Thank you to @MENAbytes for hosting that great discussion with @trkfhm @kenza_lahlou @kaisalessa on VC in the age of Covid. Some great insights from the conversation here:

1) We are now observing the first order effect of the economic downturn such as increased volume/adoption in ecommerce, egroceries, Edtech. trick is identifying 2nd and 3rd order effects that hold in the long run and build an investment thesis around that and counter cyclicality

2) For example: Within F&B and food delivery there’s , broadly speaking, a decline in revenue. People usually order food at the office/virus concerns leading to traditional F&B suffering massive damage in medium term - operators must adopt or evolve to be omni-channel...

3) Offline and online, drive virtual brand development and have diversified revenue streams that maximize utilization of physical space and creates efficient ways of testing concepts/brands quickly leveraging tech

4)Another area is retail/ecommerce. Most likely traditional retail will take a large hit globally, as retail is dislocated opportunity to build Direct to Consumer (DTC) homegrown brands that cater to local consumer as opposed to typical franchise/distributor model

5) The crisis has shown that broad global supply chains can get easily disrupted. Corporates and governments will look to bring some of it locally. It will be interesting to see what kind of companies emerge from that for local manufacturing

6) A lot of gig economy companies emerged in last downturn (Airbnb, Uber, Upwork) due to disruption in the labor market in US , people wanted to monetize their time or physical assets. Similar shift this time in the way we think of employment in Emerging Markets/MENA will come