Founder Institute portfolio companies are using four tactics to survive COVID-19: overcommunicating with investors and employees, publishing thought leadership about the pandemic, managing staff through cuts or growth, and negotiating vendor deals like securing a year-long subscription for free.
I've actually just seen this just from the top portfolio companies in Founder Institute that are not only, you know, embracing this, but they're thriving. So a couple things. So number one, overcommunication, right? So if we're looking like the top portfolio companies, their investor updates are much more detailed. This is what we're doing, we're on top of it, this is the plan. Then they're also sharing how they're communicating with their employees. This is like our shelter-in-place policy, this is what we're doing, blah, blah, blah, things like that. Then on top of that, many of them are actually already doing a lot of thought leadership around this. So it's rare that you see a company that doesn't address COVID-19 on their website, for example, right? So if you don't have that, you should probably have it just because that's kind of what's top of mind right now, right? What your policy is, talk about it in blog posts and things like that. So that's another one. The other one is basically how they're managing through various different scenarios with their staff and their employees, whether it's, you know, having to potentially make certain tough decisions with regards to cuts or working really hard to basically, you know, maintain their staff while also growing. Things like that is also another thing. And then finally, one thing that seems to be really interesting is that like all the top companies are able to kind of figure out a way to make it happen, whether it's negotiating with their vendors to basically reduce their cost to zero. We were talking to one company and basically they were able to like get like almost a year-long subscription for this super valuable vendor that they needed to use, and because they were able to kind of negotiate their way through as a result of this. So those are just some of the things that I've seen just from the portfolio of founders too.
