I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time, it is Brad Feld, who has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars. He released last week a book he has co-authored titled The Startup Community Way. He has been a big cheerleader (along with Steve Case of AOL fame) of startups in smaller communities around the world, debunking the notion that innovation only happens in Silicon Valley.
For each of the interviews in this series, I have sent a script ahead to my guests. Brad put mine aside and spoke with amazing fluency on a wide set of topics. He is noticeably humble - does not dwell much on his portfolio or make any projections for the economic recovery. Instead, we spent plenty of time on complex systems thinking he explores in his new book and looks at the recent crisis from that lens. The big revelation from the last few months is 'geography' of where innovation happens has suddenly become less important in our virtual world, but the ecosystem concepts we have learned can now be applied to what he calls "domains."
He also spends time on a new book by Debora MacKenzie COVID-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One
In many ways, the conversation was a discourse on how much our healthcare system has learned about COVID 19 in the last few weeks. He discusses one of his portfolio companies, Whoop and its respiratory rate metric and how it is helping with COVID diagnostics. As interesting is his description of how doctors have learned not to overuse ventilators.
The conversation with Brad and my last session with Lou Von Thaer, CEO of Battelle reflect the tectonic changes we are seeing in healthcare and life sciences. Or more accurately how little we know and how quickly we are learning. I have said it a couple of times - we are starting to apply Moore's Law to our understanding of the human body and mind.
I have personally been frustrated how the media has hysterically presented the June/July spike in positives across the Sunbelt as similar to that in the Northeast in March. It has not paid much tribute to the exponential learning we are witnessing in healthcare like that around use of ventilators. How it has learned to rapidly scale ICU capacity. How it has made medical workers mobile across states. How therapies like Remdesivir and convalescent plasma are having a significant impact on acute cases. Brad describes media behavior within the context of multiple 'complex systems' he has been tracking - those around health issues, the economic crisis and mental issues from the lockdown.
We ran long in our session. There are two further issues I would like to explore with him in a future session. One is around mental issues - he has a keen interest there - from the crisis. We are running a global experiment with WFH. Kids are staying at home for extended periods away from friends, without much physical exercise. In FL, we are seeing strains coming from fortifying our nursing homes for months without family visitation. Lockdowns are not free - as societies we need to also wake up to the realities and costs of domestic abuse, suicides and other consequences of prolonged isolation.
The other is as companies re-jig their global supply chains, how smaller communities should position themselves to take advantage of the shifts.
Of course, given the experience with this session, I have no doubt, we would likely also throw that script away and cover several other fascinating topics.
