Sent from My Home Office

From the Messari Unqualified Opinion's Newsletter

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As you know, I’ve been tracking the coronavirus for the past several weeks. (Updated shared doc.) Since early February, I've tried to stay a couple steps ahead of this thing for the sake of my family, team, and personal portfolio.

While I’ve written about the metrics I’ve tracked surrounding (what can now safely be called) the pandemic, and shared the steps I’ve taken to hedge my personal portfolio, I’ve not yet discussed Messari’s official approach to preparing for the coming economic disruptions, travel restrictions, and prolonged period of self-isolation that could be on the way for most businesses.

Today, some thoughts on what lies ahead.

For starters, we just made the (rather easy) decision today to go remote-first indefinitely at Messari. There are several reasons we pulled the trigger now:

1. The response to the coronavirus in the West, and especially in the U.S. has been frighteningly non-chalant in spite of overwhelming evidence there is an emerging global health crisis. We’re in an election year with a volatile President potentially facing off against a front-running candidate who wants to blow up the entire current healthcare system. Neither our political nor healthcare systems are equipped to handle a crisis like what we’ve seen unfold across Asia. I have little confidence that our collective response will be fast, reliable, or aggressive enough. Barring major change in the stats surrounding this disease (hope warm weather helps!), we can expect a lot of people to get infected and a lot of older people to die from this vs. “the flu."
2. I hope I'm very wrong about #1! But I fear I won’t be, and by the time reality sinks in, and we start to see more reliable data on COVID-19 case growth in the U.S. (i.e. we actually start f*ing testing), it may already be too late for aggressive containment measures. I worry then about a great *over-reaction* to our initial under-reaction, and I want our team at Messari to be prepared for other people’s irrationality and initial under-preparedness. We aren’t encouraging our folks to buy full hazmat suits and build bomb shelters with a year’s worth of space food. But we'd like everyone on our team to have enough provisions that they don’t ever get caught in a CostCo stampede. Look to Milan if you want to see what the herd mentality can do to people’s collective psyche amidst a high perceived threat level.
3. I expect the news in the West to get increasingly worse in the days ahead even if the underlying situation stays the same, or improves. More testing, more cases, more deaths, more politicization, more headlines. It could be a vicious cycle, and I’d prefer our team be a few days ahead of things and remain undistracted.
4. In the event there are more severe, long-term disruptions, we want our team to be ahead of the curve with respect to remote solutions. (How do you streamline remote communications? Build culture and relationships without an in-office presence? Invest in community and network? Organize events? More on this below.) The time for coming up the learning curve and innovating in this area is pre-crisis, not mid-crisis.
5. Finally, and most importantly, we have a relatively young, active, healthy team. Even if the worst scenarios play out, most of us should be fine health-wise. For me, a temporary remote move is less about our team’s well being, and more about being a proactive part of the solution to a much larger potential problem. That is, if we know the coronavirus is a) here in NYC, b) highly, quietly contagious, c) very dangerous to older and immune-compromised patients, d) unlikely to affect our day to day work deliverables; then I find it borderline irresponsible for us to take chances and contribute to population-wide risk. Why would that be ok? I hope more companies that do not *need* a physically present workforce will make the move to temporary remote work soon as these are the sort of macro changes that can cut down on population wide infections (the R0 of the coronavirus) and prove to be the difference between an overrun healthcare system and one that experiences significantly heavier, but manageable case load.

We are also scrapping most planned business travel for the next several months. I’m taking a wait and see approach to attending a DC-based conference next week, but after that, our team travel will be non-existent from mid-March through end of Q2 at the earliest. Some predictions:

1. Most smaller conferences are likely to be proactively cancelled. We’ve already seen the cancellation of Hong Kong Blockchain week, and Paris Blockchain Week, and I would be surprised if Bitcoin 2020, and Consensus go ahead as planned. For the bigger conferences like SXSW and Consensus, I’d bet they will go forward, but only because the organizers want their force majeure clauses are triggered. (They can’t cancel without massive contractual headaches unless there are formal top-down restrictions on gatherings above a certain size due to an "Act of God".)
2. VR meetups will take off. I went to my first over the weekend, and it was very cool. I can tell you as a non-gamer whose last console was *Sega Genesis* that this medium has promise, and it may be propelled forward by necessity in the months ahead. We bought everyone on the Messari team Oculus Go’s today. I’ll be digging into remote / VR hosting tools. And I could see Decentraland emerging as the new crypto Schelling point for global meet ups. (Seriously. Incredible timing of that launch. Mike McSweeney had a terrific piece on the project.)
3. A new popular crypto community “venue” will emerge outside of twitter, reddit, telegram. I hope it’s Nakamoto, but it remains to be seen if Balaji will be enlisted by the feds (three years too late) to solve the coronavirus. People need venues to catch up, network, and learn in a more unstructured way. If a virus prevents that, then alternatives will emerge that mimic the best parts of physical and onlilne meetups and happy hours.

Stay safe (and sane) out there amidst the chaos. Otherwise, stay tuned for some pretty big new podcast episodes, pro research pieces, and product news this week. -TBI 🙂

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