Just three months after capping what was the best year for Indian startups, having raised a record $14.5 billion in 2019, they are beginning to struggle to raise new capital as prominent investors urge them to “prepare for the worst” and cut spending.

Governments and medical officials are scrambling to provide the public with accurate and timely information about the novel coronavirus. But those efforts are being undermined by the spread of medical misinformation and fake cures on one of the world's most popular messaging platforms. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, is coming under renewed scrutiny over how it handles misinformation as the coronavirus pandemic rampages across the globe, infecting more than 200,000 people and killing over 8,000, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

On March 17, 2020, Emily Holdman and Mark Brooks recorded a discussion on cutting expenses in light of the COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting economic halt. This recording is part of our podcast, The Messy Marketplace, available on all major podcast platforms. You can’t cut your way to growth. When bringing a new company into our family of businesses, cutting expenses is not on our to-do list. Most expenses exist for good reasons and we’ve found that after patiently taking the time to fully understand how a business operates, we end up keeping almost all of them.

Some founders I spoke to this week are preparing for headcount reductions of 30–35%, renegotiation of vendor contracts and customer relationships. This is fun for nobody. I shared a note with our portfolio over the weekend to give my two cents:
Not just your reputation, but what you stand for will be defined by the way you act now and Think about how your business realities will structurally change once this settles.

As an experienced entrepreneur, I have bootstrapped and scaled companies from 0 to $100M and have advised a few. While startups are all about scaling fast, there are moments when they are all about survival. There is even a name for it — the “WFIO” moment which stands for “We’re F!*ked, It’s Over”, coined by venture capital investor Ben Horowitz in his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”.