Is the writing on the wall?
First Lyft, then Airbnb, and Uber... are all unicorns taking this kind of hit right now?
First Lyft, then Airbnb, and Uber... are all unicorns taking this kind of hit right now?
However, I think you can make a pretty good argument that it's going to turn into a general economic depression, which means pretty much every company is going to take a hit sooner or later. Millions more people (in the US) will be struggling to make ends meet over the next few months, and that's going to have bad ripple effects.
Everybody has moved on to Zoom, even though SFB is available via our org wide Office365 implementation. I do use it to send quick messages to coworkers in different regional offices, as their online/offline status is a useful indicator of their availability since it's connected to their outlook Calendar. And the screen sharing feature is good, there are never any compatibility issues. But as a voice or video call system, it's not great. Zoom has had far lower switching costs.
First travel related companies, which is mostly consumer, like tourism (flights, ...) and in-person services (house cleaners, ...). In parallel, weaker companies in general (enterprise startups that raise megarounds wothout megarevenue).
Scarier is 1-2 financial quarters later. No clue yet, but as the b2b's relying on b2c's start missing their numbers for more than 1qtr, who knows. Can they just reduce by say 10% + consumer divisions, or were too exposed?
A big saving grace is, in bigger co's, annual budgets mostly passed in dec--feb, so a lot of flex time ahead. So if commerce starts thawing , there will be cuts, but not so bad. Long-term, whole tourism etc sectors hurt, more about reshuffling for everywhere else.
A silver lining is for startups: this is a time of chaos, agility, big moves, digital, and soon, m&a. I have a talk on Friday w 200+ people registering last minute - in our industry, we are lucky to be quite busy, but every week is a surprise right now! More importantly, we are volunteering on health interventions and people are sick: $ is useful but not #1.
Not yet. The earnings call in Q2 (Not Q1) will be the true writing on the wall.
> are all unicorns taking this kind of hit right now?
Not just unicorns but also other startups that are unprofitable and have a high burn rate are taking a critical hit.
Shopify, which is 100% ecommerce, just reported record numbers.
With quite a bit of retail shutdown as well as many people not wanting to leave their home, lots of money is shifting online, and these ecommerce enablement companies are going to benefit a lot.
I don't know that this is so mysterious at all: Uber and Airbnb sold transportation and travel, which are two segments disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
It has nothing to do with their "Unicorn" status at all. Uber is suffering for the same reason taxi cabs are. Hotels are getting pinched along with Airbnb. But taxis and hotels suffer in traditional ways, whereas startups show up on HN. But there's no "startupness" to this analysis at all.
The "disrupters" disrupt oligarchic industries with stagnant business models. They don't "disrupt" the actual industry they're in.
Anything travel related is going to be screwed for the foreseeable future. There will be very little international travel for at least another 6-12 months. Cross-European travel restrictions are already being talked about. The US will continue to have community transmission in their "open" states. There is no business travel.
Things are moving (food etc). People aren't.
Australia and New Zealand have discussed opening their travel and perhaps expanding that to the Pacific nations, which have been mostly spared due to isolation.
That was the astute remark of the cafe/restaurant owner when I asked her how the business is going. (It's a lovely cafe/little hole in the wall in Brooklyn selling Brazilian fare.)
She first expressed gratitude for having an understanding landlord and the arrangements they have made. "And we were already set up for delivery unlike some others", she said. I remarked "business must be good for these delivery services", to which she replied "We're all working for these guys now".