YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Hargreaves

lines on the record
30
first
2017-08-11
most recent
2017-08-11
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

  1. “Marketing channels, they really own themselves. But the fundamental operations don't necessarily have to scale perfectly. Keep in mind, even some of the best, most scalable businesses ever, specifically Google, have warehouses full of people in India that go through Google images and make sure there's no porn in there or do customer service for Google AdWords and all sorts of things like that. Not every aspect of a scalable business has to scale perfectly. Just try to make it as close as you can to a server plugged into the wall that makes money.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, we have a model that works every one of our homes makes money and sends cash back to common and the economics are good and the members are happy. I think it's really about scaling it and growing this into a global brand around community focused, convenient, and flexible living. I think there are some aspects that scale and some aspects that don't. And not everything has to scale, so property management is just one of those things, for instance, that you hire one person for every ex-members. And the distribution channels, however, do scale. And I'm a big, big fan of organizations that have scalable online distribution channels, but”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, I think if I've been doing startups now for 13 years, and the biggest difference between Brad Hargraves 13 years ago and Brad Hargraves today is I get a lot less stressed out because I feel like I've seen a lot more things and I know it's all going to be okay.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Two handles I love to follow who are really, really thoughtful on this space are Stephen Smith who tweets as at market urbanism, and that's market urbanism, and Kim My Cutler, who was formerly a writer at TechCrunch and has written some of the, I think, most well-researched pieces about the Bay Area's housing crisis, and particularly Prop 13, which I mentioned earlier.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I almost think some Twitter feeds have taken the place of that. I usually just open up one of my favorite or some of my favorite tweeters in the housing space who always have interesting things to say.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I'm going to go back to AVs. I see the secondary effects of AVs being something really that nobody is thinking about right now. I mean, there are obviously people thinking about it, but compared to the size of the impact that AVs will have on the economy, on cities, on the way we live, I don't think enough work is being done to understand what all those follow-on effects will be and how can you build businesses around them.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, out of all this negativity we've been talking about today, I'm actually extremely bullish on the United States. And I feel like people have gotten, and particularly after the political events of last year, people have gotten very, very bearish on the U.S. as a whole. And as much as I'm saying all these terrible things about occupational licensing and housing, I'm still...”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, it's a pretty bense book, but it really tells the story of how technology, particularly from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, have marginal improvements on technology in the agriculture sector, freed up more people to do non-agricultural work, and does some comparison as well back to ancient Rome, where they in fact had a lot of the technology that could have improved agricultural productivity, but didn't actually utilize that technology in a way that actually increased the wealth of the nation.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So, in the vein of technology innovation and distribution of wealth, I'm going to go with lever of riches by Joel Makier.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I hope not. I think it would be extremely sad if we ended up in a world of landed gentry where people simply handed homes down to their heirs as opposed to sold them when they were done with them. But I think things like Prop 13 in California, which Prop 13 effectively froze all property taxes back in the 70s and they're reset to market levels when a home is sold. So what that means is there is a strong disincentive to ever sell your house in California because then your property taxes go way up. So most people I know in California who own homes have no intention of selling those homes. They simply plan to pass those homes down to their children and then to their children's children, which is about as far as you can get from this idea of the American dream of home ownership and climbing the economic ladder. So you pretty much can own a home in California unless”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And the other is housing costs. Owning a home has always been, once again, a path to the middle class and a path to creating sustainable wealth. And the first rung of the property ladder has gotten so egregiously high that it appears unattainable for most young people today. So a starter home in the New York metro area is going to cost half a million to three quarters of a million dollars. And the down payment on that is going to be well into the six figures. And for people learning what they're earning and paying what they're paying in rent, saving $150, $200,000 for a down payment is simply unreasonable. And so people look at that and say, well, if it's going to take me 30 years to save for a down payment, I'm just not going to bother. And I think there's been a little bit of learned helplessness on the Millennial generation about homeownership. And I think that's very sad.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Unfortunately, that's just not an option for a lot of the people who would start, say, a moving company. Because if you start a moving company and you go into debt to buy a truck and you post an ad or two and then the local competitors obviously are going to notice and they come and shut you down, you're really a sitting duck and that could be devastating to someone's life. You could lose your house. You could no longer be able to put your kids through college. So I think move fast and break things works really well when you're dealing with a fairly privileged venture-funded entrepreneur who is not going to lose their house if the business fails. Unfortunately, a lot of these small businesses involve personal guarantees and way more personal risk and occupational licensing to the extent it's gone out of control really limits a lot of that and shuts all that down.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Licenses are actually often hoarded by either financial organizations or people with political connections to cities and resold at a much higher premium to the people who are often immigrants or often young people who want to get into these businesses. And what that's done is created a massive barrier to entry in many fields that otherwise provided in previous decades provided a path to the middle class or a path to wealth. And if you actually look at macro data around entrepreneurship, we see a lot of stats around venture funding being at a very high level right now. A lot of deals getting done. Fewer businesses are getting started today than have been started at any point since the Great Depression. We are in a massive, massive slowdown in entrepreneurship in the United States today, and that's primarily because it's very difficult to start a small business. The main reason it's difficult to start a small business is”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's the idea that industries that formally anyone could enter now require a license. If you look at the number of industries or fields that have require occupational licenses, it's gone from something like a dozen in 1970 to hundreds today. And occupational licensing obviously makes sense in fields like law, like medicine, where someone is performing a very high skilled task where someone who is unqualified could do a lot of harm to society. But you've started to see this concept of occupational licensing expand to a wide variety of other fields. So for instance, in many cities in the US, you can't start a moving company without a license. In most cities in the US, you can't open a food truck without a license.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So it's a great point. This is the first generation in American history to be poorer than their parents. From an income standpoint, from a wealth standpoint. And I feel like technology gets unfairly blamed in some ways, when in fact I look at the problem as two major changes that have happened over the last 40 years. The first one is occupational licensing. Occupational licensing, I think, is one of the least addressed topics that is curbing economic growth in America today. Things like...”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, right, I certainly think the decline of trucking as a profession will have a lot of secondary effects. I don't necessarily know what that does to suburbanization, but I think it makes a lot of rural communities a lot less sustainable. So think about communities that are really based around gas stations, around stop-off points for truckers. I think gas stations, rest stops and”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Month old at home, and one of my biggest pain points in the main reasons that I might move out of New York City is that it's so hard living in Chelsea to get out of the city. So if there was an AV with a car seat that I could call that would just pull up outside my apartment, I could load my son in and we'd be on our way as opposed to either paying for parking or renting a car. It just makes living in cities a lot easier too. So it's hard to piece that out. And I don't have an answer for you.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, that's the big question. I think the obvious answer would be, hey, it makes it a lot easier to come from the suburbs into an urban area every day. I can do work in my car and therefore the commute is less painful. On the other hand, a lot of people have looked at a lot of technologies in the past as the harbinger of the end of cities, thinking about video conferencing, for instance. There was certainly a period in the 90s when everyone thought that video conferencing would lead to the end of cities. If anything, urbanization has accelerated since then and people have seen more reasons to work together, to work in the same place, to be physically present. So hesitant to say just given a lot of natural preferences that go towards cities, that AVs are going to really disrupt things that much. Also keep in mind that AVs makes life easier within cities as well. So I have enough.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Economic perspective think this is a good thing because I believe it enables a lot of innovation in retail because right now it's very, very tough to get into the retail business as a tenant just because the initial ask and the outlay is so high. So even though I'm bearish on retail rents in the space, I think it's going to be a good thing for the economy as a whole.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Oh, well, I certainly feel like they need those distribution centers. I feel like them having a physical presence close to their customers given the deliverability expectations and the timing expectations is very important. This is not to say that there will be no retail space ever going forward. It's to say there's going to be a collapse in the market. Keep in mind that the United States is wildly over retail in comparison to other developed countries. The US has somewhere between three and four times as much retail space per capita than most major European cities. So we're really overbuilt retail. And if that Amazon distribution hub, Whole Foods, becomes the distribution hub for everything that's sold on Amazon for that area. There's a lot of spaces down the street that are going to be put out of business and landlords that can't necessarily find a tenant to take that space. I actually from a broad”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “On any number of platforms that just going down to three blocks down the street to a store to pick something up is a bigger hurdle that's ever been. So I think between all these forces between the already very high underwriting that you've seen of retail rents and the coming of e-commerce, I'm just very bearish on it.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “If I am neutral on residential, I am very bearish on retail in particular, and I think we're just at the beginning stages of the immense amount of pain that retail landlords are going to face. We're Well, I believe one that you have to look at the retail rents that a lot of these landlords have been underwriting, particularly in major urban centers. They've been underwriting retail rents that are almost impossible to break even on. And look, there are a lot of retail tenants out there that don't need to break even on their retail space. When Louis Vuitton rents space for $600 a foot on Fifth Avenue, they're not going to break even on that space. That's a loss leader to build their brand. There are only so many companies in so many spaces that can be operated in this way. I think you are going to see a major correction on the rents that these landlords in both prime and secondary areas are asking for. The other is, and a lot of people talk about this, is e-commerce. It's so easy for me to get something on Amazon, on Jet.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “In rents. I actually still believe that people are going to do want to live in cities. There's a huge attraction to urban centers. But I guess I just don't see it appreciating vastly beyond where it is right now.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, I think it would have to draw precipitously to actually have a meaningful impact on what we're doing. Keep in mind that common tends to price at about a 20% discount to a traditional studio. Ours is an all-in-price that includes Wi-Fi, utilities, cleaning, et cetera. And most people are moving in, not primarily because of the affordability. Keep in mind they can find a much cheaper place on Craigslist, but because it's a great community, it's super convenient. So when they move in, everything is taking care of. They don't have to spend their first two weeks buying furniture, setting up utilities, waiting for the Con Ed guy. That'd be a power guy. They really can just come in and it's ready to go. So there's a big service component as well that differentiates it. And I don't necessarily know just to add on to that whether there's going to be a steep decline.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I struggle to understand how it will continue to appreciate. Because if you look at the percentage of income that people are paying in rent, in most of these cities, well above 50%. In New York, it's between 55 and 60 and San Francisco. It's between 60 and 65. People just can't afford to spend, what's it going to go to 70 going to go to 75? And unless you see secular wage growth, which that's a totally different question whether you're going to see that, I find it hard to understand how it will continue to appreciate. And if you're looking at the underlying asset value, we're already talking about very compressed cap rates that's basically the ratio of the purchase price of an asset to the income produced by an asset, very compressed cap rates in a variety of markets, which is partially just driven by the amount of capital that's out there, but partially also”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Community as well, and we do a lot of the things that make living with roommates easier. So we clean everything, we provide shared supplies like paper towels, toilet paper, things that otherwise roommates would fight over, who has to go buy. We furnish everything so you don't have to worry about one of your roommates leaving and taking their couch with them. And there's an entire technology interface that makes it a lot easier for everyone to interact and get to know each other. So that's really been the center of common. And we're now in four cities. We just announced Chicago and we're growing faster. We're opening about one new building a month.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So it seems like a white space to me, and one of the really interesting parts about that is there's actually a really complicated technology component to doing this well. So enabling flexibility, that is people moving seamlessly between different cities and different homes, which is very, very, very important to the primarily 22 to 35 year old demographic that we serve. That kind of flexibility is extraordinarily important because people don't want to feel locked in to a given city. And there's actually pretty complex technology problem that sits behind the surface there that makes that possible while still being in compliance with rent stabilization, with rent control on the west coast, and with the requirements that banks and developers put in place to actually get this kind of product built. So over the last two years since we started, we've opened 13 buildings, and it's a great”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Brand, think about it like a hotel flag operator, like a Starwood or a Marriott, but for residential. And one of my favorite questions to ask people when you're thinking about the brand element is name a brand of a partnership building that spans multiple cities. And it's actually very hard for most people to do that.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And find other roommates to live with, and they would rent a bedroom, not an apartment. And we actually did the research and we realized that three-quarters of a million households in New York alone are shared apartments, roommates of some sort. And that number is pretty even across about a dozen cities in the United States with a lot of upwardly mobile young people in particular. So San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Washington, DC, places like that. So we really wanted to build a product that served this unmet need of roommates because there weren't any real estate developers focused on this building housing designed for roommates. And there weren't any property management companies that were operating buildings in a way that made the roommate experience better. So we said that we realized that we could actually create a multi-city.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, so first of all, I don't come from a real estate background, and I'll tell you a little bit about what Common does. It's really about making the roommate experience better. But actually, my background is much more in technology and education. I co-founded a business back in 2010 called General Assembly. General Assembly is really focused on training in tech and design disciplines, so specifically three-month immersive programs that get people jobs as web developers, UX designers, product managers, et cetera. And I left that in 2015 to start common because we saw while we were there at GA many of our not just our students, but our instructors, our employees, people pretty far into their careers, earning good salaries were living with roommates. And when they would move to a new city, they typically wouldn't go hire a broker and sign a lease. They would go on to credit.”

    2017-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Not Every Element of A Scalable Business Has To Scale, Why You Should Be Bearish on Retail & Why Fewer Businesses Are Getting Started Today Since The Great Depression with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO @ Common · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source