I’ve been mulling over what I heard William Bao Bean of SOSV Capital say in a Techsauce Global podcast, “It is the cockroaches, the survivors, who can really take advantage of this tough environment that will build the next generation of leaders.”
Curious about cockroaches and inspired by the amazing contact tracing work Singapore’s been doing on Covid-19 cases – it’s better than a CSI drama, reading those charts – I started doing some investigative work into these winged creatures which make all women, big and small, squeal at first sighting.
What I learnt is the modern cockroach first came to be about 200 million years ago, but primitive roaches appeared even earlier, about 350 million years ago, during the Carboniferous period. So clearly they are survivors.
They also have interesting skills to survive – they are fast, they can hold their breaths four to seven minutes at a time (beating most free diving world records) and they can live without heads. Which, when you come to think about it, would be a good skill to have at this time, given most of us have been running around like headless chickens since the virus struck.
William Bao Bean: Winter is the best time to do a startup.
Bao Bean, never one to mince his words, is clearly a cockroach, and I know he won’t mind me calling him that. He believes the best time to do a startup is during winter – he’s not speaking seasonally, but economically – “when it’s hard to raise money, it’s easy to find good talent, it’s easy to build a company with less competition, it’s easier to set yourself apart, and when there’s not a lot of overly-funded companies around”.
He admits it’s been a very difficult 18 months for startups in China but “again, when you have mass layoffs, it’s the best time to build a company.” And he’s certainly been busy these past weeks holding MOX Accelerator events across the region.
Speaking of layoffs, it’s been heartwarming to watch the outpouring of support for the 3,000 employees who were laid off from Expedia this week. These cuts were planned pre-Covid-19 and it’s been interesting reading social media posts from those who were laid off, sharing positive messages about their state of mind, as well as competitors, partners and colleagues, essentially saying, “call me if you want, maybe I can help”.
Some are clearly opportunistic but why not? Expedia hired smart people and they’d be valuable anywhere, especially startups who now have access to talent they would never have dreamt of before.
Meanwhile, in a rare piece of good news this month, Booking Holdings reported a strong 2019. It reported a 4% increase in revenue to $15.1 billion for the full year 2019; over 845 million room nights were booked last year, an 11% increase over the previous year and its alternative accommodation business reached 6.3 million listings in 2019 and achieved $3.1 billion in revenue.
However, CEO Glenn Fogel alluded to getting leaner as well. “In 2020, we will further emphasise the need to make sure our expenses are appropriate for our revenue and we’ll look at ways to streamline and make all aspects of our company more efficient.”
Operating expenses for Booking Holdings went from $9.186 billion in 2018 to $9.721 billion in 2019. Said Fogel, “I always believe that you should be a cost-effective company. I believe it’s also very natural as companies grow very rapidly and achieve great success on the bottom line, sometimes discipline lightens up a little bit.”
While it is bracing for a “significant and negative impact” for the first quarter of 2020, Fogel is pretty clear about what he wants to do – bring all its companies together and keep working away at its payment platform – more than 50% of Booking.com gross bookings now occur on properties that are enabled on its payment platform.
“This payment platform is foundational for our connected trip strategy in which we envision a frictionless customer experience across multiple products that we believe will drive increased loyalty,” said Fogel in this report from Phocuswire.
This is clearly a time for strong and clear-eyed leadership. Leaders are being tested like never before and those who seize opportunities will come out stronger, faster.
I find it heartening that conversations with executives have moved on from “OMG, look at all these cancellations” to “what can we do differently, what can we review, rethink, redesign” – beyond the obvious of job cuts and wage freezes.
Dare I hope that we in Asia, who took the pain early, have moved past the initial shock and awe to accepting and figuring out next steps – while our brethren in Europe and and the US are now having to deal with the early stages of panic? In this again, we are all in the same boat and I hope lessons will be exchanged in how to handle this crisis with cooler heads, so that it doesn’t end up killing entire economies, which will end up killing more people than the virus ever will.
Which is why I thought I’d share some learning notes I picked up from reading David Epstein’s “Range: How Generalists Triumph In A Specialised World” which I feel relevant in the current context of tackling new problems.
• The most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorised procedures.”
• Focusing narrowly on many fine details specific to a problem at hand feels like the exact right thing to do, when it is often exactly wrong.
• Knowledge increasingly needs not merely to be durable but also flexible – both sticky and capable of broad application. Knowledge with enduring utility must be very flexible, composed of mental schemes that can be matched to new problems.
And the last word goes to Malcolm Gladwell who, in his podcast series, “Revisionist History”, said, “Nothing of consequence gets accomplished without courage.”
Come to think of it, have you ever seen a cockroach run from a human being? It’s usually the other way round.
Stay brave, my friends.
• Featured image credit: gan chaonan/Getty Images
