Joe Dodridge

Investor building with AI. 8 yrs in private equity RE. Covering markets, CRE, energy, AI, robotics and space. Former D1 tennis, current padel player.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

I've started posting a lot more of what I actually think, on purpose.

Part of it is that I learn faster when someone tells me I'm wrong. Part of it is accountability. It's easy to hold a strong opinion in your head. It's a lot harder when it's out here with your name on it and anyone can come back in six months and check.

So if you think one of my takes is off, tell me. I'd honestly rather hear it.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Why doesn't LA have more padel courts? Demand isn't the problem.

It's the real estate. Pick a bad location and nobody shows up, because nobody in LA is sitting in traffic to play. The locations that do work have basically zero availability, and the good spaces usually get leased before they're ever listed.

Like most things in LA real estate, it comes down to who you know.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Tower stocks jumped Friday on the idea that SpaceX becomes their fourth big tenant. Maybe. But I keep coming back to who pays the rent today.

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile bring in about 85% of American Tower's US and Canada revenue. Those are the same three companies Starlink Mobile is trying to take customers from.

SpaceX would also be a very different kind of tenant. A regular carrier needs towers everywhere. A network that can lean on satellites needs a lot fewer of them, and it shows up to every lease negotiation knowing it has somewhere else to go.

Near term a new tenant is great news. Long term I'd want to know what happens to a landlord when its best tenants start losing share to a competitor that lives partly in orbit.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@teslaownersSV 927 registered and 420 of them already Cybercabs is a big jump. What I really want to know is how many paid rides each Cybercab is doing in a day. Has anyone seen that reported anywhere? @SawyerMerritt where would we even find that?

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@KatieMiller @bot @Varneyco @elonmusk Same setup here, one chief of staff bot running the rest. The Zoom walkthrough is real though. Nobody gets it until they watch it actually do something for them. @philrosenn what was the first task that made it click for you?

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

I run a handful of agents and this is exactly what I've seen. Every handoff loses a little context, the same way a message gets watered down by the time it travels down an org chart. Kind of funny that agents are rediscovering middle management. Fewer layers has worked better for me every time.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@zerohedge Six companies paying for the whole buildout is wild. In real estate that's the first thing I'd flag on any deal. Great credit, sure, but if one of them pulls back there's no seventh tenant waiting.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Feels like a squeeze to me. Everyone is trying to buy chips at the same time and the fabs can't keep up yet.

Long term I still think compute gets a lot cheaper. That index fell every year for almost 30 years for a reason, and once data centers start going up in space, powered straight off the sun, I'd bet the cost of compute drops faster than anyone is modeling today.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@SawyerMerritt @Starlink "I wouldn't over-rotate" is what every incumbent says the year before they start over-rotating.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Three things I'd rather own than an AI startup right now:

1. Land next to a substation
2. A long-term power contract
3. A transformer factory

The software keeps getting cheaper. The stuff it runs on doesn't.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Every AI layoff headline is secretly a real estate headline.

Fewer people means fewer desks. The money that used to pay for them is going into buildings that have no desks at all.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

Washington can make it legal to build a car with no steering wheel. It can't make a city council say yes to one.

The robotaxi race won't be won in Washington. It gets decided in a few hundred local fights, and the company with the best permitting team might beat the one with the best software.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@sweatystartup Truest in real estate. The broker who sends you a deal they can't make a dime on is the one you call first for the next ten years.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@SawyerMerritt Four days in the Petersen lobby. Wilshire and Fairfax is about to be a parking lot all weekend.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@zerohedge Cut, delay or dilute is the same menu every real estate developer gets handed at the top of a cycle. The ones who come out fine locked up their land and power before everyone else needed it.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@icreatelife Same experience. I went in expecting a chatbot and ended up with a small team where each one has exactly one job. The narrow ones are the ones that stick.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@KobeissiLetter Oracle cutting 30,000 people while spending like a hyperscaler is the whole AI trade in one line. The money is going into buildings and chips, not headcount.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@KobeissiLetter Every developer underwriting a 2027 start just watched their concrete, asphalt and freight lines move. Oil at this level shows up in construction bids long before anyone calls it inflation.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@unusual_whales If you can't patch every bug, security stops being a software problem and becomes an insurance problem. Somebody is about to make a lot of money pricing that.

[Joe Dodridge @JosefDodridge]

@SawyerMerritt @Tesla Nice cleanup, but turn signal switches were never what was holding Cybercab back. The real gate is still city by city permission to pick people up.