Ryan Johnson

You think you’re getting a local news stand. But mostly just more Rafi.

Valentines Day market at Culdesac!

Zoox is the current top dark horse in the AV Ridehail space. Building their own vehicle added a major obstacle. But the thesis was that ultimately that wins.

Zoox! Now actually available (last vegas visit was effectively not). Super smooth. Slight jerk while stopping. Still much better than a human driver.

Wait until AV Ridehail has buses and a network of substations

Airport was poppin. Busiest time of the year, peaking with the Phoenix Open next month.

Looks like Lyft has shared rides from PHX airport now. Not much of a discount rn but the airport is definitely the place to start. Surely the highest density pickup spot in Arizona. Higher match rate will spread those prices - I bet right now many users who select that option just get a solo ride.

There’s no reason the fees had to be that high forever, however. If someone could cold start a marketplace based on a home price index, fees could collapse. With sufficient liquidity, even someone of the scale of Opendoor could use it as a hedge.

And maybe this is the moment for that.

Macro drives the market home price appreciation component of returns, and it has a big impact, particularly on narrow margins.

Could we hedge it? The fees that financial institutions wanted to charge were prohibitively expensive.

Instead we’d solve it by buying and selling the homes, and we were prepared to take on the operational complexity of that.

We’d need to predict each home’s sales price accurately, despite the adverse selection problem. We thought we could overcome that, except one part - macro.

Polymarket announcing trading on home price appreciation was a Déjà vu moment for one of the very first questions at Opendoor.

We would have loved to just be a marketplace, but there’s a full graveyard of startups that failed because of how hard it is to cold start a home marketplace.

I gave my cousin a silver dollar for Christmas. He’s 9 and I want to get him thinking more about investing/money/value. Amazing feeling to see him realize it’s worth much more than $1, and then getting to tell him it’s already worth another $8.

Don’t think so but I didn’t meet them all

Quality of life is higher with less traffic noise. Instead of barriers to isolate car noise, what if we just had less noise?

It’s an exciting time right now. Not because it’s the holidays. But because every day I wake up and more smart people are writing essays about how much AV Ridehail is going to change cities.

It’s a new brand, focused on the essentials of what’s necessary in a mattress to be high quality. And a simple purchase at a great price. Tuft & Needle also recently closed their brick & mortar stores. Boring just opened their first, and it’s at Culdesac! Come check it out, and say hi while you do.

The founding team of Tuft & Needle is back. Tuft & Needle was a darling of the Az startup scene last decade. They invented “mattress in a box” and showed that consumers would go direct if they trusted the brand. After selling to private equity and seeing it deprioritized, they’re back with Boring.

Not bad, Greensboro!

A group of mayors visited Culdesac last week, one of a series of visits recently. They picked Tempe so they could visit Culdesac to learn what they can bring back to their city.

The tides are turning across the country in favor of more, better housing.

Easier when people come visit but sometimes I present elsewhere too!

Mayors and city leaders from Washington State seeing what they can learn from Culdesac to improve their policies.

The lesson of these bike industry failures (and the outlier successes) has been that consumers want low cost. Mastery of the supply chain is the price of entry to be a modern ebike company.

Looking like end of an era for Rad Power Bikes, one of the pioneers in the space. Will always love the Rad Runner, and their trailblazing to build the market.

The car industry receives enormous subsidies. And has received multiple bailouts. That’s not going to happen here.

A very important battle for the US to win

Was on a panel for rising star ASU students this past week. Cordial, sharp panel “debating” startups vs corporate jobs. Wasn’t my plan to debunk anyone until someone said watch Shark Tank to see how startups work. I said that HBO’s Silicon Valley is closer to reality than that.

I was unfamiliar with your game, Hilton Portland

Applying traffic laws strictly only to AV Ridehail would be hypocritical.

Just had the key concrete pour for pocket neighborhood #2 (neighborhood #3). So much less complicated this time not competing with TSMC for raw materials.

Glass half empty: this is only because car drivers treat golf cart drivers much better than people on bikes

Glass half full: this is still much better than cars, pushes us more away from cars, and fits into the mobility portfolio

Tomorrowland replacement stage wasn’t bad but this would have been better

If you had told me in 2013 that we wouldn’t get to see how Opendoor does in a downmarket until 2025, I would not have believed you.