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Trucking is one of America’s most critical and vital industries. Not only is it one of the US’s largest labor categories (employing greater than 3 million individuals), but COVID has served as a harsh reminder of the vulnerability of our nation’s supply chain and our reliance on these workers. I was first acquainted with the trucking industry in 2015 when I met Doug Waggoner and the team at Echo Global Logistics, a publicly-traded freight logistics company co-founded by my bosses at Lightbank. Over the next several years, I spent hundreds of hours getting to know brokers, dispatchers and the drivers they work with. These drivers represent some of the hardest working, yet most underestimated workers I’ve ever met.

In February of this year, we announced the launch of our fund Equal Ventures, and alongside it shared that we would be bringing on a new investment professional onto our team. We’re extremely excited today to share that Simran Suri has joined our team as an Analyst.

One of the characteristics we value most highly at Equal Ventures is cognitive diversity. We love the fact that our team comes from such different backgrounds and experiences and feel that it enables unique insights into the markets and companies we invest in. One of the greatest challenges of bringing together individuals from such different backgrounds is establishing a shared culture that unifies each of these unique backgrounds into a single knowledge system that enables us to make decisions as a team.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working with our portfolio founders to analyze the impacts of COVID-19 on their companies and the industries they operate within and develop plans to mitigate those impacts. Given the degree of uncertainty around the pandemic, founders need to have plans for a variety of potential scenarios. To facilitate this planning, we created a standardized framework for use across our portfolio that we wanted to make available to the broader community. This activity is meant to be a forward-looking exercise to discuss impacts of the crisis to date, analyze the effects that different scenarios may have on the business, and develop an appropriate plan of action.

We are in unprecedented times with the markets experiencing some of their deepest declines on record and, more importantly, the world is experiencing the most severe pandemic crisis it has seen in the last century. I am not qualified to judge the extent, severity or duration of this crisis, but as someone on the front lines of the two previous market failures (the “Cleantech Bubble” and the “Credit Crisis”) and a perpetual student of markets, I wanted to share some of my lessons learned from prior crises to help others who haven’t experienced times like these before. Our hope is that these learnings help you and your company navigate the crisis ahead.