Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 828

I went to graduate school in the United States. After I graduated I was given, if I remember correctly, 90 days to leave the country. The US wasn't a good place for professionals in architecture and/or real estate at that particular time, and so I did exactly that. I left the country.

Lately, I've been having a number of informational coffee meetings here in Toronto where I have been connecting with highly intelligent and educated people who have moved to this city in search of success. They couldn't get a visa in the US and so they decided to, instead, move to the greatest city in the world.

These are people from Brazil to Bangladesh. These are people who are young (late 20's), who have multiple masters degrees, who are hungry to get ahead, and who have a strong, if not perfect, command of English (or French).

I have been finding this fascinating. As I sit and drink my coffee, I can't help but think to myself, "This is what a merit -based immigration system looks like."

I learned today that the hard hat will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year.

Patented in 1919, the hard hat was invented by a man named Edward W. Bullard (though his father had already been making protective leather caps for the mining industry). Edward had just returned to the United States after World War I and he began to wonder why construction workers weren't wearing helmets like the one he had been wearing overseas. So he decided to make one.

Edward's first product was called the Hard Boiled Hat, and it was made out of steamed canvas and leather. Similar to today, an early version of the hat featured a "suspension system," which created an air cavity between head and helmet and cushioned any blows to the head. This overarching design approach hasn't really changed all that much over the years, but Bullard's hats did go from canvas to aluminum (1938) and then to plastic (1950). Plastic is, of course, cheaper to produce.

Supposedly, the first designated " Hard Hat Area " in the US was the Golden Gate Bridge site, which started construction in 1933. This should give you a sense of the hard hat's adoption curve. It seemingly took well over a decade for construction sites to start mandating their usage, and even then it doesn't appear to have been ubiquitous.

The company -- which was founded in 1898 in San Francisco -- is now in its fifth generation of family ownership, according to the New York Times.

Photo by  Guilherme Cunha  on  Unsplash

Jerry Neumann's recent blog post on the " taxonomy of moats " is a great summary of the ways in which companies -- and perhaps even cities -- can protect themselves against competition.

Here's an excerpt from his introduction:

Value is created through innovation, but how much of that value accrues to the innovator depends partly on how quickly their competitors imitate the innovation. Innovators must deter competition to get some of the value they created. These ways of deterring competition are called, in various contexts, barriers to entry, sustainable competitive advantages, or, colloquially, moats. There are many different moats but they have at their root only a few different principles. This post is an attempt at categorizing the best-known moats by those principles in order to evaluate them systematically in the context of starting a company.

And here is his taxonomy of moats. He identifies four main sources:

As a sidebar, consider how this might also apply to cities.

Scale, for example, matters a great deal. We know that as cities get bigger, people tend to walk faster , have broader social connections (the relationship is super-linear), and be far more productive and innovative .

If you'd like to read Jerry's full post, click here . And if you're interested in this space, I recommend you also check out Fred Wilson's recent post on, " The Great Public Market Reckoning ."