We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?

I've never seen anything like COVID-19. I lived through the dot-com bubble, watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car back to Iowa within 6-months. Tech contracted and survived. Then there was the 2008 financial crisis. In that case, the damage was spread out beyond tech centers. Capital markets dried up and life seemed very uncertain for awhile.

With COVID-19, we went from extreme prosperity to an unprecedented shutdown of global economies with massive uncertainty as to how long this will last. Every business will be affected, the vast majority of them negatively.

I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance.