Day: June 15, 2020

Billion or Bust? 4 Questions to Assess the Strength of Your Business Idea.

wayne June 15, 2020


7 min read

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While the health crisis is far from over, the business world and consumers alike have mostly overcome the “survival” phase and are starting to adapt to what it will mean to live and operate, post-pandemic.

Now faced with a “new normal,” budding entrepreneurs are reassessing business ideas that had been on the backburner and exploring their potential in the current circumstances. But while many businesses have successfully launched during times of economic downturn — Mailchimp, Airbnb, and Whatsapp, to name a few — that doesn’t mean it’s the right time for everyone.

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When it comes to post-crisis strategic thinking, aspiring business founders must consider how the needs, wishes, and budgets of consumers have changed for the long term. So if you think your business idea has potential, ask yourself these four questions to determine its strength in today’s landscape:

Do you fit into the new normal?

Business as usual is off the table, at least for a while. If you envisioned your business idea before the reality of the pandemic hit, you

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Shutting down Rhode Island’s economy was a ‘nightmare’ for Gov. Gina Raimondo

wayne June 15, 2020

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Mayors continue to respond to protests and to police brutality, Australia backtracks on subsidizing childcare, and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo leads the country on coronavirus testing. Have a productive Monday. 

– Raimondo’s Rhode Island. For any governor, shutting down their state’s economy is a “nightmare.” For Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, it’s one she’s determined never to live through again. 

The governor of the country’s smallest state joined Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women community via video chat last week. In a conversation with Fortune senior writer Michal Lev-Ram, Raimondo outlined exactly how she got transmission of the coronavirus under control—and her plan to make sure it stays that way. 

It was 11 p.m. on a Friday night in March when Raimondo, desperate to slow the spread of the virus among her state’s population, called contacts she had at Salesforce. Now the company’s software is used in Rhode Island state labs to allow people working as contact tracers, tracking potential spread of the virus, to work more efficiently. Rhode Island leads the country in testing; 17% of the state’s residents have been screened for COVID-19, compared to 7% nationally. 

Raimondo took her cue to …

23 minutes with Peloton’s Robin Arzón

wayne June 15, 2020

Robin Arzón was a lawyer with a top-notch New York City law firm when she realized she’d rather be running. The challenge was turning her passion for fitness into a career. Today, she is the vice president of fitness programming and head instructor for Peloton, the remote-training upstart whose fortunes have surged while its customers shelter in place.

Equally committed to the motivational art as the physiological science of fitness, Arzón affectionately cheers on the “hustlers” in her classes who make up her remotely sweating “family.” In a sprint of an interview last week, she talks about Peloton’s unplanned pivot to leading classes from the homes of its instructors, including Arzón; her methodical approach to transitioning her career; and importance of social media in building a corporate and personal brand.

“The most pivotal question I asked myself, and still ask myself, was, ‘Why not me?’ I started to do an honest assessment of my skill set. I said: ‘I know how to read, I know how to write. I have a nascent social media platform. Okay, what do I do with this?’” says Arzón.
Janette Pellegrini—Getty Image

Fortune: I’ve taken your classes recently, and I feel like you’ve been …

The 8 cloud companies that crushed it in Q1

wayne June 15, 2020

You didn’t have to be Warren Buffett to predict that cloud service providers—which are essential to remote working—would do well during the pandemic, even as sectors like airlines and hospitality took a beating. But that doesn’t mean every cloud company performed the same.

In an incisive essay, Jamin Ball of Redfin Ventures examined how 54 publicly traded cloud companies, which reported earnings between late April and early June, performed over the first quarter.

All but three of the 54 firms beat analyst expectations, and many of them did so by a wide margin. Once again, this is hardly surprising given how many people and companies had to embrace remote work in 2020—a situation that favors firms that can provide cloud-based tools to communicate, shop, invoice and much more.

Ball, however, used a series of financial metrics to identify the best of the bunch. The metrics include a few commonplace ones, like share price appreciation, but more nuanced ones too. These included net revenue retention—a number that looks at how much revenue increased for a given cohort of customers from one to the next—as well a company’s cost of customer acquistion.

This analysis produced eight standouts among the 54 companies …