Iterate Weekly - Issue 127
This week we're talking about a new utopian city , using AI to negotiate your salary, an e-bike that looks like a race car, a new influx of beach-free surf resorts, and "The Good Enough Job"!
Welcome to issue 127 of Iterate Weekly!
Hope you’re all doing well. This is just a friendly reminder that you can always reply directly to these messages or leave a comment on the Substack post. Feedback is highly encouraged and I’m happy to answer any and all questions that come up.
Let’s jump into this week’s stories.
🤖 Tech
Billionaires want to make the utopian city of the future
This story hits close to home and has been causing a lot of controversy recently.
A group of billionaires are looking to build a new city in a quiet corner of Northern California.
The lists of tech power players involved with this project is pretty impressive. It’s lead by former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek and also includes investments from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a16z’s Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs (wife of the late Steve Jobs).
Pushback on the development efforts are mostly coming from concerned citizens who are worried about what will happen to their relatively tranquil life in Solano County. Being about 60 miles north east of San Francisco, the county is typically considered the outer fringe of the Bay Area on the way to Sacramento. Could this become another viable location for those who have had enough of life in SF?
The group known as Flannery Associates has already bough up 52,000 acres of land for over $800 million. While most of the land is currently zoned as agriculture, the plan seems to be for a mixed use densely populated are in the future. It’s another shot to develop with a clean slate in a way to minimize some of the problems that already exist in other municipalities in the region.
It’s easy to tell the billionaires to just leave well enough alone but I’m pretty intrigued by this concept. No, it’s not great if farmers are getting displaced but there could be a lot of benefits to a new well-thought out community in a part of California that often gets forgotten. When it’s all laid out as they describe, it sounds pretty good doesn’t it?
“…a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over ten thousand acres of new parks and open space”
🎓 Education/Productivity/Work
Could AI help employees with salary negotiations?
Finally, here’s a new use for AI that I think we can all get behind. What if there was an AI-powered chatbot that could handle stressful salary negotiations for us?
Pactum AI, a leading provider of automated procurement negotiation, has been using AI chatbots to negotiate the packages of its employees for the past few years. And this only seems like a growing trend as the technology improves and humans feel more comfortable delegating more important tasks to AI bots.
Think about it, it seems like the perfect setup. The AI can have access to all of the public salary figures for your current role. They’ll have all the data points they need to figure out if you’re getting paid what you deserve. It’ll know if you’re getting paid way less than other similar candidates but it can also deflate your ego a bit when it thinks you’re asking for too much.
Salary transparency is becoming more and more common these days. Several states (including California) are required to list salary ranges for jobs in the description. The mystery behind salaries is going away, and the awkward game of negotiation may be the next thing to disappear.
Would you be willing to let an AI negotiate for you in your next job?
♻️ Health & Environment
This company wants to turn your e-bike into an F1 race car
Another day, another interesting car/bike/hybrid electric vehicle to discuss.
Take a look at some of the products being created by UK company Northern Light Motors.
Looks like some futuristic Formula 1 race car right? But it’s actually a recumbent electric bike with some fancy weather-proofing. Yes, this could be another option in my quest for a legitimate covered bike!
They have several options available with costs ranging from £4,000 to £6,000. The biggest differences are the motors and batteries. Classifying these things in different jurisdictions is going to be an absolute nightmare. There is a pedal-assist only version that will be a standard bike. There is an e-assist version with a throttle that would be considered a Class 3 e-bike in the US I think. Then there is an even faster version that would need be classified as a moped in the UK. To be clear, these are only available in the UK to start as they try to navigate the legality of other regions.
But the weather protection here is really the selling point for me. They claim that it can also carry 3-4 bags of groceries in its enclosure. If you’re protected from the rain, can haul 4 bags of groceries and go up to 28mph without a need to pedal? That seems like a total no-brainer as a viable car replacement. If it could launch in the US for $5k or less, I think it could have an audience.
Of course I signed up for updates on their website, but I’m not holding by breath for this to be available in the US anytime soon. But these are the kinds of vehicles that we need! I’m sure they still have plenty of kinks to iron out, but these will be the vehicles that get people out of traditional automobiles. Electric cars are great, but they still have so many of the same problems of their gas-powered brethren.
Anyone in the UK willing to put down a deposit for one of these bad boys?
🛍 Grab Bag
You don’t need a beach to go surfing anymore
Artificial surf breaks aren’t exactly new. Kelly Slater made a whole lot of noise when he first set up his Surf Ranch in the central valley of California.
Now, there looks to be a new big player in the quest to bring surfing inland to as many people as possible. A startup called Aventuur is going to try to give surfing the same treatment that Topgolf is doing for golf.
The concept is relatively simple. How do you setup a wave park that mimics the real experience of beach surfing enough to get people to pay to try it out like some sort of adult amusement park? It seems like the technology is there, now it’s just a matter of marketing and finding the right locations and price point.
Only a 5 acre lagoon is needed to house the experience. And the real attraction might be the hotels, restaurants, and other amenities that are built nearby. You can essentially build a surf resort destination anywhere you’d like. Right now these are already being built in parts of Australia and New Zealand with plans to come to US cities like LA, NYC, Denver, and Nashville.
I love to surf but I’ve never tried an artificial wave. Having one of these located in LA is intriguing. I wonder if they’d attempt one in San Francisco or San Jose. It could be viable, but the closer these parks are located to actual amazing coastal surf breaks, the more I wonder if it’s a good idea. Denver, Nashville, sure that sounds like a great idea. But filling California with fake surf wave pools just feels a bit dystopian if you ask me.
But hey, if it gets more people surfing, I think it’s worth attempting.
💬 Quote of the Week
"Nothing will work unless you do."
-Maya Angelou
📚Content Review
The Good Enough Job
This week I finished reading a book called “The Good Enough Job” by Simone Stolzoff.
As you can probably guess, it dissects the whole concept of the “dream job”. It analyzes exactly what a job can or should be for a person. I loved that it didn’t really give a cookie cutter answer or a step-by-step guide to find a job that’s “good enough” for your life.
Instead, each chapter dives deep into one person’s particular story. There is the guy who worked at Google and lived in a truck on their campus parking lot. There is the woman whose restauranteur business partner sucked the enjoyment out of the job she thought was her dream job.
Each tale isn’t so much a cautionary or exemplary scenario for what to do or not do. They all can be looked at with a critical lens. I’d say that my biggest takeaway is to be careful not to let your personality get too intertwined with your work.
It’s a quick read and I highly recommend it. But if you don’t have time to read it now, I’ll leave you with one suggestion. Try not to let “so, what do you do?” be one of the first questions that comes out of your mouth when meeting someone new.
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week!
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52000 acres of high density development - seems like the Vegas of the 21st century, but with tech offices instead of casinos haha!