Charlie Songhurst

I think COVID has changed that because what you've had is 70 and 80-year-olds get on and use Zoom and use digital apps in a way that was much more akin to 25-year-olds.

That's a permanent one-off shift.

And you always see it in the numbers for all e-commerce startups.

Every e-commerce startup, the numbers have gone insane to the point where you almost start wondering whether they've made a mistake because it can't be that good.

You can't get that fast an acceleration.

But no, it really is that fast an acceleration.

And my guess is the emotional experience of retail will just be less appealing than it was.

And so even in a world of reopening, my guess is you get this continued elevation of e-commerce.

And then once people have shifted from doing some activity like going to a bar to playing some video game competitively, probably a bigger percentage of that will stick and seems obvious because this has lasted long enough that you get habit formation.

It's certainly longer than 30 days that that's probably meant to take.

Then there's the much more subtle impacts, which is you've definitely had a globalization of investing.

One of the things that never made any sense to me was investors that define themselves by geography.

So they were in Berlin and they invested in companies in Berlin because the commonality in running a startup by geography seems almost de minimis, whereas the commonality of, say, fintech globally seems much more similar to each other.

Or quantum computing startups globally seems much more similar than a quantum computing company and a credit card company, both within a few streets of each other.

So it always seemed more logical to me for startups to be defined by functional area than by geography.

And that's starting to happen because if you're doing Zoom calls with someone, there's no difference whether they're a mile away from you or a thousand miles away.

And then the same with the labor force.

Startups are starting to do remote in a way that was inconceivable before.

And what it's starting to do is make them think very deeply about where they can find talented people.

Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think that may just lead to a permanent shift in overall productivity upwards because you're putting together a team not defined by the accidents of geography, but defined by finding the best people you can anywhere in the world.