Hey Google, Fire Dan Doctoroff and Install Me as CEO of Sidewalk Labs
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Hey Google, it’s me, David Friedlander. I know you have a lot of information about me. Many of your Sidewalk Labs team knows me directly — we’ve had conference calls, I know several of their partners, and I’ve tracked, written, and spoken on most of the project’s initiatives. I come to you as an intimate friend — one who needs to discuss a hard matter. We need to talk about Dan.
I know how attached you are to him. He’s your first — the one who alerted you to the crises that have befallen our global cities. I know he’s the ostensible founder of Sidewalk Labs. I know you still hold hope he’s going to start delivering on his many promises. But you know as well as I do that that won’t happen. Dan can’t be trusted and he needs to go.
He botched Quayside. He’ll botch San Jose. He’ll botch any oversight of your new FactoryCo project.
It’s not you, it’s him.
You see, Dan’s last big relationship was with the Bloomberg administration. I lived through the sum total of that administration’s three terms. In that time, I witnessed Dan and his money-lovers transform NYC from an ailing but still culturally-relevant world-class city into a chain-store-teeming, glass-and-steel deposit box for shady global wealth. I saw that model replicated in San Francisco, London, Moscow, and many other urban centers. Do we need more of this, really?
One of Dan’s many sins was a lack of accommodation for non-institutional, bottom-line-unfocused New Yorkers — the vagabonds, drifters, everyday people, and artists were forced to the streets, restaurants, and other wage-slave jobs. Those so disposed could land a 60-hour-week, $150k-a-year job at a “digital agency” cranking out $5M ad campaigns for Gary Vee-branded fidget spinners. Dan doesn’t like cities or understand the motivation of people who have zero interest in donning a Brooks Brothers suit. From New York Magazine:
Doctoroff also writes in the book about how he never really liked New York City, much less wanted to live here, which is an odd thing for someone who served for six years as its deputy mayor to admit. When he first visited with his family, in 1968 — he was 10 and a resident of Birmingham, a well-off suburb of Detroit — it was “hate at first sight.” He moved here in 1983 after his wife got a job at HBO — Doctoroff had been only three times and it never grew on him. The self-described “creature of the suburbs” helped remake this city, in some ways, for his own maximum personal comfort.
Remember, this is the cat that wrote the pro forma for Hudson Yards.
Dan’s value prop is dead and his credibility with the kids — already shaky — is going to bottom out completely as he drops the ball on future endeavors. He’s still doubling down on old operators. This is not 2016 HPD: you can’t just create a design and RFP and expect everyone to jump.
So why me?
First off, ask around. People might not always like me, but few will contest the breadth of my knowledge and acuity of my insight. I’ve had my eyes set on the future as long as I’ve been able to see. Issues like climate, food scarcity, energy security, and social justice are not initiatives — they’re realities that must be immediately addressed. And people know that the death-grip I have on my principals and my force of character will enable me to get shit done.
Whereas Doctoroff revamped mid-20th-century Urban Renewal programs — homogenizing, leveling, and pumping areas with cash and new structures — I’ve grafted small-scale, low-energy, grass-root, future-focused initiatives onto the present day.
Through developing and promoting programmatic solutions such as micro-housing, adaptive re-use, smart floor-plate design, and alternative operating models such as co-living, I’ve consistently looked for lightweight solutions that work with existing structures (architectural and social) rather than glossing over and destroying them to erect massive, untested new structures (architectural and social), as Dan is wont to do.
When it comes to new stuff, I’m a wonk’s wonk and I keep up-to-date on bleeding edge — as well as historic — AEC and operational tech. I’ve worked with the innovation teams at two of the world’s largest retailers and I know and/or have worked with many of the world’s most innovative real-estate startups, investors, and developers. I know all the best new toys.
And I don’t treat culture as a commodity to institutionalize and throw in a metal box. Culture is something that must live and breathe at street-level or a city will die. I’ve done my utmost to contribute and support that ground-level culture.
In 2009, I was on the cover of the New York Times Real Estate section. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was starting an influential conversation about minimal living structures and psychometric responses to my environment, asking “what’s truly important in our living environments?”
This experiment very much informed my more mature design philosophies as it did the greater cultural zeitgeist and orientation to possessions and home. Here’s a quote from the otherwise click-bate Times’ piece:
“I was buying into an idea of how I should be in my early 30s, sort of a mode of living that one is supposed to inhabit,” he said. Now, “I place a higher premium on living a rich life, rich with experience.”
I also knew the future wasn’t going to be characterized by ceaseless industrial growth and that we might start a relationship with waste and decay.
From 2011–2016, I tried to apply my philosophies at the micro-housing startup LifeEdited. While there, I helped shape and document the evolution of the burgeoning PropTech and MMC scenes as well as the “minimalist” lifestyle movement. It was my aim (and continues to be) to develop market-ready real-estate products designed around hard-data-based human, ecological, and economic needs.
I would later turn my experience into a marketing, PR, and innovation consultancy which served as a hub for a tight-knit network of top-class founders, VCs, developers, and investors.
While building my industry reputation, I publicly built a cultural reputation based on aforementioned data-based-needs. My open-source wedding made the Times. When my family needed a home, I gut-renovated a Brooklyn co-op that was featured in Dwell’s best-selling small-space issue. I became a leading exponent in the “minimalist” movement; my home and I were later featured in the movie, “Minimalism: A Documentary about the Important Things,” (available on Netflix) in which I expound on the role of residential and product design in creating a sustainable future. I practice what I preach and I preach a lot.
When Dan was glad-handling septuagenarian donors from Scarsdale at Cipriani’s, I was hosting intimate dinners and events in Koreatown with TechCrunch writers and founders at the vanguard of re-building the world’s cities. When Dan was getting an Uber Black from his Sag home to his midtown high-rise condo, I was riding my two boys — jammed into on a Burly Trailer — on my bike from my Windsor Terrace garden-level rental to the Park Slope Food Co-op to get groceries.
Which one do you think gives you a better vantage point for seeing and knowing the city?
Dan preaches a detached vision from dais, while I live my vision on the streets, in my home, at my work, and every facet of my life. I will do that for Sidewalk Labs (we might need a rebrand…details).
My main focus is still building out The Change Order Group (please don’t rip it off!) but I could easily shift focuses for a minute to be the CEO of Sidewalk Labs. You should have my contact info since a bunch of your team already knows me. I bet I’ll work for a fraction of Dan’s salary and save y’all a ton of money not chasing dead-leads, stupid prototypes, superfluous startups, and master-planning communities that have no backers or relevance to their host city’s past, present, or future.
That’s about it. Have a great week and I look forward to hearing from you soon!
In urban service,
David Friedlander
