Ok hat tip to Tom, Rick, Will and Keith for inspiring this post. But if you are a small business what can you do. FWIW I’ve never run a small business so I don’t know much about that, but I have worked with startups (and even been in one), but here are some great words of wisdom
- Sequoia. OK, these are the deans of startups sent a warning very early. Great reading.
- A16Z. Has a great list of resources and twitter feeds to follow.
- Benchmark. This was a great Podcast particularly since Bill Gurley has lived through two major crises. Very sanguine.
- Bessemer Ventures. They just did a zoom webinar about how great companies prospered. They got together the Pinterest, Shopify and Twilio CEOs to talk about their real work in the 2008 recession. Super interesting I don’t know if they will post more, but really helpful. The big Shopify point is that in 2008, with people losing their jobs, they ended up having a bunch of entrepreneurs who wanted to sell things so similar story to AirBNB and Uber where people are looking for jobs. Pinterest was a completely different example, they did an iPhone application which failed, so they just did Pinterest for fun and so they did a hard reset. Pinterest was hard to predict, but obvious in retrospect, they just found some signal that they loved it and find people more like them, so they found non-techies who were underserved women and bloggers and just cherished them. Great words there. Twilio was about focus on developers and finding people who would pay and look for really hard enterprise problems.
Then there are my buddies with some great thoughts:
- Capria. They have a good summary of what each company should be doing.
- Alliance of Angels. Well written on what every business should do.
