What it’s like being a founder in a time of crisis
Being a founder is probably the closest thing to being a parent that there is. You have a strange connection, that you can’t even properly explain, to this thing that you created. Right now, I feel like my child has had a really bad accident and unless I get her to the hospital in time, she might not survive.
My close friend is an A&E doctor and he had been giving me the inside scoop from the front-lines since the coronavirus outbreak began. He had been pretty calm about it, but last week there was a turning point where he told me there was quite a noticeable jump in the number of cases on his ward. This was a few days before the word really started to get out in the UK, so it felt like I was a bit ahead of the curve. So I let my co-founders know just how bad I felt this was going to get and that we needed to brace ourselves for a storm.
The first thing that really mattered to me was to work out what was the most important metric for our business. In a time of crisis — there’s only one answer and that’s how much ‘runway’ we had (cash left in the bank). It occurred to me that we were really entering survival mode and that we needed to find a way to extend our runway quickly. There are only 3 real tricks here — cut costs, generate revenue or fundraise. So my first weekend of the crisis was spent thoroughly understanding our cash position and expected inflows and outflows. We were mid-fundraise when the crisis hit, so I had to follow up on all our ‘soft commitments’ to see if people were still looking to invest in us — unsurprisingly, we saw a few pull the plug due to the impact of the crisis on people’s wealth and liquidity.
Next up, I started mapping out every single potential route to funding, and began to think about how to best connect with each of these sources. I’ve been having to think outside the box — I initially felt this investment round would be an angel round, but I’m realising now I can’t be so tunnel-visioned. I’m exploring options such as government grants, accelerators, corporate venture capital, government loans and crowdfunding (both equity and donation based). I’ve also started looking into sector specific VCs — I guess if any fund will invest in us at a time like this, it’s the ones that have a real alignment with our business.
I’ve also been trying to keep my team as informed as possible by sharing the highest quality news I can find on the virus. Because in times like these, I feel one of the biggest competitive advantages a company can have is access to good information. My view is that the startups that are most likely to survive this epidemic will be the ones that take the best bet on the way the world is going to look like over the next few weeks, months and potentially even years, and act decisively and accordingly.
We’ve also been faced with another interesting challenge. The app that we’ve built, Flair, is centred around young people playing football. At the start of the week, my friend sent me a screenshot of a headline from Sky Sports explaining that all youth football across the UK has now been suspended.
Admittedly, I had a moment of panic — all that was crossing my mind was ‘what are our users going to do on Flair now?’ But it’s in times like these when it’s super important to lean on your co-founders for support. My cousin/co-founder Darrell is forever the optimist and he was quick to point out to me that we should use this as an opportunity to finally build something into our app that doesn’t centre around playing football matches. After-all, games get cancelled throughout the season all the time anyway and there’s always an off-season — so why not use this as an opportunity to really focus on working out what kids can do on Flair when they aren’t playing? With no football, cancelled holidays, and restricted time outdoors with friends, our young userbase is likely to be as bored as ever over the coming months — a perfect opportunity to try out new ways to engage them on the app.
It’s been a crazy week, but in a way, I feel like the business is in a better position now than ever, because we’re having to act with urgency, cut bloat and make some important decisions. I’m going to try to document this period because I imagine I’ll learn more in the next couple of months about our business, our team, our community, our ecosystem and myself, than I can even imagine.
