Covid-19: Startup Generator
Covid-19 is devastating the lives of millions and tearing people apart. I am going to do something extremely distasteful with this: I am going to see what it is telling us about our technology, economy and society.
Why?
Because any kind of disruption to normal life highlights the things which were normal but not optimal. The canonical example I usually use is when the content industries — like music — were disrupted by the internet. The old normal was CDs and records, but the internet disrupted this and suddenly the value shifts.
A global pandemic is a hell of a way to disrupt things, but it is a disruption. As things pan out, I’m going to write about this from a few angles:
- How old business models are not optimally using the digital world
- How people are not optimally using existing digital things
- How people are not setup, in themselves, for large scale disruption. I believe a lot of this is reflected in mental health and anxiety, but re-framed as “how should society optimise itself” you realise that peoples’ (understandable) unwillingness to change is holding us back.
In all of this, there is a lot of learning about the opportunities to build new things — products, technologies, ways of working, business, society etc. This is not totally capitalist. The fact that we can’t move around means fuel consumption is going to fall; why didn’t we do that sooner?
Week 1
We in the UK are less than a week into a fairly modest lockdown, which started slower than it should have. (I’m more than happy to have the argument if you disagree.)
People are now largely working from home. Interesting points here are:
- Anxiety of isolation. If WFH is better for the environment, how can we teach people to feel connected and generally ‘sane’ without insisting they commute every day? There are a heap of experiments into this, deliberate and artificial, often around space flight and trips to Mars so we don’t have a standing start.
- We’re actually quite good at it but there are still jokes about conference calling. “Sorry can I sa… can I say… can I … oh I think you broke up … could. … oh I dropped off”. These funny things are bugs in the technology. Opportunities.
- Things that are tied to place. Schools, universities, pubs, cafes, museums. I would probably never say that these things will move online entirely, but you have to ask if the business models can’t move online a lot more than they are at the moment.
- Social interaction. The vast majority of human interaction still happens face-to-face. We largely do this in meeting rooms in suits (which I gave up on about 10 years ago, still surprised that others haven’t), even though we know it’s largely an act. Go back a thousand years and we might be sitting across a fire from each other having hunted a deer; what is normal does not remain normal. Do we need to teach ourselves new good defaults for social interaction?
I’m going to write more about how what’s going on is a real example of a theoretical idea I’ve run for ages: take the basic assumptions of your business or an industry, remove it but make the business or industry survive. If you can do that you will survive disruption.
Almost nobody does that exercise properly. They do the first 20% and then realise it’s hard because it involves skills and knowledge they don’t have (because it’s “not their role”). And they stop.
Then something happens. And they weren’t prepared.
This is why the current situation is probably the best start up generator / incubator / accelerator the world has ever created. The incumbents in an industry don’t think things will every change and don’t really spend the time thinking about what would happen if things did.
Things have changed. Suddenly we are seeing all the ways in which current ways of doing stuff don’t work.
I once had a beer with an economist & investor. I asked him “what makes industry change quickly”. He said:
War
That’s what this has created. The simultaneous demands of having to carry on and the normal ways of doing things being entirely inadequate.
Let’s see how this goes…
And for clarity, in doing this I mean absolutely no disrespect to those affected.
Hi — thanks for reading. I’m writing a book. I know. Who isn’t? But really, I’m trying to.
Mental Health is almost entirely a reactive approach to managing our mental wellbeing. This is completely the wrong way around. We should be actively managing our mental fitness from the beginning of our careers.
You can sign up for preorders and extracts HERE. Thank you :)
— Dan
