How my VC fund is helping our companies survive the pandemic
We’ve adopted a system inspired by emergency room triage, with red, amber, and green color codes to help us prioritize which companies need the most aid.
The past few months have seen almost all businesses make dramatic shifts, and the same is true for venture investing. By April 1, I knew I’d been fooled. I had figured COVID-19 would be just a bump in the road for our portfolio companies across Southeast Asia. Lockdowns and other measures were disrupting life in countries from Malaysia to Vietnam, but the founders and CEOs of our firms expected things would bounce back to normal soon. And so did I, until the bad news and grim projections from overseas kept coming. The data points were adding up to a pattern which in no way looked like a V-shaped, or even U-shaped, global economic recovery.