How Startup CEOs Should Think About the Coronavirus, Part II

[Updated 3/10 12:09]

This is part II in this series. Part I is here and covers the basics of management education, employee communications, and simple steps to help slow virus transmission while keeping the business moving forward.

In this part, we’ll provide:

• A short list of links to what other companies are doing, largely when it comes to travel and in-office work policies.
• A discussion of financial planning and scenario analysis to help you financially navigate these tricky waters.

I have broken out the list of useful information links and resources (that was formerly in this post) to a separate, part III of this series.

What Other Companies are Saying and Doing

Relatively few companies have made public statements about their response policies. Here are a few of the ones who have:

• Alation:  Work in the Time of Coronavirus
• Amazon: Defers Non-Essential Moves Even Within the US
• Coinbase: Publishes Three-Phase Response Plan
• Gainsight:  Five Positive Things SaaS CEOs Should Do to Get Through COVID-19
• Salesforce: For the Safety and Well Being of You and Those Around You
• Stripe: COVID-19 precautions for Stripe employees and customers
• Twitter: Keeping our Employees and Partners Safe During Coronavirus

Financial Planning and Scenario Analysis: Extending the Runway

It’s also time to break out your driver-based financial model, and if you don’t have one, then it’s time to have your head of finance (or financial planning & analysis) build one.

Cash is oxygen for startups and if there are going to be some rough times before this threat clears, your job is to make absolutely sure you have the cash to get through it. Remember one of my favorite all-time startup quotes from Sequoia founder Don Valentine: “all companies go out of business for the same reason. They run out of money.”

In my opinion you should model three scenarios for three years, that look roughly like:

• No impact. You execute your current 2020 operating plan. Then think about the odds of that happening. They’re probably pretty low unless you’re in a counter-cyclical business like videoconferencing (in which case you probably increase targets) or a semi-counter-cyclical one like analytics/BI (in which case maybe you hold them flat).

• 20% bookings impact in 2020. You miss plan bookings targets by 20%. Decide if you should apply this 20% miss to new bookings (from new customers), expansion bookings (new sales to existing customers), renewal bookings — or all three. Or model a different percent miss on each of those targets as it makes sense for your business. The point here is to take a moderately severe scenario and then determine how much shorter this makes your cash runway. Then think about steps you can take to get that lost runway back, such as holding costs flat, reducing costs, raising debt, or — if you’re lucky and/or have strong insiders — raising equity.

• 40% bookings impact in 2020. Do the same analysis as in the prior paragraph but with a truly major bookings miss. Again, decide whether and to what extent that miss hits new bookings, expansion bookings, and renewal bookings. Then go look at your cash runway. If you have debt make sure you have all covenant compliance tests built into your model that display green/red — you shouldn’t have to notice a broken covenant, it should light up in big letters (YES/NO) in a good model. Then, as in the prior step, think about how to get that lost runway back.

Once you have looked at and internalized these models, it’s time for you and your CFO to call your lead investors to discuss your findings. And then schedule a discussion of the scenario analysis at your next board meeting.

Please note that it’s not lost on me that accelerating out of the turn when things improve can be an excellent way to grab share in your market. But in order to so, you need to have lots of cash ready to spend in, say, 6-12 months when that happens. Coming out of the corner on fumes isn’t going to let you do that. And, as many once-prodigal, now-thrifty founders have told me: “the shitty thing is that once you’ve spent the money you can’t get it back.” Without dilution. With debt. Maybe without undesirable structure and terms.

Now is the time to think realistically about how much fuel you have in the tank, if you can get more, how long should it last, and how much you want in the tank 6-12 months out.