Homescreen
Posts
🏠 The Bay Area Billionaire Plot

🏠 The Bay Area Billionaire Plot

It's San Fran But Better

Stephen Flanders
August 28, 2023

Gm. I saw that Burning Man started yesterday. I’ve always been really curious about it. Is it as fun as people say? Has it become too mainstream? Are people just high out of their minds the entire time? If you’ve been, let me know. And if you’re going this year, have fun!

— Stephen Flanders

🏠 TECH

A New SF?

By all accounts, San Francisco is a wonderful place. What else can you call the home of Silicon Valley, and thus, many of the world’s most significant technological achievements?

However, SF is far from perfect, and its problems look increasingly difficult to fix and increasingly likely to drive people away.

So, what if you can build a new city that can capture the magic of SF with none of the issues?

That’s the goal of Flannery Associates.

Tech Royalty

The mysterious company is headed by former investment banker Jan Sramek and is funded by a who’s who of techies, including Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Reid Hoffman, Patrick and John Collison, Lauren Powell Jobs, and Michael Moritz.

And what they’ve been spending their vast fortunes on is Bay Area land. 50,000 acres for $800M, to be exact.

That’s enough land to make the Feds think a foreign adversary was involved.

And for the last five years, nobody had any idea why. But now we do.

A Grand Vision

Flannery wants to build “tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open space”.

The goal is to “deliver access to good-paying jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, open space, and a healthy environment”.

Basically, they are building what they want SF to be.

Obviously, there’s still a long way to go before any of this becomes reality, including having to pass a vote as all their land is classified as agricultural.

But, if Flannery delivers on their promises, then the new city sounds pretty damn attractive.

The Big Picture: Ideally, San Fran would fix their issues and get back to being the city it can and should be. But Flannery makes clear the Bay Area’s tech billionaires are skeptical of this happening.

🏠 TECH

InstaCart Is Going Public

The tech IPO winter might be finally thawing after all.

Days after chip design company Arm filed for an IPO, grocery delivery giant Instacart followed suit and formally submitted its public ambitions.

If successful, it will be the first significant venture-backed tech IPO since December 2021, when software vendor HashiCorp and cloud technology developer Samsara both went public.

So yeah, a pretty big deal. And, as part of the filing, we got to take a look behind the curtain for Instacart’s business:

It’s been profitable for 5 straight quarters.
Like every other company, it’s integrating AI into its products. In this case, that has taken the form of Ask Instacart, a search tool chatbot.
It wants to “create a truly omni-channel experience that brings the best of the online shopping experience to physical stores, and vice-versa”, whatever that means.

They’ve tapped Goldman Sachs to lead the offering.

And you can bet that the investors who have poured $2.9B into the company since its 2012 beginnings are praying this thing goes through.

A Poor Track Record: Among the public gig economy companies (Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft), only Airbnb is trading above its IPO price. Will Instacart be able to buck this trend?

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

What else is going on?

LinkedIn is so 2022, we use Twitter X now.
Alibaba launched two new AI models that can understand images and carry out more complex conversations.
There’s some funny business going on with TikTok’s algorithm.
Starship is growing ever closer to launching again.

Stat: 100 Years: How long you can register a domain name with WordPress for a small payment of $38,000.

Rabbit hole: The Strange, Secretive World of North Korean Science Fiction (ArsTechnica)