What We’re Reading
Here are a few good articles the Collaborative Fund team came across this week.
Prove yourself wrong
This is a great piece on testing your best ideas:
Sir Karl Popper wrote that the nature of scientific thought is that we could never be sure of anything. The only way to test the validity of any theory was to prove it wrong, a process he labeled falsification. And it turns out we’re quite bad at falsification.
Disruption
A solid article on technology trying to eat the real estate industry:
Real estate has long been an appealing market for investors, and for good reason: there is a lot of money at stake. The United States alone has $25 trillion worth of housing, and $900 billion of that changes hands every year; that means well over $50 billion in real estate fees and even more in mortgage interest. It is a market tailor-made for those ubiquitous “If we get X% of the market” pitches that have characterized many a startup business plan.
Food
A trend I knew nothing about:
Americans made 433 million fewer trips to restaurants at lunchtime last year, resulting in roughly $3.2 billion in lost business, according to market-research firm NPD Group Inc. It was the lowest level of lunch traffic in at least four decades.
Diversity
A study on diversity in VC:
First, we find strong evidence that parenting more daughters leads to an increased propensity to hire female partners by venture capital firms. Second … we also show that improved gender diversity, induced by parenting more daughters, improves deal and fund performances.
Opportunity
Mark Zuckerberg talks about wealth inequality:
“Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now it’s time for our generation to define a new social contract,” Zuckerberg said during his speech. “We should have a society that measures progress not by economic metrics like GDP but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.”
Migration
Shipping warehouses brought jobs to rural areas – and left just as fast:
Starting in the late 1990s, Amazon.com Inc. began opening fulfillment centers in sparsely populated states to help customers avoid sales taxes. One of those centers, established in 1999, brought hundreds of jobs to Coffeyville, Kan.—population 9,500.
Yet as two-day shipping became a priority, Amazon shifted its warehousing strategy to be closer to cities where its customers were concentrated, and shut the Coffeyville center in 2015.
Have a good weekend.