Startup Building In Times of Pandemic

-


Photo credit: CDC

I think America is unprepared for COVID-19. The response looks horrible, from over here in Asia. For weeks, I have been writing about its race through China, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan. I post those thoughts on my personal Facebook page. For weeks, friends and family would write comments like, "Please stay safe," and "we are thinking of you."

It's a decidedly American thing to believe that something "over there" is always going to happen to "those people" "over there." I don't think many of them have been thinking about the cost to lives this has brought, or the cost to business. My own immediate family in Taiwan, and my workplace, have been thrown about by this.

For the first time in the ten years of the Accelerator, we had our opening day virtually. While other accelerators did public demo days (and could, because their founders have been in Taiwan for the whole time), I gazed at 28 teams through a LCD monitor.

Last night, my sister casually revealed in chat that a man who works at her company was at a private party attended by the first case of COVID-19 in her state. He's not even being tested, because he doesn't qualify as "close contact." The CDC isn't even bothering to track him and monitor him or put him under mandatory quarantine.

Asia quickly learned that you can't treat this virus with the same general rules as the flu or other novel coronavirus outbreaks. This one is stealthy. I fear what is to come.

Being an authority on COVID-19 is not something I ever anticipated having to do as a marketing person in venture capital. But daily information intake means that I am confronted with this situation in China, Asia, Europe and the United States every time I am at the computer.

I've lived overseas for a long time. I saw the impact of SARS on Hong Kong. My wife and her family lost their doctor to the disease. Living outside of America brings with it a natural anxiety. The world and its dangers somehow has always seemed closer here.

One thing that I know is important during any time of crisis -- stay focused. The world does not way for you to feel comfortable. You must continue to make decisions. You will make mistakes. You have no armor though. There is nothing special about you or about your situation. Life, nature, death, chaos. It comes to everyone.

This sounds really medieval. But that is how life is. We can pretend we are advanced and invulnerable.

The truth is, outside of our personal beliefs in hope, prayer and spirituality, there is the practical and rigorous details of life.

You have to keep going.

Photo credit: Blas on Unsplash



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Engineering in China vs. Taiwan

-
Three years ago today, I was halfway through my first two week stint in Beijing, working on a project to develop a STEAM camp for high school kids. I met an engineer, who explained to a very rookie me about how engineering was in high demand in China. Here's an excerpt from my Facebook post about the trip : According to an early employee of Facebook who runs his own fund these days, the top two percent of the engineering talent of China is in high demand, not because they understand the theoretical underpinnings of STEM or design, but because they are boldly trying to build things in niche, hyper-focused areas of high tech, rather than work for companies that build huge infrastructure products. In many cases, this man told me, the efforts are not grandiose, but they are unusual technologies that deal with using AI and scans of the physical environment for weather, people, and security issues, and that teach the systems how to predict changes and news events, in some cases. Very ...
Read more

The Rite of the Counterintuitive

-
Venture capital investing is the practice of behaving counterintuitively by going for the risky opportunities that seem impossible or untouchable to others, because they lack the network, the knowledge, or the advantages that mitigate the risks that come with this style of investing. Why can they do this? Partly it's because they invest in founders and spend lifetimes learning about them, collaborating with them, and understanding how they work. You invest in a founder who: 1. Mitigates risks because she is talented, resourceful, creative 2. Is surrounded by people who can eliminate risks by being extremely good at what they are doing 3. Is working in such a blue ocean area that nobody can come close to delivering risks against them . VC investors with powerful networks use those networks to build and collaborate with founders to make them really great. The business is the end result. The VC funds ensure the scalability of the high risk option, mitigated by people and...
Read more

Data that shows the scope of change rippling through SE Asia

-
Image
Here are a couple of slides from a recent Google study called "Swipe Up and to the Right," showing massive numbers for mobile use and e-commerce in parts of Asia. While not all the same, these countries growing at different rates can give even the casual observer some food for thought about how mobile changes the way people work and live in cities. The first slide is one of my favorite. It shows that 50% of the Internet economy in SE Asia happens in these cities. But it also shows that only 15% of the population of these countries lives in cities. This means another 85% of people without the same average means, costs of livings, or access to technology or software are still outside of the scope of economic growth in the technology-empowered category. Then you have an eye opening slide from data collected in Vietnam. And if you are wondering what a person does on a daily basis with her phone, from waking up to going to bed at night, here's a very detai...
Read more