Comparing the 🦠coronavirus to Ebola and MERS is reassuring. But that doesn’t mean we can discount Covid-19 as being just like the flu. The current 3.4% mortality rate is 34x deadlier than the seasonal flu. Even the estimate of 1%, which takes into consideration unreported mild cases, means the virus is 10x more deadly. Could the coronavirus spread as widely as the flu? Yes, if it’s allowed to.

Mortality might be lower than the others, however the rate of transmission is so high which makes it more alarming, it will over exhaust supplies and doctors. And if that happened, more people might die due to the lack of health support and the mortality rate may exceed many other viruses 🦠

Credits: BloombergOpinion IG

Just a few months ago, discount hotel chain OYO seemed unstoppable. The India-based startup touted plans for global expansion and saw its valuation double to $10 billion in October. But in mid-January, the company began sweeping layoffs that have seen thousands lose their jobs. Last September, Fair.com, a car-leasing startup that raised nearly $400 million in a funding roughly a year earlier, acquired one of its rivals, Canvas, only to slash 40% of its workforce weeks later. The goal, according to a memo at the time that Fair.com directed CNN Business to from its then-CEO, was to “be a smaller team, focused on doing fewer things well.” One laid off Canvas-turned Fair employee said it was “a rollercoaster.” (Fair declined to comment beyond the memo.)

Actually the ‘startup’ model always been around the ‘hyper-growth’ at any cost¹. So they could outcompete the established players or get too much head start over the new comers., or otherwise just grab as much market share, in a shorter period of time, as they can. 

However it comes at a price and price is what VCs are willing to pay or at least used to pay for the hyper-growth. Traditionally businesses grow organically, as did our. However VC-Startup partnership totally changed the economics and dynamics of the businesses. 

Anyhow speaking of Flexport specifically, I guess laying off merely 50 personnel does not even count as opposed to other larger lay-offs, for instance Oyo another Softbank funded startup laid off over 3300 personnel.

1. However in the aftermath of WeWork fiasco, things are changing quite rapidly, in particular Softbank has made a major shift in their strategy, they are trying to minimize losses and seek profitability in the near future for their funded startups., by reducing headcounts and overheads.

Danish shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk said on Wednesday it had agreed to buy U.S. warehousing and distribution firm Performance Team as part of plans to deliver more customised logistics solutions.

isn’t that little obnoxious? I meant it’s nothing short of a ‘monopoly’ and undermining freight forwarders further, look at the Airlines, they are OK with their model of selling through freight forwarders. Whereas all major ocean carriers are creeping into every area of the business of freight forwarding, when they should actually mind their own business i.e sailing their boats and operating terminals etc. Heck, is there anyone who regulates them or even could question them that?

I don’t’ think Softbank made a mistake by investing in WeWork¹, If you are sitting on top of a $100 billion VC Fund, and you want to shop for startups., suddenly you would realize, that all of the ‘tech-startups niches’ are either too much saturated or dominated by very big players, leaving a little room for any disruption.

So where would you invest then., you have to look for startups, that are still looking promising and going through hyper-growth, so it made a perfect sense (as a late stage VC). And I guess it’s the very reason Softbank bought them out, It’s a great idea with too much growth.

However it ended up being a way more expensive deal for the Softbank than they would have anticipated and nearly lost $4.6 Billion as shown in their recent quarterly results, that reported a total loss of $6.5 Billion (Wework + Uber) www.bloomberg.com for the first time in 14 years, that’s a major setback to their aggressive investing strategy., and raising the successor to their first mega VisionFund.

Edited following the quarterly results posted by the SoftBank.

1. The only mistake Son made was, he invested in the startup not its founder. Always invest in founders first then their startup. This would serve as a great lesson for the VC community.

An 800 pound gorilla (DHL) tried to use SAP for digital transformation, and lost $1 Billion in the process. When in IMO they could have achieved all this under $10-$20 Million, only if they had hired 50-100 full stack Rails developers.

But neither do they know what is a full stack developer nor Rails. They just know SAP and Oracle. That their teachers taught them in the 90s. On a serious note, scaling is the major issue for a company of that size, But I guess Rails could have handled it easily. For instance most probably twitter runs on Rails too.

That’s brilliant, never been to Bangladesh though, but everyone who did, tells the same, too much traffic congestion. It’s the most densely populated country in the world¹. However I cant’ appreciate enough how their Govt is involved in developing the export sector and its infrastructure. In particular their garment export industry that was kicked off, a decade or so ago, by the Pakistani garment exporters who were facing at the time, crippling electricity shortage 8-10 hrs per day (now 1 or 2 hrs per day).

Bangladesh took advantage of the situation, offered them lavish terms to move there. But as soon as their own exporters caught up, they were left hanging in the middle, even the land/properties they had purchased won’t get sold, because everyone knew they are going back. A little brutal on the part of Bangladesh Govt., but very smart for their own good.

[1] Of the larger countries, Bangladesh is the most densely-populated with 1,252 people per square kilometer; this is almost three times as dense as its neighbour, India. It’s followed by Lebanon (595), South Korea (528), the Netherlands (508) and Rwanda (495 per km2) completing the top five. Source

We are capable of calculating quotations for three major projects, making booking for 5 different shipments and answering 12 totally unnecessary calls per hour, all simultaneously. We do not require sleep and are at your service 25 hours a day, 8 days a week. Our home numbers are your numbers.

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