Tips, tactics and cashflow strategies for startup survival during a crisis

Published April 10, 2020

Joe White
Contributor

Joe is general partner of Entrepreneur First, a Greylock-backed early-stage deep tech fund; co-chair of GBx, a curated network of British entrepreneurs in the Bay Area; and a former co-founder of Moonfruit.com, a website and e-commerce platform.

We’re in unprecedented times and are likely at the beginning of a long journey back to normal — whatever the new “normal” turns out to be.

While governments rush to get debt-relief packages in place, the high-risk, high-reward tech sector will need something different. To survive, the community requires fancy footwork, hard choices and a lot of shared pain between founders, staff, investors, suppliers and customers.

With my startup Moonfruit, a DIY website and e-commerce platform I co-founded with Wendy Tan-White (now a VP at X) and eirik pettersen (currently CTO at Secret Escapes), we survived the 2001 dot-com crash, when the entire tech sector was decimated for years to come, as well as the 2008 financial crisis, when we were lucky enough to experience rapid countercyclical growth. These experiences made us stronger and ultimately led to our successful exit in 2012 and post-acquisition growth to $150 million ARR.

I’ve spent the last five years as a general partner at Entrepreneur First, raising $200 million of funds and advising hundreds of startups through formation, growth and fundraising — but right now I work with many of them daily on survival.

For most companies, I think this crisis will look more like 2001 than 2008, though there will be some who are lucky enough to grow through it. The good news is, having been through this before, I know there are things you can do as a founder or as an investor that can mitigate the damage. In the U.K., I’m in several conversations about making emergency equity funding more available, and I hope this happens all over the world too.

Here is a tactical guide to surviving the crisis.