Me heart cloud kitchens and driverless cars

We’re already 6 weeks into 2019 and we’ve been super busy working on changing the way you see healthcare at Sikka – meanwhile I have not found the time.

Here’s what I am tracking in 2019 besides digital health and ai --- passionate about food tech and autonomous vehicles, especially the secondary disruptions they’re going to foster (example – autonomous vehicles and real estate values, food tech and home/apartment design)

Cloud Kitchens 
Cloud Kitchens and its sister company Cloud Retail are the two arms of the new venture from Uber co-founder and former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, which was formed with a $150 million investment.

Cloud Kitchens are commercial kitchens designed for on-demand food prep only: they don’t have dining rooms and thus not only avoid the costs associated with them but also are able to focus on their food assembly lines and methodologies to maximize yield. Cloud Kitchens distribute their foods on platforms like DoorDash, Uber Eats or Postmates. 

​That’s the obvious but the real disruption isn’t there – its inside the cloud restaurants’ digital storefronts and the user data they generate: in near real-time they can A/B the menu items and adapt to user tastes and preferences. We’ve already seen that with startups like Stitchfix, here the data is applied to food tastes and demand. Basically the menu product is evolving as you know what your customers want to order.

Right now we see 10100 (Kalanick’s investment firm) building a network of these cloud kitchens to service the supply-side of the delivery platforms such as Uber Eats. The goal is to build the infrastructure and platform software to enable them to open delivery-only location in minimal capex and time. This is doing two brilliant things: first, we can imagine that the role of the Chef can evolve from one-kitchen one-menu location, to one-cloud, multi-kitchen locations. In a way we’re evolving from theme-based dine-in chains to customer-centric, taste, quality and creativity-based food choices, all of this available at the tap of a mobile button. 

Whereas we saw for the past 5 years delivery platforms getting their food items by begging established brick-and-mortar, dine-in locations in order to seed the funnel and establish demand, more and more today we see the same locations now begging for real-estate on the very same platforms as demand is shifting to the cloud. As Cloud Kitchen networks develop we are going to see further vertical integration thus reducing the need for dine-in facilities (those are going the way retail is going today) – and once established they’ll invest in Chefs and will complete the full redefinition/disruption of the category. 
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Driverless Cars
The autonomy ecosystem: we know that autonomous vehicles, whether it’s trucks or cars are set to disrupt the auto/trucking industry (and directly associated like insurance cos) as we are going to see a shift from individual ownership to fleets of driverless cars. I am pretty sure that people who are born today will never have to learn to drive. This creates massive new opportunities. So let’s have a quick look at the secondary disruptions. (and if you want more info about all the other stuff that will change beyond the car… from public infrastructure, the automotive value chain, and energy, to finance (including insurance), the justice system, and shopping too – and most importantly when do we think this will actually happen: check here. By Frank Chen (@withfries2) is awesome.
 

• Real estate:as long commutes become less of an inconvenience, property values are very likely to shift from highest values concentrated in urban areas to a more spread out and even distribution across cities, suburban areas. Combining this with distributed work from anywhere with a shift to countryside quality of life demand, autonomous driving tech will most likely reshape city and urban planning as well

• Hospitality:For medium haul distances, many riders may decide to sleep in the car while being transported and thus forgo the one-night stay that is the bread and butter of most of the low to mid-range hospitality industry in the US. 

• Airlines:Equally on short haul routes, the convenience and lower cost of self driving vehicles will compete directly with airlines especially because there isn’t any wait at security lines and all the ancillary costs associated with airline travel (airport parking/ground rides, baggage fees)
• Media, work, life:now that riders won’t have to operate the vehicle this create new opportunities for on-board entertainment and work at blocks of time that weren’t necessarily addressed previously

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​Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
​My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. 

Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader.