Why the Pandemic Startup Apocalypse Never Happened
For many companies, unexpected circumstances became the perfect storm for massive growth
“Coronavirus is the black swan of 2020.” So began the ominous letter that venture capital firm Sequoia Capital sent to the founders and CEOs of its portfolio companies on March 5 of last year. In many ways, the note was prescient, published roughly a week before the rest of white-collar America shuttered their doors and pivoted to remote work.
I remember receiving a similar pandemic-panicked email in my inbox around the same time as the Sequoia note. It essentially declared: “Nobody is allowed to come into the office until further notice.” I was in a meeting with approximately 20 other people, and you could tell when someone had just checked their email. Each new reader would immediately start glancing at everyone else in the room in search of runny noses or any other indication of which co-worker was to blame for turning the meeting into a superspreader event.
Businesses worldwide began closing their doors that month and everyone in the entrepreneurial community started predicting the Great Startup Apocalypse. Many seasoned startup observers — from venture capitalists to economists — were expecting destruction of cataclysmic proportions, bigger than that of the…
