Post Corona summary

California Pizza Kitchen, Lucky Brand Jeans, and 24 Hour Fitness. What do these American companies have in common? Well, for one, they’re all bankrupt. And they’re not the only ones. In the first few months of the pandemic, hundreds of well-known, but financially sluggish enterprises collapsed.

Yet, in the face of all this failure, the stock market fared okay. In fact, by the end of August 2020, market indexes like the S&P 500 reflected a moderately positive year for investors.

Let’s take a look at some numbers. In the five months between March and July 2020, COVID-19 killed more than half a million people around the globe. More than 150,000 people died in the US alone. That was a truly harrowing period.

Yet, for tech companies, that same five-month period brought nothing but good financial news. In fact, the world’s nine major tech companies saw their market value increase by nearly 2 trillion dollars.

In 2013, venture capitalist Aileen Lee went hunting for a mythical beast. Actually, she was looking for one animal in particular: unicorns. This was Lee’s term for promising start-ups valued at more than a billion dollars.

At the time, unicorns lived up to their name. They were rare. Ten years ago, Lee could only identify 39 companies that met the criterium. How quickly things have changed. Today, there are an estimated 400 unicorns wandering the business landscape. Forty-two of them – one in 10 – appeared in 2019 alone.

How do you know when an industry is ready for disruption? One easy metric is the disruptability index. It’s simple and easy to measure. An industry’s disruptability goes up when its products become more expensive without really improving.

Here’s an example that’s ripe for disruption: higher education. In the past four decades, the average cost of tuition has increased by 1,400 percent. Yet, walk around any campus, and you’ll see that college classes haven’t really changed that much.

When COVID-19 first started spreading, scientists noticed a disturbing pattern. The virus seemed to be especially harmful to people who already had medical problems. If you were living with diabetes, asthma, or age-related issues, you were in greater danger.

Now, months after the outbreak, we face another troubling truth. As it turns out, the virus doesn’t just threaten people with pre-existing issues: societies with a history of trouble are also at risk. And, unfortunately, the United States is rife with problems.