A type of development you see a lot in Tokyo on arterial streets, like this one in Nakameguro (4 lane road; rare here).

Three retail (grocer, pharmacy, convenience store) serving foot traffic from neighborhood. One floor of commercial destination locations. About 65 apartments.
You could imagine Market Street in SF looking like this from the Financial District for next 12 blocks or so, without compromising anything people truly want, greatly improving usage and appeal of that corridor.

(Doesn’t have to be every lot obviously.)
Same street a block away.

These are all light commercial / residential, most likely owned by a landlord living in the building.

Average density on street works out due to a few larger developments adding 2-3 virtual stories everywhere.
“What are rents like in these places?”

$1.2k to $3k or so (studio through 3 room); a pricey neighborhood but it’s one of more desirable ones in Tokyo. You can cut a grand off larger apartments/condos if you want ten more minutes of walk time to station.
(Approximate price of a condo in neighborhood sized for family is $600k to $1M depending on size/location. Again, cheaper available if you want a ten minute walk.)

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More from @patio11

19 Oct
I feel professionally irked every time I get a payment request which requires me to do something borderline absurd to optimize for the person who will have to check, by hand, that all X00 recipients have paid.
This should be a computer program! We can do it! We have the technology!
In Japan the typical way this is handled is overloading one of the three fields of customer-specifiable information on a domestic bank transfer request with content to optimize for the lookup speed of the person doing reconciliation. Often they're syntactic clusterflops to do so.
Read 5 tweets
19 Oct
People generally overestimate how many folks worldwide are working on X specifically, for basically any usefully scoped X.
It’s often on the order of hundreds to single digit thousands directly on the problem, with an order of magnitude more for each ring you go out.
This suggests many opportunities. You are able to reach a surprisingly large chunks of audiences that matter. Your individual contribution matters more than you would naively expect, particularly if you leverage it well. You will see same people over and over again in career.
Read 5 tweets
19 Oct
A lot of founders choose markets based on the availability heuristic, which tends to overconcentrate brainsweat in predictable places. Some of them make for poor businesses specifically because they're interesting to young people without money.
There are plenty of hard problems with massive implications for society which are almost buried in money, and you will broadly be rewarded more for working on them than you will for doing incremental improvements on economically marginal entertainment activities or similar.
Wasn't even planning on subtweeting myself here but managed to anyhow, so, FYI, voice of experience.
Read 5 tweets
18 Oct
Some people might not know Magic Wormhole exists. It's a great way to transfer files or text (passwords, API keys, etc) synchronously and securely between two computers without leaving a copy on any sort of online system.

Used it for a lot of secrets when booting up new machine.
The UX is:

(sender)
$ wormhole send <filename>
# You get a magic human pronounceable passphrase here

(receiver)

$ wormhole receive
# You are prompted for that passphrase; no addressing, VPN, etc necessary.
Available via homebrew (magic-wormhole), your package manager of choice, or source here:

github.com/warner/magic-w…
Read 8 tweets
18 Oct
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.
The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.
(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)
Read 4 tweets
17 Oct
Interesting UX from Paypay, a Japanese QR code (primarily) payment app: I was doing a transaction and after authing it they interrupted me to say I had won a promotion and was getting 2% cash back.

(Base is 0.5% these days; 1.5% for very heavy users.)
So clearly this is designed to gamify usage to win share of wallet against other payment methods. Interestingly, it seems like it is directly targeted at credit cards, contact payments like Suica, and Apple Pay/etc, none of which can replicate the UX without an app to do it with.
I wonder what the win rate is and I wonder if it is static or whether they vary it over transactions to maximize ROI on the marketing spend. PayPay is ~always a small ticket (mine was $30) so it’s cheap anywhere, but maybe you try to encourage me to use at new stores or similar.
Read 5 tweets

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