What an amazing question Fortune asks in its current issue!
Who will build the next great car company? Silicon Valley and Detroit are in a race to create our driverless future. And for the first time ever, the car may take a backseat.
We’re talking here about an iconic phenomenon–driving–that deeply and elegantly cross-pollinates American business and industry with American consumer behavior. As Fortune writer Erin Griffith explains, why the story of “a radical transformation that is reshaping the very definition of what it means to be a car company” goes even deeper than that:
Most important from a business perspective, driverless vehicles are poised to threaten the $570 billion that Americans spend each year on new cars. For 125 years U.S. auto companies made their money on the manufacture of motor vehicles. Now they must be in the business of ride-hailing apps, shuttle buses, 3D maps, and computers on wheels that drive themselves. They’re no longer automotive companies either—they’re now calling themselves “mobility” companies, just in case all those predictions about the end of car ownership come true. At stake is a transportation services market that Ford believes is worth $5.4 trillion, a sum that makes you wonder why it took the auto industry so long to go after it.
How close to home does that feel? If transportation is an essential cross-pollinator of need and enterprises’ ability to meet that need, what, then, is housing?
Notwithstanding the notoriety Tesla’s getting in the wake of an investigation into the fatal crash of one of its semiautonomous vehicle owners, the Fortune story underscores the fact that when Silicon Valley and Wall Street decide that it’s time for an industry–no matter how iconic–to be disrupted, the odds that it will be disrupted are huge. Fortune’s Erin Griffith writes:
Ford president and CEO Mark Fields, for example, has taken to declaring that his company needs to “disrupt itself” before Silicon Valley players get the chance. The sentiment raises several questions: Does he really mean it? And does he understand what that takes? Even if the answer is yes to both, a much bigger question looms: Can he?
This is exactly why we’re creating Hive. It’s the community, the conversation, and the ideas-into-action forum for housing’s leading enterprises to see and seize housing’s future. On September 28 and 29 at LA Live, the story of who will build the next great housing organization begins with our Hive conference. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, home builders, developers, planners, designers and architects, product and materials scientists, and data leaders will be there. For information and a way to register for the event, click here.
Attendance is limited, and a seat at the table for this conversation, we believe, will one-day prove to be a key to many organizations’ ability to thrive amidst present challenges and future risks to viability. It’s an opportunity for home building, multifamily development, affordable community making, investment, policy, data and technology leaders to recognize and begin to address housing’s five profound, solvable challenges:
- Attainability
- Profitability
- Labor Capacity
- Aging America
- Sustainability
The next great housing organization in America–whether it’s a legacy home builder or multifamily REIT or residential developer or an entirely new business model born fully-formed out of 3D printing, robotics, interoperability, frame-ware, crowd-sourced, component-ized, super material, off-site, super-efficient maker-society–will very likely change what it means to be a company that builds homes and neighborhoods.
So, the question is: do you want to be in on the start of a very focused, very purpose-driven, very practical conversation about that by coming in to Hive?
Or do you want to read about it later in Fortune?
Enough said.
