1/ Over the last few days have had a lot of conversations about both a) the severe negative impact we are seeing COVID have on enterprise companies while also b) maintaining an optimistic/bullish perspective on “the other side.”

2/ Having lived through the 08/09 crisis in Silicon Valley, my main regret was not investing more when things looked scary. Most (all?) investors from this era echo this sentiment. This crisis is different, and scarier on many levels, but “the other side” will look familiar.

3/ In the decade that followed the 08/09 financial crisis over $2 trillion in value was created in the cloud space - $1 trillion went to Amazon, Google, Microsoft and their cloud platforms, while $1 trillion went to other cloud/SaaS players (see BVP Index).

4/ Will we see another $2 trillion in value created in the next 10 years? I think the answer is unequivocally “yes.” Quite possibly more.

5/ The CIO of a Fortune 100 company told me his IT infrastructure is “still only 30-35% cloud” with the rest on prem, legacy technology and software. This crisis has made it very clear to every board member, CEO and CIO that is no longer tenable.

6/ As a result, we will not only see a continued “shift to the cloud,” we will likely see it accelerate.

7/ So – when you see immediate bounce back in cloud/SaaS stocks over the last 30 days + ask “why?” – this is your answer. At least a big part of it. Many investors learned their lesson in 08/09: Cloud/SaaS is one of the greatest economic freight trains of our lifetime.

8/ And it's not stopping any time soon. We don't know whether this crisis will last 6, 12, 18 months. But we know what the "other side" looks like for enterprise/cloud/SaaS.