While other tech giants fund housing initiatives, Amazon is opening a homeless shelter — inside its HQ

As big tech gets bigger, industry leaders have begun making more noise about helping homeless populations, particularly in those regions where high salaries have driven up the cost of living to heights not seen before. Last January, for example, Facebook and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, among other participants, formed a group called the Partnership for the Bay’s Future that said it was going to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to expand affordable housing and strengthen “low-income tenant protections” in the five main counties in and around San Francisco. Microsoft meanwhile made a similar pledge in January of last year, promising $500 million to increase housing options in Seattle where low- and middle-income workers are being priced out of Seattle and its surrounding suburbs.

Amazon has made similar pledges in the past, with CEO Jeff Bezos pledging $2 billion to combat homelessness and to fund a network of “Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities,” as he said in a statement posted on Twitter at the time, in September 2018.

Now, however, Amazon is taking an approach that immediately raises the bar for its rivals in tech: it’s opening up a space in its Seattle headquarters to a homeless shelter, one that’s expected to become the largest family shelter in the state of Washington.

Business Insider reported the news earlier today, and it says the space will be able to accommodate 275 people each night and that it will offer individual, private rooms for families who are allowed to bring pets. It will also feature an industrial kitchen that’s expected to produce 600,000 meals per year.

The space is scheduled to open in the first quarter of the new year, and is part of a partnership Amazon has enjoyed for years with a nonprofit called Mary’s Place that has been operating a shelter out of a Travelodge hotel on Amazon’s campus since 2016. The new space, which BI says will have enough beds and blankets for 400 families each year, isn’t just owned by Amazon but the company has offered to pay for the nonprofit’s utilities, maintenance, and security for the next 10 years or as long as Mary’s Place needs it.

BI notes that the shelter will make a mere dent in Seattle’s homeless population, which includes 12,500 people in King County, where Seattle is located, but it’s still notable, not least because of the company’s willingness to house the shelter in its own headquarters.

It’s a move that no other tech company of which we’re aware has taken. The decision also underscores other cities’ equivocation over where their own, growing homeless populations should receive support. In just one memorable instance, after San Francisco Mayor London Breed last March floated an idea of turning a parking lot along the city’s Embarcadero into a center that would provide health and housing services and stays for up to 200 of the city’s 7,000-plus homeless residents, neighboring residents launched a campaign to squash the proposal. It was later passed anyway.

Vox noted in report about Microsoft’s $500 million pledge last year that many of these corporate efforts tend to elicit two types of reactions: admiration for the companies’ efforts — or frustration over the publicity these initiatives receive. After all, it’s hard to forget that Amazon paid no federal tax in the U.S. in 2018 on more than $11 billion in profit before taxes. The company also threatened in 2018 to stop construction in Seattle if the city passed a tax on major businesses that would have raised money for affordable housing.

Whether Amazon — one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a current $915 billion market cap — is doing its fair share is certainly worthy of exploring in an ongoing way.

Still, a homeless shelter at the heart of the company is worth acknowledging — and perhaps emulating — too.

“It’s not one entity that’s going to solve this,” Marty Hartman, the executive director of Mary’s Place, tells BI. “It’s not on corporations. It’s not on congregations. It’s not on government. It’s not on foundations. It’s all of us working together.”

Pictured above: A view of the new Mary’s Place Family Center from the street, courtesy of Amazon.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/30/while-other-tech-giants-fund-housing-initiatives-amazon-is-opening-a-homeless-shelter-inside-its-hq/

Two sides of the internet

The architecture of the internet is about choice. That’s where the resilience comes from.

Email can take one of a trillion paths to get from me to you. You have millions of pages to choose from when you want to read a blog post or learn a programming concept.

On the other hand, the business of the internet is often about no choice. Investors seek organizations that create natural monopolies, businesses with such significant network effects that they can clear the board and create infinite returns.

These network-effect businesses succeed at first because the benefits to each user are significant. We voluntarily choose to engage because it’s better (cheaper, faster, more fun) than doing it somewhere else.

But then, the implacable desire for ‘more’ kicks in and suddenly, this monopoly isn’t about serving us, it’s about enriching the owners.

And so the tension. The tension between the open resilient world of choice and the rigid and inflexible dominant monopoly.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/614154932/0/sethsblog~Two-sides-of-the-internet/

Top speed is overrated

The Amtrak Acela is capable of going well over a hundred miles an hour.

And yet, it’s not unusual for a 90-mile ride on the Acela to be only three or four minutes shorter than it would be on a more traditional train.

I can drive my Prius from NY to Syracuse faster than I can fly there. Even though a plane has been engineered to have a much higher top speed, the door to door costs of travel (security theatre, parking, checking in, the rest of the last mile once I land) aren’t impacted at all by the top speed of the chosen form of transport.

Top speed is easy to measure and fun to work on. But for most of the people you work with, there are dozens of factors that matter more than the easily measured versions of top speed that are talked about.

Fix the systems first. Look at the overhead of context switching. Bravery, empathy and other real skills matter for more than horsepower.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/614094488/0/sethsblog~Top-speed-is-overrated/

Slow is relative

In between the holidays, it all seems to slow down. Most days, there is little traffic on the road (or on websites). Fewer products launched, fewer inbound emails, fewer things to check off a todo list.

And yet, if someone in 1820 had lived at the pace we live in December 2019, she would probably have dropped dead from exhaustion.

A store in New York that feels slow this time of year might be recording record traffic if it had the same turnout in Scottsdale or Tempe.

Two things are true: The world is faster and crazier than it has ever been before. And the world is as slow and predictable as it will ever be again.

Bustle and crises are local conditions.

 

PS The last week of the year is quiet, which leaves time for new plans, new learning and new opportunities. I hope you’ll consider signing up for the ninth session of The Marketing Seminar (it begins in a few weeks, but if you visit today, you can sign up for updates). You can find my Udemy courses here as well.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/614038522/0/sethsblog~Slow-is-relative/

Distracted by wide funnels

If you have enough at the top of your interest funnel, you don’t need to be very effective at conversion to seem successful at the other end of the funnel.

And so, a billion people visit Wikipedia and 32 million become registered users and 3,800 earn the privilege of being trusted enough to create a new article without oversight.

TED has a billion views which leads to 4,000 TEDx events that reach hundreds of thousands of in-person participants and 2,500 end up coming to Vancouver.

Kickstarter has millions of visitors, tens of thousands of projects and a few of those do more than a million dollars in revenue.

The internet has enabled the wide funnel, but it’s incredibly uncommon. That’s not because the last part of the process is difficult, it’s because the first part–becoming a huge hit–is. Best not to waste attention if you can avoid it.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/613978478/0/sethsblog~Distracted-by-wide-funnels/

On seeking a category

A new ice-cream shop opened up downtown. Do you want to go?

Every word in that sentence is easy to understand. We know that a ‘new ice cream shop‘ is a bit like the other ice cream shops in our experience, except a little different and probably better.

And where know where downtown is.

That’s a different question than:

Have you subscribed to Prodigy? (1989)

Want to see my iPhone? (2008)

Did you hear that podcast? (2004)

Do you know how to program an Arduino? (2016)

When you ask a question about a new entry that’s also in a new category, you’re now trying to do two things:

1. Explain what the thing is. What it rhymes with. What it does. What the parameters are, whether it can be trusted to work, whether or not you’ll feel stupid doing it…
2. Ask whether your friend, now that she vaguely understands what the thing is, even wants it.

I’ve been living in this state of mystery for three decades. I’ve been asked by generous and interested folks, “what’s email?” as well as, “what’s a cd-rom?” and now, “what’s the altMBA?”

First you need to explain the category (which is never glib or easy) and then you can help people figure out whether they want to leap or not.

This is one reason why competition is such a gift. If you have competition, now you have others helping you explain the category. With competition, you can say things like, “We’re like Uber, but without the scandals.”

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/613908262/0/sethsblog~On-seeking-a-category/

Toward peace

Peace might not mean getting everyone else to do what you want them to do.

Instead, it might involve understanding that people don’t always want what we want and don’t often believe what we believe. Everyone has their own narrative and is struggling with their own fears.

We can begin there.

Most of the time, people want to be seen, understood and appreciated. And if we can offer someone dignity, we give them a gift that’s difficult to find.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/613853104/0/sethsblog~Toward-peace/