Chickens are a big part of Wombi Rose’s quarantine experience. On one hand, the CEO of Lovepop, by his own admission, doesn't have much time in the day to waste. But on the other, he finds moments to watch his chickens pecking at the flower beds all day.
“Last fall, my girlfriend got these chickens, which at first, I wasn’t too excited about,” said Rose. “But now that I spend all day watching them, I’ve grown attached. I’d have never predicted that."
There are other things Rose couldn’t have predicted.
When he co-founded the company in 2014, he hadn’t predicted that the machines used to cut 3D greetings cards on a shop floor in Vietnam would one day be used to produce 10,000 face shields and hospital gowns.
Such is life for an entrepreneur in times of a global pandemic.
As the effects of the COVID-19-driven shutdown rattle the economy and the labor market, Rose joins the ranks of many local entrepreneurs who find themselves making big decisions on the fly and responding to the crisis at hand any way they can. But that looks different for everyone.
“Zooming out a little, I am seeing three pathways [for startups] at this time,” said Matt Segneri, director of Harvard i-lab. “These are three Ps: propel, pivot and pause.”
Segneri said that for some startups, the outbreak is giving them the momentum to charge ahead.
“For some startups, this is rocket fuel for what they’re doing.”
Propel
Biotech is having a moment.
For many startups working in life sciences and biotechnology, the pandemic has come to be their do-or-die moment.
Take Rubix Life Sciences, for instance. The Lawrence-based life sciences startup, which builds predictive models to combat infectious and rare diseases, found its purpose during this time. Originally founded in 2016 with a mission to ensure patient diversity in clinical trials for drugs targeting infectious and rare diseases, Rubix’s purpose has changed since the outbreak.
In December 2019, CEO Reginald Swift recently told BostInno, the company was tasked with testing animal swabs that were COVID-19-positive by a municipal hospital in Hong Kong. From that point on, it’s been a rollercoaster ride for the company.
In a response to the pandemic, the startup retrofitted one of its pilot products — a real-time detection mask, built with an AI transceiver that can aggregate particle protein in an open air setting — to detect COVID-19. Shortly after, the company began developing a global symptom monitoring tool to be run in conjunction with hospitals and is concurrently developing an inhalation vaccine to fight the virus.
Swift will tell you it’s not been easy.
“It is a 24-7 operation,” Swift said. “I’ve never worked so hard since I started the company, but it's been a challenging step forward.”
According to Swift, the pandemic has revealed a new realm of possibilities for the startup’s future.
“COVID-19 might have just changed our business model,” Swift said. “We were thinking about product development in therapeutics, but we are better suited to provide a continuum of care by focusing on the connection between tools, policy and innovation.”
Swift said that his startup’s COVID-19-related work is already bringing in new prospects interested in learning more about the startup’s work.
“We want to be the virus chaser,” Swift said. “We want to identify the science, logistics and policy to chase infectious diseases, starting with creating a robust system to predict these.”
The startup is already at work, close to a dozen hours a day. Swift and his team are among a cadre of biotech employees considered by the state of Massachusetts to be essential workers during the pandemic.
David Raiser, founder and CEO of Aldatu Biosciences, a genotyping startup based in Watertown, has a similar story to tell. The six-year-old startup develops diagnostic tools for HIV and other infectious diseases but is now working exclusively on manufacturing tests for COVID-19.
Raiser and his team, a total of nine employees, are helping Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center test as many as 2,700 people a day for COVID-19.
“Our technology can be broadly applied to most infectious diseases testing,” Raiser said. “We were very well-positioned to do this [COVID-19 testing]. We have experience developing real-time PCR tests for pathogens, so we had everything in place. In a way, everything we had done really prepared us for this pivot.”
Even so, Raiser concurred that it was a sprint.
“The timeline was extremely accelerated,” Raiser said. “The time taken from design to have it up and running was about 18 days.”
When Raiser first learned about COVID-19, before it spiraled into a pandemic, he assumed small companies like his would be overshadowed by the “big guys like Roche.”
“The demand for testing is something we have never seen before,” Raiser said. “We were never going to keep up with this demand, but I am glad that we could have an immediate local impact.”
Just as the rising tide lifts all boats, capital infusion in biotech has been on the surge. This is true not only for public companies, including Gilead Sciences and Cambridge-based Moderna Therapeutics, but also for venture-backed private startups. In March alone, over 25 local biotech companies collectively raised more than $1 billion.
Pivot
Yet, it is amply obvious that biotech may be one of the exceptions.
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has left half a million people in the state, and at least 22 million nationwide, unemployed overnight. Startups weren’t shielded from this. In a span of four weeks, over a dozen Boston startups were forced to lay off or furlough workers, including unicorns ezCater, Toast and DataRobot.
“For some folks, [this] could mean a short-term pivot where they lean into the moment,” Segneri said. “For others, the headwinds and overall changes to the economic landscape could make them rethink what their model looks like.”
Soofa is one such local startup that had a lean-in moment. The six year-old, Cambridge-based company is behind smart benches and signs that display advertisements and information to pedestrians. This spring, it began displaying information about school closures, canceled events and the availability of civic services like libraries and transit.
That COVID-19-related pivot may have gotten Soofa closer to one of its longstanding goals: to help cities with urban planning. Today, Soofa’s sensors track pedestrian activity at its smart benches and signs, information the company can then send to city officials who are working to keep their residents from moving about to limit the spread of the virus.
For some startups, however, the pandemic couldn’t be more disruptive. Take Knoq, for instance. The Techstars alum behind door-to-door marketing campaigns had to make a temporary pivot, merely weeks after it changed its mission and purpose (along with its name; Knoq was previously known as Polis).
One of BostInno’s Startups to Watch in 2020, the company originally launched with a door-to-door canvassing app to help campaigners and politicians keep better track of their door-knocking campaigns. In early March, the company rebranded itself as Knoq to signal its complete pivot away from its political component to focus on sales and marketing. The company calls this new initiative “neighborhood outreach,” where it educates people about a suite of different products and services available to them.
As the measures like social distancing and stay-at-home advisories in Massachusetts got more stringent, Knoq CEO Kendall Hope Tucker decided to partner with local food banks to deliver food and groceries to those in need through a new initiative called "Knoq Cares."
“Before the COVID-19 crisis, Knoqers were going door-to-door and talking about new products,” Tucker told BostInno. “Things were going amazing for us four weeks ago, but because of safety concerns, we had to pull away Knoqers off the door, but I didn’t want to lay off any of our employees.”
The forbearance shown by startup founders to avoid layoffs at any cost is what Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, calls “principled entrepreneurship.”
“[You] could have been a casualty, but [you] look at it as an opportunity,” Aulet said. “Some people's business models will go belly-up; others will say, 'This is our time.' But this will basically change things significantly. There will be a pre- and post-COVID world.”
There are a number of entrepreneurs who fit Aulet’s description of “anti-fragile.”
Gordon Sacks, founder and CEO of 9MilesEast, a workplace wellness company and a local farm, is one of them.
Working out of a local farm based in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 9MilesEast brought weekly healthy meals to employees of several Boston companies, including iRobot, Carbon Black and Fidelity, until all of them went remote.
“Three weeks ago, I could have told you we served 100 Boston companies,” Sacks said. “[Healthy catered meals] was 60 percent of our revenue, and that went away overnight.”
But Sacks wasn’t just going to accept the “new normal.” When one avenue shut, another opened almost immediately.
“The stages of grief model is quite analogous here,” Sacks said. “At first, you justify to yourself that this will probably last a week. And soon, you realize nope, it might be a while.”
“The stages of grief model is quite analogous here,” Sacks said. “At first, you justify to yourself that this will probably last a week. And soon, you realize nope, it might be a while.”
Once Sacks realized things were going to look this way for a while, he channeled his team’s efforts towards a small but growing part of the business — meal kit subscriptions.
“We have been creative about serving our clients in other ways,” Sacks said. “We realized we have the infrastructure to deliver food to homes. We were fortunate to have good relations with employees of these companies so we were able to get in touch with them to offer them this.”
With the excess produce from the farm, Sacks was not only able to deliver meal kits to people in Boston, but also donate hundreds of meals to health care workers at Wellesley Hospital.
Pause
Unlike biotech and life sciences, there are some sectors that face a disproportionate negative impact — namely, travel and hospitality.
Layoffs at Boston tech darling Lola.com came in a week before Gov. Charlie Baker first issued the stay-at-home advisory on March 24. Layoffs at smart water dispenser startup Bevi and furloughs at corporate catering startup Alchemista followed shortly after.
“For some [startups], this is a moment of pause and conservation,” Segneri said. “[The startups] are in product development mode now, but they have conviction around long-term potential and are being mindful of other things that can provide a bridge to make it through.”
For Christine Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Alchemista, this rings true. The state of things at the company cascaded quickly. The startup went from interviewing 15 people to potentially hire to furloughing 90 percent of its staff.
On the heels of the cuts, Marcus told BostInno that she didn’t expect the pandemic to have such an impact on livelihoods. She also said the best thing she could do for her company was to use this time very effectively. Two weeks later, Marcus was already working on projects in her pipeline.
“It’s amazing how quickly people adjust to things,” Marcus said. “This is not ideal, but the positive side is that I see this as a time to pause and reflect. There are a lot of things I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but never had the time to flesh out.”
“It’s amazing how quickly people adjust to things,” Marcus said. “This is not ideal but the positive side is that I see this as a time to pause and reflect. There are a lot of things I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but never had the time to flesh out.”
Marcus is alluding to her startup’s new initiative: offering family-style home delivery weekly in collaboration with award-winning chefs. The experiment is beginning with a partnership with James Beard Award-winning Ken Oringer of Toro.
“It’s allowed us to take time and think about what we can do, brainstorm and run a trial,” Marcus said. “In a way, COVID is the impetus for all these things we are putting in place. “
Pulling through
The pandemic may have disrupted workflows and other ways of life, but the experience has also led people to look for silver linings on an uncertain horizon.
“The startup ecosystem in Boston and even globally is much stronger now,” Marcus said. “We are all so empathetic towards each other with strength and positivity.”
In some aspects, people are even trying to adjust and make the best of this "new normal."
“Entrepreneurship is a challenging path that can feel like a lonely road,” Segneri said. “And it’s about trying to foster relationships.”
That sentiment resonates among founders. Just as Rose hadn’t expected to grow attached to his chickens, he hadn’t expected a pandemic to be an unifying experience.
“The good thing about this is helping the community,” Rose said. “It took [a pandemic] to bring us all together.”
