why too many cooks in the kitchen can be the kiss of death for development projects.

I'm sure the same thing can be said for many other things in life.

In this recent post by Naval Ravikant , he argues that innovation seems to like two things: decentralization and a frontier. He starts by giving the examples of more decentralized states (i.e. smaller federal governments) and the Wild West. The American frontier was, as you know, wild. But it was also a place of great innovation.

Naval then goes on to talk about the pendulum that tends to swing between centralization and decentralization. And in the world of technology, the last decade has been one of centralization (big companies). But this pendulum is much broader. Cities, as we have talked about before on this blog, are constantly in tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces.

COVID was a powerful decentralizing force for cities. Everything was closed and we were all supposed to stay home. And so most/all of the benefits of centralizing in a city were suddenly, yet temporarily, turned off. Many people naturally decentralized. But when the dust finally settles, I highly doubt it will be as dramatic as most people initially thought.

We know that cities and urban density encourage innovation . That's why "unicorns" tend to overwhelmingly originate in big cities . But here's the thing: this is a form of centralization. The fact that cities even exist in the first place tells us that their centralizing forces are winning out over the decentralizing ones.

So how do we reconcile this with Naval's argument that new frontiers and decentralization are actually what are needed for innovation? I agree wholeheartedly that one of the key innovations with crypto, for example, is that it is decentralized and permissionless. But what does this ultimately mean for cities and our built form?

Does it encourage a similar sort of decentralization to happen? Or is the irony that decentralized technologies actually still thrive in centralized urban places? We may all be online buying NFTs, but we still want to get together in person to show them off and exchange ideas.

These "aesthetic monsters" are part of a new NFT collection that I recently bought into. They're called Angomon (supposedly "ango" translates from Japanese into "dwelling in peace"). And they can be purchased on the Magic Eden NFT marketplace . At the time of writing this post, the floor price is about 1.15 SOL.

The ultimate plan is for these characters to live in some sort of 3D world that will be called the Angoverse (which is an obvious play on metaverse). The team is also planning to provide NFT holders with the original 3D files for these Angomon so that owners can 3D print their own real-world figurines. Longer term, the hope is that there will be official Angomon collectible figurines available for purchase.

All of these things are of course future plans. They could happen or they could not. These NFTs could have tremendous value or they could not. I just thought these monsters looked cool and fashionable, and so I bought a few. Right now the plan is to frame them and display them all at Parkview Mountain House .

But it is also interesting to note how go-to-market strategies are changing in this new world of crypto and web3. Fred Wilson recently wrote about this over on his blog. In web2 (think the Facebook/Instagram era), most consumer applications started out with a tool. The network came after.

Chris Dixon called this strategy, " come for the tool, stay for the network. " In the case of Instagram, the tool was initially photo filters. People used it to apply those filters that made every photo look brown and hipster-like. But eventually network effects took over and that became more important. There are were lots of people using it.

In web3, everything now seems to start with some kind of asset or token. People buy in and then become invested in the project, which is interesting because they then begin to market out of self-interest. This post is not about that and is more about sharing something that I think is cool.

Fred Wilson has proposed a new slogan for this. It is: "come for the assets, stay for the experience." So these Angomon are now assets of mine. If the experience does eventually come, I guess I'll stick around. Hello web3.