How Does COVID-19 Change The Future of Work? with Basis Set Ventures

Good afternoon and good morning wherever you are in the world today watching us at the New New in Venture. Today we are joined by Lan, the founding and managing partner of Baseless Ventures. Thank you so much, Lan. Thank you, thank you so much. It's great chatting with all of you. I have a little presentation here I would like to walk through and would love to answer any questions or ask you any questions. I don't know how interaction works. I actually have a few questions for you guys. But let's go through this and see whether we can open up with Q&A. So just to introduce myself a little bit more, my name is Lan. I'm founder and managing partner of Basis Ventures. I started Basis Ventures in 2017. We are a seed stage fund that focuses on AI and automation. We invest in companies that transform the way people work. Most of our portfolio are enterprise companies. The fund is about $140 million. We mostly do seed stage investments and a little bit Series A. The verticals we focus on are obviously the office productivity, you know, dev tools, but also some of the more antiquated industries, including construction, you know, like agriculture, manufacturing, et cetera. So with that, I'm going to go into the formal topic, which is how is COVID impacting the future of work? First of all, what is future of work? The way— I'm curious about your thoughts as an audience of future of work, and I don't know how I can see your response, actually. I mean, should I try to exit and see if it's possible? Maybe not. So anyway, so what is future of work? The way we think about future of work is, as an investor, we think about the stack of automation. We're investing both down and up the stack, anything from infrastructure to the data layer to algorithm to application. So pretty much the whole spectrum. And as I mentioned, industry-wise, we look at, you know, the professional office workers and also the deskless workers, including people working factories, in farms, and a lot of different settings. As investors, very fascinating to me how COVID is changing the entire spectrum of future work and not just our office workers, but also people who work in different settings, because I think the impact on them is probably even bigger than us. And we're all fortunate enough to be able to stay at home and do this on Zoom, but a lot of workers are not as fortunate. So I'll spend a little bit of time talking about that in the presentation. So on a high level, that's how we think about future work, and that's how we make our investment. It's pretty broad, kind of scope. I've been tracking COVID since its very early days in January. After seeing China getting hit very hard, I've been tracking this for several months. It's very clear that it's impacting us in many different ways. Specifically, I think it's impacting who are winning in this market from the founder point of view. In an upmarket, a lot of founders will survive because market's great. A lot of founders will easily raise money and start company, have product-market fit. But in a downmarket, the profile of people who are gonna survive will be different. And I'll give a little example and talk through a little bit of that. And obviously, the second thing, COVID's changing the way we work. We went from very much going to the office to completely remote. And lastly, I'll give you an example of how COVID is changing the infrastructure of our economy in terms of supply chain. So it's changing who wins and how we work and changing infrastructure. So it's basically, in my view, it's a pretty complete reset for us in many ways, which brings lots of challenges and also some opportunities. Okay, so first, for founders, it changes who wins. The way we see this is the rise of wartime founder are going to have some kind of advantage in this market, because they've just been preparing for this a little bit longer than the founders who, you know, maybe only have seen the good times. So the rise of— I'll spend a little bit of time on the founder side. The Rise of Wartime Founders is what I called it. Typically, as investors, the way we look at founders, you know, are we look at some of the very obvious attributes. You know, which school you go to, what have you done before, what is your experience, you know, are you technical? If you read a lot of the memos and interacted with investors before, those are some of the most obvious attributes that people look for as an investor. We think some of the more better predictors of founder success in upmarket or downmarket are actually these, what we call critical aspects of psychological profiles of the founders, which includes agile thinking, confidence, day-to-day effectiveness, founder-market fit, whether quick learner or not, whether scrappy or storytelling. So these are the attributes, if you know, are much harder to identify, especially given limited amount of time as investor when you meet founders, but extremely important. And it is extremely, especially important in a market where certain aspects become more important because we're in a downturn. Fundraising is more difficult now. Business customers are getting impacted. Timeline's longer for fundraising, for closing customers, and payments get delayed, right? So certain attributes like agile thinking or day-to-day effectiveness, results-driven, scrappy becomes even more important in this market. We collected data from 60 founders who are— some are successful, some are not successful, and on these core attributes. And we used the data we collected to kind of group them together to see what kind of profile of founders, you know, we can parse out, and what are some of the profiles that are successful and some are not. And what's the difference between the successful profiles and those who are not. The result is quite interesting. Let me take you through. Some of the results. So we've identified 3 successful founder archetypes. One is called humble operator, one is called agile visionary, one is called seasoned executive. I'm gonna stay here for a minute. The core differences between these founders are, you know, how these attributes, as I work through, grouped together. Like, for example, a humble operator, This is a group of founder who are very strong in execution, very greedy, gritty, very resourceful, and also tend to be humble. These founders described by investors as resilient, as ambitious, as modest and diligent. And the second type, agile visionary, these are founders who are more, tend to be younger, tend to be first-time founders, They're very much a visionary. They're very driven by a desire for greatness. They have some unique perspective, and they're very, very quick to respond. Also very strong execution, but they're described as multifaceted and very driven and very brilliant. The third one is seasoned executive. This type of founder has more experience than the previous two. On average, they have more than 5 years of management experience. Note, this is management experience, not work experience, which is a little bit different. And they're described by people as a great communicator, mature, thoughtful, high confidence, knows the business well. These are 3 types of founders that we identify from the dataset that has certain characteristics that drive them to be successful. In all markets. And then there are 3 types that are struggling. So the first one is called Passion Outsider. This is the type of founder who tend to be first-time founder, very, very hardworking, but just don't— can't seem to find product-market fit. They may be a little bit risk-averse, maybe lacking a little bit unique advantage in the market, even though they work very hard. They just didn't find product-market fit. The second type is overconfident storyteller. This is a type of founders who are very charismatic, very compelling, who are much more likely to be very good at fundraising, but may or may not be strong execution. So this type of founders we see in upmarket, they can raise money because they're very charming. They come in, in a full partnership meeting from investor, they get a lot of attention, they raise— waste money, right? Probably not so much in a down market like this, where investors really care about the metrics and the unit economics. So I think this is the type of founder who actually suffers a little bit more in a downturn. The third, the last one is called stubborn individualistic, individualist. This is the type of founders who are stubborn and a little bit slow to adapt to learning from the market. And not really empathetic to customers, which make it harder for them to find product-market fit. Now, like, we call it stubborn, but stubborn doesn't mean bad. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs are actually stubborn, you know, like Steve Jobs, or, you know, very famously stubborn Jeff Bezos. I think the difference between these individuals and this type of founders is basically whether, you know, stubborn in vision but not execution. If customers tell you this is not working, keeping the visions in mind, but change execution to make sure this works for a customer. That's how you find product-market fit. During downturn, one of the attributes that becomes really important as we talk to investors is attributes associated with scrappiness or agile thinking. So as you see from the first couple of type of founders, investors overwhelmingly believe founders with grit, with very persistent personality, or scrappy, agile, are much better positioned to be successful in this market. Some of the quotes here are from very experienced early-stage investors, they value resilience, they value grit, they value making quick adjustments to the plan, they value quick pivot to product, they value fast learning. So these are attributes, we kind of group them together as persistent, scrappy, and agile, as the important attributes. So what's interesting in our dataset is looking at two type of founders who are great storytelling founders, who are very confident, who have found market fit. The difference in differentiating these two founders, actually, the very attributes we talked about, which is scrappiness and agile thinking, which translate actually into day-to-day execution. So if you compare the the two founders, one is Agile Visionary, and another is Overconfident Storyteller, the core difference between these two founders are whether they can be scrappy and find the resources they need to find to execute strongly day-to-day. And this is the core difference that we found between these two founders. I think this will translate into even more differences in the market like we're going through today, because execution matters even more as investors index less on your fundraising abilities, index less on your confidence with your business, right? And then as you index more on execution, looking even more at your metrics, these attributes will become more important. So hard work obviously matters, is one of the— attributes that kind of group together with these founders. And we all know Zoom is doing really well, and Eric Yuan, I've known him since 2015. He's like probably one of the hardest workers we know, and he valued hard work, and obviously, that's something also grouped together with these attributes. So if you're a founder, the question is, if you're a founder who are humble, who are scrappy, who are gritty, who are resourceful, who have all these attributes that we think are going to be successful, Does that mean you're a successful founder? Does it mean that you for sure do better in this market? The answer is no. So we compared with two groups of founders. One is humble operator, very scrappy, very hardworking, very humble. And another, what we call the— oops. Sorry, Passion Outsider. Both of them score very high on humility, scrappiness, and resourcefulness, and also grit. The difference between these two founders are, if you compare these two, founder-market fit and whether a team follows the founders. What does this mean? A founder who's very hardworking, very scrappy, very resourceful, need a unique advantage in the market that the founder has, or someone to kind of, you know, supplement the founder to be unique in this market. This means unique advantage, either unique insight or founder-market fit in the market that's specifically a great fit for you. This is more important in a down market like this because execution becomes so critical. A male founder, so both strong execution. If you have a unique insight, if you have a unique strength in this market, say, be it customer relationship, be it investor relationship, be it product development skills in a tough market, that sets you apart from your other competition. That makes you even stronger in execution. and accuracy of execution will become higher. So that's the difference between these two funds, are both greedy and also resourceful. Here's an investor quote that speaks to that. This is the point where, when actual understanding of a business matters. For the last 10 years, there are lots of CEOs who could get away having high margin subscription software business, not really paying attention to every penny. The thing about downturn is that every penny actually matters a lot. And, you know, this speaks to the accuracy in execution. If you execute, you have an advantage in the market, and you execute super precisely and make every penny count, your business goes way longer, and you'll gain more market share and become a bigger business. Lastly, on the founder, what I want to summarize this for is, you know, this is a market for underdogs. If you have been through tough times, this is a market for you. Founders who grow up with limited resources, founders who have lots of experience dealing with challenges and, you know, went through hard times, they're likely to be more resilient and hardworking. And also, if you actually happen to have a unique advantage in the market, you're actually better positioned to win this battle. This is a tough battle for everyone. But if you have actually got the practice in having a disadvantage in some ways, the silver lining is that you might just have more experience than your competitor who only been through good times and always have the resources that they need. I think this is to encourage founders who— I certainly think I'm underdog, to encourage people who think the same way like us. And I grew up very poor. I'm definitely first-generation tech, first-generation VC. What I went through is very different from a lot of other VCs went through. I think this is market for people like us and for us to actually shine because of our practice we've already had. That's on the funder side. The second thing, like, you know, switching to how COVID is changing the way we work, this is more straightforward than the first one, how this, you know, it changes who will actually win this market. So in terms of how we work, it's pretty obvious. We are, as knowledge workers, we're all going remote. I wrote an article earlier on the different type of models for distributed teams. Initially, all the companies have centralized headquarters. Then we moved towards more— there are companies with multiple centralized offices. We have a couple portfolio companies that has a headquarters in San Francisco, but R&D office in Berlin, or R&D office in Mexico, or in like Asia, some countries in Asia. And that becomes more common in this market to take advantage of the unique technical talents in other market while still keeping marketing and sales in California or United States. So that become even more common with COVID What we're moving towards is actually the third type of completely distributed model where everyone is distributed. We have a company that has 90 employees and completely distributed. No headquarters anywhere. We're seeing other companies like, you know, InVision, or actually Twitter. There's some other larger companies who previously had centralized HQ, now is more distributed, announcing that they're adopting this distributed approach. I think Box just announced as well. So we're moving towards from a centralized HQ to a completely distributed model. And in my view, I think this is not going to be reversed. Once people get used to remote work, and there's certainly a lot of benefit, obviously a lot of challenges, but like there are certain group of people, once company get comfortable with this, a portion of the people will be permanently remote, which will allow them take advantage of the low costs or in certain geos, and lack of visa for immigrants, and to name a few benefits. So as we've seen, the rise of team productivity tools in the cloud also is changing the way we work. Before, there were a lot of systems that doesn't allow collaborating with our coworkers. Our team is entirely on Airtable, you know, and have been for a year. I used to work at Dropbox. The adoption of cloud-based team collaboration tools have, you know, have been increasing dramatically in the past month, driven by COVID. I think, you know, I heard that Figma usage is like more than doubled, and Slack, obviously a lot of people are on Slack, and we've all seen, The jump of Zoom stock, we're all on Zoom meetings a lot of times. Data.build.com and Okta, Atlassian, these are companies benefiting from the trend. If you look at public market, about 20 to 40% of market is accounted for by about 5 companies, and these are 5 tech companies that are in some ways benefiting from COVID While the other companies are actually not doing really well. So we're seeing the rise of office productivity, collaboration tools, and some of the tech tools benefiting from this market. And this will fundamentally change the way people work, because once you get on these tools, it's so much easier than some of the other tools that, you know, we used in the past, and it's very hard to see us going back. So the last trend I want to talk about is infrastructure. This is not something we spend a lot— investors typically spend a lot of time on. As a fund, we think this is super important to look beyond the office workers, beyond our productivity tools, beyond Zoom, beyond Slack, but look at the real economy. Supply chain is just one of them. A lot of the economy, the real economy is actually getting hit really hard. Restaurant workers and factory workers, farmers and some of these healthcare professionals. These other spaces are getting hit pretty hard, and I encourage everyone to look at some of the other spaces and help out as much as possible. I will spend a little bit of time talking about supply chain because this is an area where we spend a little bit of time looking at, and supply chains go through some of the most transformation in the past month driven by COVID. One example where I want to start with is kind of like how does supply chain work? Supply chain is extremely complex. I don't know how many of you have had experience dealing with some kind of supply chain, right? So take an example of like trucking. You see the flowchart, I'm not going to go through every single detail, but you see the flowchart from like loading, unloading, transportation, like, you know, hold at different ports, transporting different geographies and hiring drivers and driver turnover, and then kind of like certification paperwork. It's extremely operational complex space. You know, that's one of the reasons we actually had an extreme shortage in PPE in the previous months of COVID The reason for that is like, you know, the existing supply chain did not have enough demand. So supply-demand mismatch was pretty severe in the initial time of COVID and most of the manufacturing of PPE has been outside of the US. To this day. And then, you know, the lack of transparency/data and financing option made it hard to get the supply from other countries to the United States. You know, some of them is driven by regulatory changes and customs, you know, going through customs is extremely complex and the different certifications especially, for medical supplies is extremely complex. There's a certification called NIOSH for N95 masks. It takes 9 months to go through the certification. So during times like COVID, it's just simply not enough time for new factories to go through the certification. As a result, the existing factories that are with the certification get very, really high demand, and the price gets bid up and it could become super inefficient. There's going to be like, there were like multiple brokers involved in this. So that's an example of why the supply chain broke down and the reason why it broke down the way it did. PPE is just one of the examples. There are also other examples, such as toilet papers. A lot of people are stocking toilet papers because there's not just— the existing supply doesn't meet the demand, and there's no transparency of how we're getting these toilet papers directly from the source. And there's regulatory changes, not so much as PPE, but there's still some. And sanitizers. Like even food, right? Grocery shopping for the longest time, we can't get enough eggs, or it's challenging to get enough eggs and milk, and some other just basic ingredients because of supply chain problem. It's a little bit better now as the existing supply chain kind of catching up and the new supply chain coming online. The new supply chains coming online are taking advantage of, you know, going direct. So I'm sure you've experienced already a restaurant going direct, selling direct to you, versus even going through a third-party platform. Obviously, you know, a lot of restaurants going through DoorDash and Uber Eats to sell to you, which is another form of direct, you know, with one middleman versus like many others. Distributors, wholesalers are also going direct and selling products to customers. Even farmers, the direct-from-farm boxes that we're all ordering, those are another way of going direct. So that's some of the ways that we're experiencing already, you know, directing our lives. Even more are, you know, medical supplies. I personally talked to about 30 to 40 factories in the past month to help source and donate medical supplies. And I'm going direct, and I know a lot of the hospitals and clinics and different resources are also going direct. So that's another vertical. So like, how does direct work? Traditionally, if you want to sell something, you go through factories, right? And then you have sourcing agents. You pay tariffs, and all the supply was sitting in a warehouse. If you're a big brand, you have a brand tax on top of that. And then with that, all the complexity and all the kind of trucking, logistics, transport, which are all costs, right? Now you can sell either through a physical store or an online store. So that translates into— in consumer sense, it's a very expensive product, especially brand product. The brand premium is much higher. The second iteration of that model is, you know, there are companies cutting some of the sourcing agents, cutting some of the steps to, you know, make other brands and direct it to go consumer. This is already a shorter— short version, which already happening. A lot of D2C brands we're seeing, you know, have eliminated some of the steps and are able to get products to consumer either at a cheaper price or higher margin. Now we're on the third model, which is COVID driving us towards, directly getting from the factories. So forget about all the warehouses and brand taxes and all of the— let's just go direct from factories and get our eggs and milk there from the farm. It doesn't matter what brand this is. You know, probably people probably even like organic products even more. In the case of PPE supply, you know, I just go direct from factory and, you know, donate these sources to people in need. So COVID is driving us towards a third option, which ultimately can be a cheaper option, can be a much cheaper option if the seller is waiting to reduce the margin. Now, obviously, some sellers will choose to have a higher margin, which is, you know, better business. But ultimately, this is approach where will allow us to— will allow consumer to have cheaper supply, better quality, you know, and also faster, which will be also more robust in age of COVID So that's one example of how COVID is transforming the the way supply chain works, which is a very fundamental pillar of our economy. So those are three examples I want to throw out. Hopefully this sparks some discussion, good discussions among us. I think COVID is going to drive us towards a complete reset in many different areas, and depends on who you are. How you work, and how this is transforming your support system and our infrastructure, the implication on each person is going to be a little different. So I encourage you to think about, if you're a founder, think about how this is impacting our business. What do you have to do in this situation? What is your unique advantage to not only survive but thrive? In this situation, given everyone's getting hit pretty hard. So with that, I'm going to take a look at some of the questions. The first question— if you have questions, feel free to type it here. Now I'm going to open up Q&A with the last 10 minutes. So The first question is, what do you define as scrappy or agile thinkers, or what are the characteristics you use? So, yeah, so the way we did our calculations are we did a cluster analysis with our data, and the data tells us which attributes tend to group with each other. With kind of humble operators, the attributes that matters more for this segment are whether you're humble, whether you're resilient, whether you're scrappy, whether you have resourcefulness and grit. These are attributes that define humble operator. The key thing here, I think a lot of operators are very strong execution, but not necessarily humble. This type of founders are particularly humble in the sense that they can place themselves out of the equation and be very empathetic with customers and have conversation with them and find product-market fit that way. So that's like a humble operator. In terms of agile visionary, agile in the sense like quick to respond. You know, pivot if needed. Super strong in execution in the sense that, you know, you execute, see what works, and if it doesn't work, let's go back and do something else, right? So these founders tend to be younger and first-time founders, so they have to try different things to really figure out product-market fit. So hopefully that answers your question. Okay, the second question is, what surprised you most about the findings about the three types of successful founders? And can you please refer to the slide when answering? Yeah, so the second question, what surprised me the most? I guess the one thing that really surprised me is the percentage of each type of founders. So as you see here, humble operator is 18%, and natural vision is about 10%, the seasoned executive is 27%. This surprised me because typically, I would think humble operator is actually undervalued and not obvious type of founders, because they're humble. If you are not out there, talking about yourself constantly, investors have a tendency to not take you as seriously. So I would have imagined this type of founder probably like account for actual higher percentage in database, but from investor point of view, maybe a lower percentage, just given they're not obvious. I was a little bit surprised by the percentages. I think the reason for that is probably because our sample is frankly, a little bit biased. We tend to like founders who are humble operators, and maybe the investors we like tend to like these type of founders, and maybe our sample just have more of them in the database. That's my explanation. Hopefully that answers your question. Do you ever think about the supply chain logistics of things like service delivery in the public sector, how government delivers its critical social services to the public, This is something that is more critical than ever now. Ordinary people face challenges they have never faced before. Great question. I think about that all the time. I'm unfortunately very disappointed by how the government is reacting to everything that COVID brings us. Simple example is testing, right? Testing should be widely available from day one. If had testing be available right away, we probably wouldn't be in the situation that we're in now. I understand why the government wasn't responding as fast to provide us all the testing kits that we need in the first place. I'm happy to go into details. But I've been thoroughly disappointed, and frankly, I've lost confidence in at least the federal government. I think the private sector— I'm more encouraged by the private sector and how fast people are willing to step up and, you know, like Gates Foundation, for example, and, you know, do some of the things that the public sector is not able to do. And hopefully that will be somewhat of a solution. I think one thing that maybe I want to mention here regarding the public sector's response to— is I think regulations, right? FDA has stepped up and drafted a lot of regulations because of 9/11, which has been extremely helpful. Because of that, which actually turned out to be not so helpful during this time when we have to respond super fast. Like testing kit, for example. We know the testing kits have been available by WHO, by a lot of the other, a lot of other countries have been using that for months. But because of FDA process, we're unable to use all the testing kit, testing kit that other countries have developed. Because the law says we have to do everything in the United States, therefore there's a huge delay in terms of— that's one of the factors. There are other factors as well. There's a delay in terms of how we're developing our own testing kit and using them. Had we used the testing kits that's being given to us by WHO, we probably would have discovered this much faster. It's one of the reasons I think it's a little bit harder to to mitigate. Hopefully in the future we learn from this and become better at managing a global endemic. And Asian countries like China and Singapore and Hong Kong, Taiwan, they're better equipped in responding to this because they all went through SARS. So they know how these things work. But this is our first time responding to this. Hope that answers your question. Do you think that the trend towards fully distributed teams is or will lead to investors becoming more geographically agnostic? 100%. 100%. I think the bottleneck from— the bottleneck for investors become more willing to make investments in founders who are further away or have not met in person is this psychological barrier of trust. If I have not met you in person, technically— Investing is a people business. It's driven by emotion. Developing trust with someone over Zoom building trust with someone who's further away from you, it's harder to do reference checks because I don't know that ecosystem. That's the barrier that causes investors to become less active and less likely to invest in founders in other geographies or founders who they don't meet in person. But I think COVID is driving us towards— investors are forced to make decisions and over Zoom. Because of this forcing mechanism, I think investors will become more— oh, forgot to click the answer live button. So investors will become more okay as a result and realize that it's actually okay. We can make a— we can write a check without meeting founders. You know, it's actually maybe better because we're more objective. We're less likely to be influenced by one's charisma or like body gesture, because we're meeting on Zoom, maybe that pushes us to do more work, reference calls, versus trusting our friends, trusting our instinct, right? So absolutely, I do think that forces us to be focusing more on different geos and better investors, to be honest. When you talk about supply chain changes, do you mean this in the context of future forward within supply chain supply changes versus, example, different in staffing? I think yes. In terms of, yes, I mean this in terms of how the supply chain will work in the future, which is a complete revamp. Obviously, it will impact the way people work and impact staffing, for sure. If we're cutting the supply chain in the middle, we're cutting the brokers and cutting middlemen, right? So hopefully people will shift towards more on either end, maybe on the supply side, work more in manufacturing, or find other roles, and cutting more of the middlemen. So for sure, it's going to be impacted. Anonymous, let's see. Now virtual event space is getting hot. Hop in, uh, Rutherworld. What do you think about this area? Are they already a winner or any different angle? Virtual event space. I don't know. I have a complex feeling about virtual events. On one hand, I know we're forced to do virtual events, and that's what the direction's going to. On the other hand, I'm just really sick of doing Zoom. Meetings and Zoom calls and everything on Zoom. So I think, you know, that probably reflects how people feel. On one hand, we're, you know, forced to do this, and you see, like, increased usage. But on the other hand, I think the moment we're allowed to go out, we're probably just going to do real events, in-person events. So I think, you know, once people— I think this will get more people online, from those who were previously offline. And as a sector, I believe they will do well. But I think, you know, maybe the portion of people who actually want to do less virtual events and, you know, more in-person events as a result of this, probably like, you know, in some, maybe a little bit increased, but not like, you know, the drastic increase we're seeing today. "How are founders, owners, managers making sure that corporate goals can still be achieved while employees work from home? Any good tools for this? Is it easy to shrink from work?" Yes, so there are lots of tools on the market. We're looking at some of them that try to help managers to work better and more efficiently. Actually, on this slide, I went through— some of these tools are remote tools that just help people work better and more effectively. They're not meant to be like KPI management, but there are some, like for example, Range, range.co. This is a tool that helps you do daily standup. It helps you to kind of talk about what you're— write on the tool what's your goal and how you're achieving this goal. So these are the tools that help people get alignment. Another example is like Remotion. We're not investing in any of those tools, I have no stake in it, but I like these tools. Remotion, that basically allows you to interact with your coworker as if they're in person, right? So there are a lot of tools that help you, help people to work better. I think this makes us better workers and more efficient. I don't actually believe our efficiency will decrease as a result of remote work. I actually think a lot of us will work better and more efficiently. So I think, you know, as a trend, I believe these tools, I believe in the cloud, and we're invested in some of— not the ones I mentioned, but in some of these tools. Will remote working also affect supply chains over the long term? Absolutely, 100%. Once supply chain go direct, it's very hard to go indirect. I think the impact is permanent. Slack and Microsoft Teams have been growing well in synchronous collaboration space, but are you seeing opportunities in asynchronous collaboration space? Yeah, for sure. I think both are happening. In some cases where people need real-time collaboration, Microsoft or some of the smaller players. In other cases where it's a basic workflow, right? One person does this, another person does something else. It doesn't need to be happening at the same time, but it could be asynchronous. I'm also seeing this happen more in the workflow automation setting. So yeah, for sure. How will the travel and leisure industry change post-COVID, specifically local/international air travel and also tourism? That's an interesting question. I think travel will no longer be the same as before. People will be more conscious in terms of what they take, where they stay, you know, how clean these spaces are. So it will change some of the behaviors in travel. But I think travel will come back at some point. People still want to travel. It's just like, you know, where are they going, how they're traveling, you know, how frequent they're traveling, these things will be different. Like specifically how exactly this will change, you know, we'll see. And there are a portion of people probably just, you know, are okay with virtual events. I think VR is getting better. I personally, you know, don't use much of VR, but I've heard great things about Oculus. So maybe a portion of people will like travel virtually. I really hope people still travel in person, But I think people's behavior will change and travel will bounce back in some shape or form, and maybe different from how we traveled in the past. How do you feel about scientifically valid assessment testing in the realm of human capital due diligence? Example, investing in founders or hiring of employees. Those types of products are getting funded increasingly post-COVID, but it seems that not many investors are experts in this area. Do you think it will open up? I think the fundamental challenge of investing in kind of science healthcare is that the timeline and risk profiles are different. And it is harder to get these projects funded because the risk is like scientific risk, right? So we're okay, A lot of investors are okay with market risk, with technology risk, maybe to some extent, but science risk is a whole different level of risk profile. Investors are less likely to be okay underwriting such risks. That's why you're seeing some just harder to get funded. That said, a lot of investors are specifically focused on this type of risk. You have to have a balanced portfolio to make calculated bets. And I really like investors who are thinking really big, like Gates Foundation, some of the other investors who, with the goal of funding projects like this. So, you know, and hopefully, hopefully, projects will get funded. But I agree with this, it's harder. What work-from-home issues have not been yet solved by existing software solutions? Yeah, a lot. I think the bigger one is, what do I do with my kids? We have all these tools, that will help us work better, but I have two little kids, you know, two and four-year-olds. They don't— they can't use any tools. They just need to be taken care of by someone. They have their Zoom meetings, but I'm their IT support and admin to, you know, help them even set things up. So that's been extremely painful. If you're a parent, I'm sure you're feeling the pain of, you know, complete work and life integration. My kids can come up anytime, actually, speak of that. So I think that's really hard to solve. And, you know, like relationships, empathy, taking care of elderly and kids, and a lot of the fundamental human basic live and work issues are not getting solved by software solutions. You know, education, healthcare, so many. I hope, like the number one thing I hope we can all solve at some point is like childcare. I think we're completely out of the time, out of time. I'm not sure if I should stop or keep going. I'm gonna just like, we have a few questions, I'm just gonna finish answering them quickly. Quickly, how will COVID change employee onboarding or software training? Or is it too soon to tell? I think onboarding is getting online, getting faster and easier, and founders are trying to make onboarding easier, which— and faster, be online. I think it's a trend that's going to happen. Which two different categories of founders out of the six you feel form the most strong founding team? I think there are the three types, are the three— Agile visionary, humble operators, and seasoned execs, they're all strong for different reasons. I think they might be fit for different type of startups. Like, for example, working on supply chain logistics business, right? If you have been in the business for like 5 years or 10 years, it probably gives you the advantage of like, you know, being strong in that business. So I think it's a matter of like, fit with the business problem, they're all strong founders for different reasons. How drastic do you think the changes will be with middleman type of business? I think it's going to be pretty— I think it's going to be severe in some cases, like supply chain, but also lucrative. If you're the middleman who's able to figure this out and other people can't, and you're probably going to be have dominated the market. But overall, I think the industry, I think it will get hurt. But if you're, you know, figure out something unique in the sector that you're in and nobody else is, I think, you know, that's also opportunities and silver lining. What do you mean by scientific risk? You know, drug discovery, for example, like vaccine risks, right? You know, there's a chance that we might not be able to figure out how science works in this case. There's a chance we might not have any vaccine. So that's a scientific risk. Science works— Science either works or it doesn't work. We just need to figure out how it works. I used to do a PhD. I used to do science. It's not something like You can figure out like product fit. You can like figure out if sense doesn't work, it doesn't work. There's no— there's no like figuring out, I guess. I think you have two and four-year-old also. It's very, it's very good. Yeah, yeah. One thing I really appreciate out of the COVID is like teachers. Oh my gosh, uh, we should pay teachers so much more. Uh, they deserve a medal. Uh, they deserve to be compensated as much as possible. I am very happy to be paying the full tuition of my kids' school even though we're having like 2 Zoom meetings every day. Very happy. I'm very happy to support the school. I think they need to be paid. How will— last question— how will connectivity infrastructure change in light of this crisis with internet usage surging much faster than expected? Yeah, internet has now been very reliable because of the surging usage. I mean, the trend is that we're shifting to 5G, we're shifting to fiber, we're shifting to those higher, better technology. I think that's a trend, right? I think this probably drives us towards faster implementation of better internet. And for sure it's happening. Hopefully it happens sooner than we expect. It's probably not the most reliable, like Google Fiber, where some of this stuff is already happening. Cool. It's been great chatting with all of you. If you have more questions or love to discuss anything, you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I think this is my Twitter handle right here, @xuuzhao. You can also find my LinkedIn with my name. Thank you so much again. This has been fun, and hopefully this is interesting.