COVID

“A lot of, I've heard LPs say, this is like the dot com or this is COVID. It's not because the traction is real and it's not ephemeral revenue like COVID.”

“New business formation, which is, by the way, at an all time high. I think it's the highest it's been outside of a peak sort of moment during COVID.”

“Because before, before COVID and Queens Gambit, we had like a million daily active users, and we were shocked at that.”

“Like, I think, had we not raised that capital right before the COVID may not have survived.”

“I saw up and up until COVID came in. When I look back, we compounded maybe at 25, 30% all my life.”

“When I look at the layoffs that are claimed from AI, for example most of them I think are overstated right now. You know, most of the layoffs are actually just over hiring during the COVID period.”

“Or in COVID, we were the only company to cut commissions by 50%. When we were not yet profitable as a company, that was an expense over a hundred million dollars.”

“When COVID hit, I just sold the company a few months earlier, and I was one week away from signing Three restaurant leases in New York City.”

“We lost ten million in COVID. We lost, I lost ten million as the majority shareholder. I lost ten million dollars.”

“To support the traffic, to support the world, we hired over 6000 employees within two years window.”

“I think COVID helped us because it made the pain more visible. Like, previously, when people were all next to each other in office, have you ever spent time in, like, a big open floor plan? I would do this sometimes for fun. I would just, like, sit and be a fl…”

“During COVID, syndicated loans traded below 80 cents for eight days. During the GFC, 294.”

“So my dumb story is at the bottom of the market during COVID, I sold all of my positions because I thought the market was done and then it ripped right back up and I have lost a fortune because of that mistake.”

“We saw through many examples in the past few years that our elites are, in some ways, failing us. We're talking, if we think about COVID, the summer of 2020, if we think about October seventh, and we think about what happened in the past few weeks these are ex…”

“And it actually popped out of a failed auto shop because of COVID.”

“So to me, what Tyler Robinson illustrates is the emergence of a lost generation that was shaped by COVID.”

“20, 21, you know, virtual conferences looked like a great idea. And it felt like that could really have legs even post COVID. No, the answer is they had no legs after COVID.”

“I think that would not have been possible to be honest, before COVID.”

“We lost 90% of our business, and by far, you know, the profitable piece of the business, and overnight, we lost 80, 85% of our volume. Couldn't be worse. And we went from, we were already losing two billion a year. We went from losing two billion a year to, li…”

“And we paid about a euro a kilo in air freight costs, which pre-COVID was pretty good. At the peak of COVID, that went up to 10 euros a kilo. That was no longer commercially viable.”

“When COVID happened like, it's, like, March, 2020, interest rates go to zero which, you know, from our perspective, like, that was, like, At that point, like, 60% of our revenue went to zero, basically.”

“Multi-state used to be something that, you know, only large companies cared about. So it wasn't like, it wasn't, it was kind of on our roadmap, but it wasn't like that important for us. And then all of a sudden with COVID, a bunch of people working remotely an…”

“Actually, frankly, the more almost existential challenge more so than COVID really was the rise in mortgage rates. And that hit the brakes on really most real estate transactions, whole home, partial home, everywhere in between. And so managing through that se…”

“The reality is the EPC CapEx world changed dramatically after, after COVID, right? Things that used to be very secured, large scale EPC companies that used to be able to give you a, you know, lump sum turnkey contract are just not doing that anymore in, in con…”

“A lot of these devices could predict exactly COVID coming on”

“So what was a multimillion dollar business became I like to say I grew it to zero. Wasn't exactly zero, but it didn't make sense to keep it open and it wasn't profitable when you start factoring in people and advertising.”

“And so I think we had two or three years where the average founder just wasn't that great, right, on a relative basis to history.”

“The user base was growing 50 to a hundred percent every month. And that compounds a lot when you do that for three years in a row, and so you're just really trying to, like, scale the platform”

“TripActions, which is what it was called at the time, revenue, you know, went from a hundred million down to zero. It happened overnight.”

“We saw this kind of discrepancy during COVID, and it took the economies a year to get back on their footing. This time, it's going to be just as bad. I don't see how the economy doesn't grind to a standstill. These strict discrepancies are going to be very uni…”

“When I started talking about the data that I found from 20 21 on the protective mechanism of semaclutide against COVID, I got deplatformed at 232,000 off Instagram.”

“I heard some Morgan Stanley equity research person said that coming out of their conference, which is a week ago, they said it was the most negative sentiment that he had heard. I think with the exception of the onset of COVID in the last 10 years from people …”

“One of the reasons why ETF became a kind of first port of call is when you have an event, something like a COVID that happens, you don't know which stock or sector is going to get affected is going to do well. You just buy the index”

“You don't see losing 50% of our revenue overnight during COVID and considering taking donations so we didn't have to fire anyone.”

“COVID was a huge hurdle for us because our user base went to zero overnight.”

“Like I started a freight business during COVID, and that I could kind of squint and say made sense because I'm in the logistics business after all, right? But, it ended up being a big mistake”

“Enterprises really started moving to cloud for their data in twenty-twenty. There was like Hadoop stuff going on before that, but that like never really achieved any level of maturity or real penetration. And yes, Redshift and stuff like did exist prior to, an…”

“Our number one revenue stream was actually people using their debit cards overseas, and the interchange you get from that, and that went away overnight, and we were totally screwed.”

“COVID, I believe, propelled us into this new regime. And whether most big investors believe that that's true or not, they have to at least acknowledge that it might be true, that nothing's permanent, but we might be in for a 10 or 15 year period where the reli…”

“The thing that I landed on as being like something that I noticed that was physically different was the number of barbecues that were on the street, like more permanent encampments because you're actually like living and cooking and like sometimes even hooking…”

“The only thing that's restrictive is getting out. So you can only get out once a quarter, generally a fund level gate of five percent. But for us, except for one quarter during COVID, anybody who wanted to get out on any quarter could get out.”

“They should have retired a long time ago, and they would have if it weren't for work from home culture and COVID, but work from home, they preserved their fiefdoms from home while they play golf, and like, we need to kick them out.”

“People talk about how COVID killed so many gyms, and a lot of that was not just because of COVID, it was because of these operational and financial decisions that weren't, like, made as smartly as maybe some other companies could have made, and not understandi…”

“Where those like front desk workers you know, you think about a spa with 10, 15 providers, they would normally have three, four providers that is before COVID and each of them get paid like 13, 14 bucks an hour. Now that same business has to make it work with …”

“People are just going into the office for fewer hours on the days they go into the office because the psychology shifted and Getting up at your desk at four or five PM is, feels very different post COVID than it did before.”

“The best part that came out of COVID was at least defaulting to, and we see this culture internally, defaulting to not having the casual meeting.”

“We actually turned off the core business and we stopped buying homes for a few months. Hey, we can't go in and we don't know if anyone's going to be buying any homes. And so, you know, what do we do? And we took those few months and then came out the other sid…”

“More people died of cigarettes and smoking related, you know, diseases during COVID than from COVID. Like, I think the peak COVID deaths were 430 430,000 that year and smoking killed 460 that year.”

“Much of the inflation, like I think grocery prices are up 30 plus percent. Nick, you could probably pull this up since COVID.”

“That's another reason I like being a holdco entrepreneur, or multi-preneur as I call it, because, you know, if you have a bunch of revenue lines and product lines, even if one of them suffers from One of these 800 pound gorillas or an upstart or a black swan e…”

“At that level, most of the time it's still physically in person. I'd say the most of the assessment now changed a lot since COVID of course it's virtual, but at that level, there's still a preference for in-person assessments.”

“We did lose ten million dollars in March, 20 20. We were the first major event shut down by COVID. RSA got done and then San Jose shut us down. When there was one case off the coast. So we lost in those ten million.”

“Fauci knew very early, as early as February first of 2020, that COVID came from a lab leak.”

“There are internal NIH emails that suggest that COVID leaked from a level two facility. They call it BSL two, which does not operate with the top level biohazard safeguards.”

“People who haven't built their character before COVID is very hard for them to build The character.”

“The year before COVID grew 300%, right?”

“With COVID, 65% of your revenue overnight evaporate.”

“We were the first major event to be canceled by COVID in March, 20, 20. The first one. RSA happened for security the week before, then we got canceled. So we lost ten million dollars in one day.”

“We did not because like we got quite a boost to it and we know that we have this summer effect and these autumn effects and we see just in summer, people go to the beach and then they're buying a lot less. It's very obvious. Then autumn comes, weather changes,…”

“Our culture suffered. Like we were not as productive during COVID. People thought, oh, this must be, I had other CEOs. This must be great. You just, you're, you must be running at full speed. I'm like, no, I hired 1200 people the past year that have, the past …”