Coronavirus Is the Ultimate Growth Hacker
Here’s what Silicon Valley futurists and COVID-19 preppers have in common
It seems particularly apt and grim that in an age of viral memes, it took a viral pandemic to remind us of how interconnected we really are. In between calls and emails to my parents to urge them to stock up and stay indoors, I, like many, watched the story hockey stick online and noticed the varied reaction among different groups of people in my life. Techies and finance folks, with some exceptions, were among the first cohorts in my personal network to hit the panic button.
The reason why they were the first to panic might be explained by Tyler Cowen’s description of the difference between base raters and growthers:
The growther approach seems most common among people trained in mathematics, finance, and those who work in technology. Finance is centered on the idea of exponentially compounding returns, where small initial gains turn into something quite large. So financial professionals understand the growther perspective.
In tech, the major companies have grown from nothing to very large fairly quickly, often by taking advantage of a (positive) network or contagion effect for their products. Tech people are also familiar with Moore’s Law, which says that computing power…
