YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Danco

lines on the record: 110
first: 2019-02-12
most recent: 2019-02-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In your way and things like that. I think if you went back a hundred years, we had this setup for cities where it was easier back then to move people than it was to move goods. People could walk or they could take horses if you had a horse, but for the most part, people could carry themselves around, whereas goods could only be carried by train or by boat. So because of that, the industry had to be where the railroad lines were, which is at the center of town. And then people would either walk to the factories where the jobs were. Or if you were wealthy, you could take a carriage or you could take a train in from farther. So you had this characteristic where the closer you were to the factory, land was more expensive because it was more productive, but also it was less desirable to live. And if you were rich, you could afford to live somewhere far away because you could pay to go that extra distance.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Toronto is a fantastic example. If you look at Toronto, where we're sitting here, it's one of the most diverse cities of the world that's a magnet for immigrants and for entrepreneurship and new people who are coming to Canada to build their life. Do you think they're coming downtown where you have to buy into something that is already expensive? No, unless you're independently wealthy. It's like if you want to get established from very little, you have to go to where things are cheap and to where your people are and to where you can get a foot in the door. And that's the suburbs. Now The reason why I'm talking about the suburbs here is because when we think about housing, housing and especially the land on which it sits is a really problematic sort of good in the sense that it's what I would call positionally scarce. The price of land for the most part, unless you're talking about natural resources or something like that, which we're not, basically just has to do with what other people consider the price of land to be and who you are near and who you are closer to and who is.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll answer sort of by starting with something that I've changed my mind about recently, and I think this is a good way into this. I was raised with my peers and I grew up in Vermont, I grew up on the East Coast, you know, and I think an audience that is familiar to many of your listeners and many of the people we spend around where we really love the idea of big cities, we love density, we have a particular coastal viewpoint around what is good. And the counterpoint to this is the suburbs are bad. I definitely had this kind of anti-suburban bias for no real reason. It was just there growing up. But you think, oh, the suburbs are soulless, they're cookie cutter, they have no form, they have no livelihood, they are something that has negative characteristics to them. I've since come to appreciate that the suburbs are actually incredibly important to the way that North”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whatever it is. It's like every problem we can point to is there for some very entrenched and real reason. You can't casually go in and say, oh, well, the problem is X and I'm going to go disrupt it with my software company.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you two different answers. So admits the problems that we are actively working on and actively doing work. You know, some of the problems in biology that we're tackling are very, very hard. I'm a biologist by training. That's my background. I love biology. I think that we are entering, about to enter this golden age of creating new biology businesses that are going to do an unbelievable amount of work and create an enormous amount of value. But man, it's hard, right? It is harder than software, right? It is much harder than software. So a lot of those particular challenges are tough. Aside from that, in terms of problems that we honestly are not even tackling right now because it's just not how we've been spending our time just because there are problems that are honestly going to be around forever. Something that interests me a lot personally is housing. I think housing is just one of those very tough issues where there are no easy solutions and a lot of the classic villains that we point our fingers and say, well, that's the problem. The problem is, you know, the mortgage interest deduction or the problem is this particular way rent control works.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. So, we're always opening to changing our list if we think of more urgent problems that we decide are worthy of joining the list and maybe bumping something else off. But I think the essential characteristic of our list is that we try our best to not include the answer in the question. So an example of, I think, a bad question for this would be, how can we use 3D printing to build cheaper houses? You've kind of created a leading question for yourselves. Instead, you might want to ask something that at first is more general, like, how can we make sure that nobody is priced out of living? Where thinking about it in those terms, although they're very broad and they're very open, may lead you to some counterintuitive ways to think about the problem that you may not have appreciated before.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually around can we pull off this technical risk? Can we build this technical thing? If we do, then it'll be worth something. And if it's not, well, it won't be worth anything and we'll know because the lights won't turn on when we turn on the switch.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the next many years. So we'll go look for that company. We'll go to spend a lot of time learning and I think developing a respect for these complicated industries and developing a respect for the complexity. I think this is very important for entrepreneurs and investors if you are tackling somewhere like the food industry or healthcare or education or anywhere where there are just layers and layers of complexity. And if you walk in sort of blindly saying, I'm going to go disrupt something, right? I'm going to go create a great business, you will miss out on, I think, a lot of both the challenges that are going to hit you, but also some of the opportunities there. Take spending a lot of time with people and really digging in your fingernails. Then once we've spent a bunch of time doing this, we will go try to find one particular entrepreneur or one particular company that's early in its life cycle and say, we want to back you. We want to help go build this. We have a process where we will experiment around ideas, we'll commit small amounts of money to do experiments.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the air we breathe clean? How do we know if the air we breathe is clean? Do we know that right outside this is safe for us to read? How do we know? And we have a company called Aclama in our portfolio that's working on this, for example. Can we create, grow, and eat food that is more nutritious and more safe for us in a way that still creates a safe and durable and resilient food industry for everybody and food ecosystem for everybody? So all sorts of problems that really have to do with kind of the basics on Maslow's hierarchy. So what we do is we say, well, start with an area. So right now we might look at something in typically these are very hard technological areas like synthetic biology or in deep into technical infrastructure. We really like companies that are building sort of the guts down below where nobody has heard or seen of this stuff and then say, okay, what is the one company we should help make? What is the one company that needs to exist? We can't find it and we feel like it's just urgently needed.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sounds great. And thanks again for having me. I work at Social Capital, Silicon Valley, Venture Capital Firm, and mission driven business out in Palo Alto, although I live in Toronto where we are right now, so I make the trip back and forth on a fairly routine basis. But as social capital, I work on a team called the Discover Team, along with my colleagues, Jays Veria and Nicole Engelhart. And we do something that I just think can only be described as really fun and very challenging, but that I'm very lucky to get to do, which is We try to rather than see all the companies that are coming in and look at a whole bunch of deal flow and try to triage through companies and pick winners and manage them, we sit down and think, let's start with a problem we want to solve and then go from there. We literally have a list of 40 hard problems. It's in a Google Doc, but I'll put this in the show notes if you have show notes. It's literally a list you can go onto it and says, here are 40 problems that we are interested in building solutions for by 2045.”
2019-02-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Danco – Scarcity, Abundance and Bubbles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.121] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source