COVID-19

U.S. Venture Deal Activity during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Last month, I published an analysis of venture deal activity in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, which demonstrated that despite early warnings of an impending collapse, the pace of venture deal activity in the first half of 2020 was more or less on par with 2019. I concluded that many early observers failed to appreciate the ability of venture capitalists to adjust to a virtual environment and some analysts undercounted real-time deal activity by failing to account for the systematic reporting lags in venture capital databases—as a result, they hastily drew conclusions that have not withstood the test of time. I demonstrated that with a few small adjustments, the real-time data pointed to a venture economy that wouldn’t miss a beat this year.

We now have fresh data to extend that analysis. It shows that after a slight dip in the second quarter, venture deal activity (adjusted for the systemic data lags) rebounded in the third quarter to a level that was about the same as the first quarter. In fact, through the first three quarters of the year, 2020 is on pace to be the most active year for venture deals since the Dotcom era peak in 2000.

Acceptance and The Narrative Fallacy in the Times of COVID-19

In the last week, I’m witnessing an acceleration in what I’ll call “The COVID Struggle,” or more simply, “The Struggle.” Many people are having a hard time dealing with and accepting the reality of life under a global pandemic, and are lashing out against this constrained way of living in ways big and small. They desperately want things to go back to the way they were before, so they pretend that everything is fine—that life as we knew it can resume with minimal further disruption.

But life is nowhere near returning to normal anytime soon. I’d say at best, we’re a quarter of the way through this thing. This is unsettling, which is why people are rejecting reality. Without strong leadership in place as a check on human impulses (selfish, short-term), the situation worsens and the whole episode drags on. The suffering elongates. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Sleep

On Friday night, I got eight consecutive hours of sleep. It’s been a long time since that last happened—months and possibly longer. I woke up feeling great. The stressors I’ve had stemming from Covid-19 related fallout and a bunch of other things were washed away immediately. I was full of energy and had an incredible weekend with my family. All from just one night of great sleep.

I have two wonderful sons. I love everything about them. The problem is, they’re both terrible sleepers. That fact, combined with some conscious choices my wife and I make about how to parent, means that we have been experiencing sustained sleep deprivation for nearly four years. I’ve probably slept as well as I did on Friday no more than a dozen times since my oldest was born in 2016.

The impacts of my lack of sleep are piling up. I’m exhausted and it’s taken a toll. It took just one night to wake me up to the reality of how badly I need to get better sleep (see what I did there?). Now I wonder: is much of my stress reducible to this one problem of not getting enough sleep? Maybe so.