INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Joe White
Contributor
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Joe is general partner of Entrepreneur First, a
Greylock-backed early-stage deep tech fund; co-chair of GBx, a curated network of British entrepreneurs in the Bay Area; and a former
co-founder of Moonfruit.com, a website and e-commerce platform.
We&re in unprecedented times and are likely at the beginning of a long
journey back to normal  —  whatever the new &normal& turns out to be.
While governments rush to get debt-relief packages in
place, the high-risk, high-reward tech sector will need something different
To survive, the community requires fancy footwork, hard choices and a lot of shared pain between founders, staff, investors, suppliers and
customers.
With my startup Moonfruit, a DIY website and e-commerce platform I co-founded with Wendy Tan-White (now a VP at X) and eirik
pettersen (currently CTO at Secret Escapes), we survived the 2001 dot-com crash, when the entire tech sector was decimated for years to
come, as well as the 2008 financial crisis, when we were lucky enough to experience rapid countercyclical growth
These experiences made us stronger and ultimately led to our successful exit in 2012 and post-acquisition growth to $150 million ARR.
I&ve
spent the last five years as a general partner at Entrepreneur First, raising $200 million of funds and advising hundreds of startups
through formation, growth and fundraising — but right now I work with many of them daily on survival.
For most companies, I think this
crisis will look more like 2001 than 2008, though there will be some who are lucky enough to grow through it
The good news is, having been through this before, I know there are things you can do as a founder or as an investor that can mitigate the
In the U.K., I&m in several conversations about making emergency equity funding more available, and I hope this happens all over the world
too.
Here is a tactical guide to surviving the crisis.
