Seed-investing company NFX has released the results of a large survey of venture capitalists and founders on the impact and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We would like to share with you some interesting conclusions reached by the study authors.
The founders showed a fairly high level of anxiety about the current events. Nearly 77% of entrepreneurs surveyed said they were worried about business and rated their excitement as medium to extreme. Most of all, the founders were worried about the cessation of investments and a serious drop in sales.
How do founders adapt to the situation? When asked about how entrepreneurs deal with stress, nearly half said that socializing with friends and colleagues helps them, and many also highlighted the importance of exercises and adequate sleep. When asked about changes within companies, every second flounder noted that first of all, office costs were reduced, every third company cut its marketing budget, froze recruitment of new employees and reoriented its product. More than half of the founders surveyed indicated that they have successfully adapted to remote work but are not ready to consider the complete transition of the business to the remote mode.
In your opinion, which tool / service was critical for more than 70% of respondents during a pandemic? Of course, this is Zoom. 66% rated Slack as important and nearly half (47%) rated Google Meet as important.
Let’s talk a little about the results of the survey among venture capitalists. When asked how the pandemic affected the investment strategy, every second (51%) respondent answered that the coronavirus did not affect their plans in any way, and another 45.6% noted that the coronavirus only slightly changed their business plans.
At the end of the study, the authors asked VC respondents to give their recommendations to founders on how to change their fundraising strategy. Every second one advised startups not to rush and postpone these tasks a little, every fourth investor surveyed, on the contrary, recommended a more aggressive policy.
A bonus of the study was the encouraging statistics, prepared by the authors together with Crunchbase, on the recovery of the venture capital market after the 2008 financial crisis. According to these data, the volume of global venture capital investments fully recovered in 2 years, and in 3 years already exceeded the pre-crisis indicators. We very much hope that this crisis will have similar consequences!
The original survey as available at the website
The next stop on our technological journey to China is to explore the country’s innovation ecosystem. Here we will not touch on the topic of venture capital investments, as we discussed it in the previous article. However, we will find out the exact number of unicorns in China, their main habitats and study the activities of the Chinese government in the development of innovations.
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MoreGoTech team has been working with startups for more than 10 years. If you want to run a corporate accelerator, prepare to hold a contest, conference, hackathon, pitch-session or any other event, where it comes to startups and technologies – let’s get acquainted, we will be glad to help.
GoTech is a leader in the field of technology scouting. Our funnel numbers more than 12 000 startups from 50 countries and is constantly updated. Experienced team and international partner network allow finding solutions for corporate tasks and startups for investment in Russia, CIS, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
We use our own TechScout platform to work with startups. Now it is available for wide use. With the help of TechScout, you will be able to collect applications from startups on your website, manage the pipeline, organize the work of experts and monitor the results of the assessment.
