Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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Cleveland ✅
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Hello Cleveland!
To recap the Cleveland saga, I observed Seattle today looks a lot like Cleveland 75 years ago. Both cities are/were coming off great multi-decade runs: strong economic and population growth, and home to some of the world’s biggest and most important companies. Cleveland’s subsequent hard fall is a cautionary tale for Seattle, a stark reminder prosperity can’t be taken for granted.
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb replied the next day (because he is far more in touch with the Seattle technology community than anyone in Seattle City Hall). He acknowledged Cleveland has endured some hard decades, but invited us to come see today’s Cleveland.
GeekWire Publisher and Northeast Ohio Correspondent John Cook and I made that trip this week. We had a packed schedule with interesting people, startups, companies, institutions and elected officials. Not only did no one throw anything at me (and they’d all read the initial piece), but everyone in Cleveland was uniformly welcoming.
I’ll do a full trip report shortly, but the trip was incredibly valuable in helping me reflect on Seattle’s current situation. The contrast between Cleveland and Seattle in terms of hustle, leadership, and civic partnership is glaring. At every level Cleveland is laser-focused on jobs and economic growth, while those words seem to be missing altogether from both Seattle and Washington State’s policy word clouds.
My only disappointment: I failed to open every meeting with “Hello Cleveland”. But I got in a couple.
John has a great first piece from the trip up with the answers to a question we asked everyone: what can Seattle learn from Cleveland?
We also recorded a GeekWire podcast episode that will be posted over the weekend from the former Westinghouse light bulb factory below—a cool artifact of Cleveland’s amazing industrial past. (Maybe the cameo from the Cleveland PD will make the cut).
You Took a Dependency on Elon Musk
Space Twitter’s Price-to-Elon ratio is very, very high. The level of stock promotion to sustain that valuation is going to be both intense and incessant.
That forthcoming GeekWire podcast episode includes my SpaceX IPO take. I like the engineering engineering a lot more than the financial engineering.
Previous:
Space (Twitter IPO Index) Jam, Jammed, Space Twitter: A Boon for Direct Indexing?, Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: Space Twitter S-1 Edition, The Price-to-Elon Ratio, Follow the CAPEX: Space Twitter, Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk, I was beaten to dubbing it Space Twitter, The great Matt Levine on Space Twitter
Related:
Matt Levine: No SpaceX in the S&P, You Can Just Not Buy SpaceX, SpaceX Priced Already
Put the Hyperclouds on Speed Dial: Part II
Another periodic reminder to everyone trying to build AI-scale data centers: there just aren’t that many customers, and those customers have very specific requirements and far more experience building data centers than any financial actor or neocloud startup.
Don’t Be Cleveland: Rich Barton Says Bye Bob
The founder of Expedia and Zillow departs Washington. Governor Bob Ferguson keeps racking up the wins.
Previous:
A Warning to Seattle: Don’t Become the Next Cleveland, Don’t Be Cleveland: Janicki Industries Says “Bye Bob”, Don’t be Cleveland: At the Very Bottom of the Learning Curve, Don’t be Cleveland: Seattle Hits New Record for Office Vacancies, Don’t be Cleveland: Credit Rating Downgrade for Washington State, Don’t be Cleveland: The Regional Homeless Authority, Don’t be Cleveland: More King Country Fraud, Don’t be Cleveland: Seattle Mayor Says Bye, Don’t be Cleveland: Seattle Mayor Retcons Her Starbucks History, Don’t be Cleveland: Snap Says “Bye Bob”, Don’t be Cleveland: Howard Schultz Says “Bye Bob”, Don’t be Cleveland: Seahawks Edition, Don’t be Cleveland: More Inebriation in Olympia, Don’t be Cleveland: Starbucks Says “Bye Bob”, Don’t be Cleveland: Amazon’s Exit, Don’t be Cleveland: Drunken State Spending, Don’t be Cleveland: Meta, Oracle, and Others Say “Bye Bob” (Ferguson), Don’t be Cleveland: What if the “Budget Emergency” was Spending, not Revenue?