Startups Should Be Preparing for Coronavirus
Startups Should Be Preparing for Coronavirus
An investor and serial entrepreneur shares what he’s learned speaking with epidemiologists and founders.
Will coronavirus become a pandemic? What would that mean for the economy? What are businesses and the government doing to prevent (or at least slow) its spread?
My Inc.com colleagues are all over these questions, reporting on possible knock-on effects of the outbreak, offering advice on mastering remote work, taking you inside Amazon’s battle against price gouging, and even updating us on how the virus is impacting sales of Corona beer (fear not, they are modestly up).
But what about more nuts-and-bolts advice on what startups should be doing right now to prepare? While each company will have to sort out individual supply chain issues and assess local risk for themselves, there are a few things just about every business can do. Serial entrepreneur Elad Gil’s rounded them up in a helpful recent blog post.
What your business should be doing to prepare
In kicks off with a note about his qualifications to write on the topic – he offers to pass on “what I have seen larger companies quietly adopt” and notes he’s been on “a number of small group calls with some of the epidemiologists working on this” – before summarizing what we know about the disease (the CDC is a good source for the latest info; everything is in flux as more data comes in).
All of this is worth checking out if you haven’t been following closely, but the most valuable part of the post may be his advice on what companies should be doing to prepare:
- Encourage hand-washing. This is a no-brainer and you’ve no doubt heard this advice before (but maybe you didn’t know all these fun songs have 20-second choruses, so you can hum something besides ‘Happy Birthday’ to yourself as you scrub for the recommended time).
