🍪 It's official, they're building SF 2.0
Good morning, friends. This is Bite Sized Beta. We’re the sauna to your cold plunge - we get your blood flowin' with everything ya need to know in tech each week.
We know a little somethin’ about fire and ice.
Now let’s get to the good stuff.
In the oven this week:
💸 A secret group of tech billionaires, building SF 2.0
🗳️ Poll of the week: are you moving?
🍪 Cookie crumbs: 7 bite-sized headlines
🍫 Chocolate chips: tool edition
😂 Snickerdoodles: memes for the weekend
FRESHLY BAKED
TECH BILLIONAIRES ARE BUILDING A NEW SF
San Fran.
The city of fog.
Land of the hoodies.
The metropolis of human feces.
Where all you gotta do is sell both your kidneys and maybe a lung for an apartment.
In case you’ve missed it - SF’s been on a downward spiral these last few years. And it’s bad bad:
There was a huge exodus of tech workers during and after COVID (net loss of 13K people)
Affordable housing is nearly non-existent
Income inequality is widening as measured by the city’s Gini coefficient
Don’t all get up at once to move in!
If you’re cringing, so is Flannery Associates.
It’s a new company founded by a bunch of OG tech legends:
Andreessen Horowitz partners Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman
Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison
Billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs
Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital
Sheeeeesh talk about a stacked roster.
Over the last 5 years, this Flannery Associates spent $800M quietly acquiring thousands of acres of farmland in Solano County, and paying way above market to do it.
Where the f is Solano County, you ask?
It’s riiiight over here:
Solano County in the dotted red lines
Alright, alright. So what’s this got to do with SF?
Well, as it turns out, Flannery Associates is trying to build SF 2.0.
They’ve announced that they aim to “deliver access to good-paying jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, open space, and a healthy environment.”
Plus, they rolled out a survey asking community members how they’d feel about a new development for “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.”
So far, Solano County thinks Flannery Associates is a walking red flag.
Residents are complaining about how sketchy it is that Flannery’s been secretly acquiring land for years now without letting the community in on it.
There's still a lot more to work through before this even becomes a reality, but it sends a signal that tech billionaires have given up on SF.
RIP.
FROM THE COOKIE JAR
POLL OF THE WEEK: WOULD YOU MOVE TO SF 2.0?
Let’s hear it from the smart people in the room:
Would you move to Solano County if Flannery Associates’ dream becomes a reality?
Sound off 👇🏽 |
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COOKIE CRUMBS
BITE SIZED HEADLINES
Elon did a 45 minute livestream of Tesla’s full self driving feature in Palo Alto, and drove straight to Mark Zuckerberg’s house. Otherwise though, the full self driving was pretty decent - it was able to navigate construction areas with cones, unprotected lefts, and random bicyclists. Elon only had to intervene once at a red light.
Cracked iPhone screen friends, it’s our time to shine: the iPhone 15 is coming out on September 12th. Just gotta hold on… a little.. bit…. Longer…!!!!
Speaking of OpenAI, they’re moving into Microsoft's turf with ChatGPT Enterprise, which gives companies unlimited access to GPT4 and end to end encryption. Pricing = “contact sales.”
Instacart is going IPO and it turns out, they’ve already been profitable for 5 straight quarters. All the gig economy companies have had pretty rough track records with IPOs though (DoorDash, Uber, Lyft, etc. are still below their IPO prices), so we’ll have to see if this is any different 👀
Meta banned news in Canada this last month after the government tried to force them to pay news publishers, and the ban didn't even put a dent in Facebook usage. Canada is lookin' like a real loser now.
Zuck demo-ed a VR keyboard and says he can type 100 WPM virtually. Forget the cage match, let’s get him and Elon in a type off!
CHOCOLATE CHIPS
OUR FAVORITE FINDS
This week, we bring you….. drumroll plz...... Chocolate chips: random tools edition!
You’re about to have such big tool energy, the homies are gonna call ya a handyman.
Our favorite: a tool to help you navigate confusing food situations, and it’s called Eat or Toss. Can you still eat a cucumber that’s turning translucent? What about an avocado with a bunch of brown spots? This thing is a lifesaver.
A PDF tool that lets you do literally anything you want with PDFs but in your browser. Encrypt, edit, merge, you name it. It does everything.
Everyone knows that getting a decent response from AI requires one thing, and it ain’t puppy dog eyes. It’s a killer prompt. Prompts are used to tell AI what you’re looking for in order to get the right response. But it can be hard to fine tune the prompt to get the best output, so this tool is a database of tons of tried and true AI prompts, upvoted by the community.
A fun tool that does “movie math” - put in two movies and it’ll tell you what else to watch.
SNICKERDOODLES
THURSDAY MEMES
😂
That's all we got for ya this week, folks. See ya next Thursday!
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