EqualOcean held an online event on May 31. Here is what our speakers thought about how they responded to the pandemic.
►'Remote everything' process has been accelerated in the first half of 2020.
►Companies should take the chance to embrace digitalization and adapt to the new normal.
On May 31, the day after industry report ‘Tech for Global’ was published, EqualOcean held an online fireside chat on a similar topic. We invited an entrepreneur from an Internet company, Jonathan Lopez, and Chinaccelerator managing director Oscar Ramos. Being an insider with a global perspective, Jonathan has accumulated abundant experience from his study and working experience. Based in Shanghai, Oscar Ramos works for SOSV and manages hundreds of startups as a managing director at Chinaccelerator.
When looking at the first half of the year 2020, the pandemic and the economic recession are the keywords. As the confirmed cases of COVID-19 climbed up to six million, we encountered the most significant challenge in modern times. Amid the pandemic, the unemployment rate rose and millions of companies worldwide were forced to re-examine their businesses.
In this follow-up series, we have selected several highlights shared by speakers:
The pandemic yields chances for many companies, what are your observations on these changes?
Oscar: The situation has accelerated 'remote everything.' Remote work and remote education are two of the sectors. In general, the acceleration urges people to understand that if it is possible to do the "remote" thing. We have seen growth in more verticals, like healthcare. If you think of the entertainment, including gaming, online video and others, these are growing fast - not just the booming usage but also video services and alike. The globalization, socially, of 'remote everything' has been expedited.
One of the key things for me to understand SaaS companies' success is that SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) is not a top management problem. SaaS-in-the-top is a 'no-brainer,' which brings simple deployment of services, faster and more updates and roll out to different areas. Companies purchase SaaS products but users, who determine the success of the products, are employees. To a certain degree, it is similar to what happens to online education, especially K12: parents pay for the service, but it must be engaging so to work for children.
All industries that can provide 'remote everything' have been growing. The two fastest-growing companies that we have at this phase are K12 online education. Their growth in the quarter exceeded the growth of the whole 2019. The increase brought abundant stress and the company put a lot of effort into building infrastructure. The key to the success of the company is the user experience for final users, not just serving the parents to make purchase decisions but making sure that children will be able to use the product. Online education is home-schooling since it still requires an adult to sit aside. However, an excellent online education product does not need parental engagements.
When talking about remote work, we are talking about digitalization and the transformation of how a company operates. In my conversation on companies in the past three months, their digitalization progress is nearly on par of what they were trying to achieve in the following years. The change is massive. It does not only change the way we work, the way companies operate, types of vendors that enterprises will use, but also change how companies make decisions in the future on who are their partners to support operations. All the above brings myriad opportunities for startups.
Jonathan: Internet companies are more well-equipped to navigate the challenges introduced by COVID-19. Some companies amid the pandemic came up with ways to be stronger and even increase revenue. Different Internet companies implemented new features for COVID-19, so they can track employees' health and be more socially responsible. This is a thing we can see around the world that how Internet companies promote their social responsibility amid the pandemic, which adds more value to the company in China and worldwide.