Podcast — Ep 4— Surviving 2008, Navigating 2020
When a downturn happens, a large scale structuring of the business environment usually happens. Some companies with weak balance sheets will run out of money, some will go for mergers/buyout to optimize business, larger companies will shut down underperforming business units, companies that are ad driven might struggle post lack of marketing spend and much more.
On the other hand, such restructuring also provides opportunities for new startups to come up. Last time in 2007, many such firms like Uber, Airbnb, Twitter came out and built out market caps well over 100 Bn USD. In fact, as per a study by Mattermark, companies founded during the financial crisis had a very high proportion amongst others go for a successful IPO/exit. Github, Nutanix, Cloudera, Airbnb, MongoDB, Slack, Yammer, Twilio, Tumblr, Square are just a few examples here.
We are now in a Covid led downturn that may be temporary or might last long. In the US, almost 17 million folks have lost their jobs as per the new unemployment numbers. There are businesses including technical startups that are going down every day. What could we have learned from the experience of those who survived the downturn or started during the downturn?
In this podcast , I have a conversation with Mark Kraynak. Mark is a founding partner at Acrew Capital — a venture capital firm based out of Palo Alto and San Francisco. Formerly, Mark was the Chief Product Officer at Imperva — a leader in web application firewall business. Incidentally, Mark was leading marketing at Imperva during the last financial crisis in 2007–2009, while it was still a privately owned upcoming startup.
Mark talks about his lifelong learnings from 2008 crash, how he and Imperva actually launched a new product offering and how that experience shapes his view in 2020, in a free flowing conversation with Alok Shukla (VP of Products at ShiftLeft)
