COVID-19
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Mobile app spending to double by 2024, despite economic impacts of COVID-19
The spread of COVID-19 has already had a significant impact on the mobile app industry, and that will continue in the years to come. According to a revised 2020-2024 market forecast from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, a sizable increase in app downloads for industries like remote work and education will lead to a large surge in app installs for the early part of 2020 and beyond, despite other decreases in downloads for ridesharing and fast food apps. However, the expected economic downturn resulting from COVID-19 will somewhat dampen revenue growth in the years ahead, the report found. Despite this, mobile app spending worldwide will continue to grow and will even double by 2024.
COVID-19’s impact on app stores’ revenue
Though COVID-19 is having an impact on the app stores’ revenue, growth remains strong.
Worldwide consumer spending in mobile apps is projected to reach $171 billion by 2024, which is more than double the $85 billion from 2019. This total, however, is about $3 billion (or 2%) less than the forecast the firm had released prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Still, it’s notable that even the slowest-growing regions on both app stores, Apple’s App Store and Google Play, will see revenue that’s over 80% higher than their 2019 levels by the year 2024.
The app stores will also hit several milestones during the next five years.
For starters, global spending in mobile apps will surpass $100 billion for the first time in 2020, growing at approximately 20% year-over-year to hit $102 billion.
Remarkably, the forecast also predicts that revenue from non-game mobile apps is expected to surpass that of mobile games for the first time by 2024, driven by the growth in subscriptions — particularly Entertainment, Social Networking, Music and Lifestyle app subscriptions.
By this time, mobile games will reach $97.8 billion, or around 41% of total consumer spending. The App Store will account for a sizable chunk of that spending, with ~$57 billion in mobile game revenue in 2024 versus Google Play’s ~$41 billion.
The App Store, not as surprisingly, will also maintain its sizable lead in consumer spending through 2024, accounting for 67% of total revenue across both it and Google Play. It will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.8% compared with Google Play’s 13.2%.
The top five countries by revenue will remain unchanged through 2024: China, U.S., Japan, Great Britain and Taiwan. China will continue to be a top market, despite regulations on app and game publishing, and will reach $35 billion in App Store spending alone by 2024.
COVID-19’s impact on downloads
In terms of app downloads, the forecast predicts a lasting lift from the impacts of COVID-19.
By 2024, downloads will reach 183.7 billion, up 9% from the earlier forecast that came out before COVID-19 that had initially accounted for 7 billion fewer installs.
Much of this download growth is happening this year, when first-time app downloads are poised to reach 140.3 billion, up 22% from 2019.
In addition to increases in non-game apps — like education, grocery delivery or remote work apps — mobile game downloads will grow 30% year-over-year in 2020 to reach 56.2 billion, compared with 10.4% growth between 2018 and 2019.
By 2024, mobile games will account for 41% of new installs, or 74.8 billion.
The early indication is that China will see a massive increase in downloads in 2020, particularly in the Games and Education categories. This follows a drop in downloads over the past few years, due to government regulatory practices, like the games licensing freeze.
The U.S. will see a similar spike in downloads this year, also due to COVID-19. For 2020, this will lead to a 27% year-over-year increase in downloads. But by 2021 and in the years that follow, growth will settle around 7% annually from 2021 to 2024 in this market.
During the forecast time frame, download growth will slow in India and Brazil, as the markets become more saturated, while growing in Latin America (up 58%) and Asian markets outside of China (up 82%).
Another notable milestone may take place in 2022, when the U.S. pulls ahead of China in terms of App Store downloads to reach number one. The U.S. has been narrowing the gap between the two in recent years, from 3.5 billion in 2017 to 1.1 billion in 2019. It will continue to close the gap during parts of 2020 and 2021, as well.
Other top countries for downloads in 2024, besides the U.S. and China, include Japan, Great Britain and Russia.
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Xerox drops $34B HP takeover bid amid COVID-19 uncertainty
Xerox announced today that it would be dropping its hostile takeover bid of HP. The drama began last fall with a flurry of increasingly angry letters between the two companies, and confrontational actions from Xerox, including an attempt to take over the HP board that had rejected its takeover overtures.
All that came crashing to the ground today when Xerox officially announced it was backing down amid worldwide economic uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also indicated it was dropping its bid to take over the board.
“The current global health crisis and resulting macroeconomic and market turmoil caused by COVID-19 have created an environment that is not conducive to Xerox continuing to pursue an acquisition of HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) (‘HP’). Accordingly, we are withdrawing our tender offer to acquire HP and will no longer seek to nominate our slate of highly qualified candidates to HP’s Board of Directors,” the company said in a statement.
As for HP, it said it was strong financially and would continue to drive shareholder value, regardless of the outcome:
We remain firmly committed to driving value for HP shareholders. HP is a strong company with market leading positions across Personal Systems, Print, and 3D Printing & Digital Manufacturing. We have a healthy cash position and balance sheet that enable us to navigate unanticipated challenges such as the global pandemic now before us, while preserving strategic optionality for the future.
The bid never made a lot of sense. Xerox is a much smaller company, with a market cap of around $4 billion compared with HP with a market cap of almost $25 billion. It was truly a case of the canary trying to eat the cat.
Yet Xerox continued to insist today, even while admitting defeat, that it would have been better to combine the two companies, something HP never felt was realistic. HP questioned the ability of Xerox to come up with such a large sum of money, and, if it did, would it be financially stable enough to pull off a deal like this.
Yet even as recently as last month, Xerox increased the bid from $22 to $24 per share in an effort to entice shareholders to bite. It had previously threatened to bypass the board and go directly to shareholders before attempting to replace the board altogether.
HP didn’t like the hostility inherent in the bid or any of the subsequent moves Xerox made to try to force a deal. Last month, HP offered its investors billions in give-backs in an effort to convince them to reject the Xerox bid. As it turned out, the drama simply fizzled out in the middle of a worldwide crisis.
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Amid shift to remote work, application performance monitoring is IT’s big moment
In recent weeks, millions have started working from home, putting unheard-of pressure on services like video conferencing, online learning, food delivery and e-commerce platforms. While some verticals have seen a marked reduction in traffic, others are being asked to scale to new heights.
Services that were previously nice to have are now necessities, but how do organizations track pressure points that can add up to a critical failure? There is actually a whole class of software to help in this regard.
Monitoring tools like Datadog, New Relic and Elastic are designed to help companies understand what’s happening inside their key systems and warn them when things may be going sideways. That’s absolutely essential as these services are being asked to handle unprecedented levels of activity.
At a time when performance is critical, application performance monitoring (APM) tools are helping companies stay up and running. They also help track root causes should the worst case happen and they go down, with the goal of getting going again as quickly as possible.
We spoke to a few monitoring vendor CEOs to understand better how they are helping customers navigate this demand and keep systems up and running when we need them most.
IT’s big moment
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Axonius nabs $58M for its cybersecurity-focused network asset management platform
As companies get to grips with a wider (and, lately, more enforced) model of remote working, a startup that provides a platform to help track and manage all the devices that are accessing networked services — an essential component of cybersecurity policy — has raised a large round of growth funding. Axonius, a New York-based company that lets organizations manage and track the range of computing-based assets that are connecting to their networks — and then plug that data into some 100 different cybersecurity tools to analyse it — has picked up a Series C of $58 million, money it will use to continue investing in its technology (its R&D offices are in Tel Aviv, Israel) and expanding its business overall.
The round is being led by prolific enterprise investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with previous backers OpenView, Bessemer Venture Partners, YL Ventures, Vertex, and WTI also participating in the round.
Dean Sysman, CEO and Co-Founder at Axonius, said in an interview that the company is not disclosing its valuation, but for some context, the company has now raised $95 million, and PitchBook noted that in its last round, a $20 million Series B in August 2019, it had a post-money valuation of $110 million.
The company has had a huge boost in business in the last year, however — especially right now, not a surprise for a company that helps enable secure remote working, at a time when many businesses have gone remote in an effort to follow government policies encouraging social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. As of this month, Axonius has seen customer growth increase 910% compared to a year ago.
Sysman said that this round had been in progress for some time ahead of the announcement being made, but the final stages of closing it were all done remotely last week, which has become something of a new normal in venture deals at the moment.
“We’ve all been staying at home for the last few weeks,” he said in an interview. “The crisis is not helping with deals. It’s making everything more complex for sure. But specifically for us there wasn’t a major difference in the process.”
Sysman said that he first thought of the idea for Axonius when at a previous organization — his experience includes several years with the Israeli Defense Forces, as well as time at a startup called Integrity Project, acquired by Mellanox — where he realised the organization itself, and all of its customers, never actually knew how many devices accessed their network, which is a crucial first step in being able to secure any network.
“Every CIO I met I would ask, do you know how many devices you have on your network? And the answer was either ‘I don’t know,’ or big range, which is just another way of saying, ‘I don’t know,’” Sysman said. “It’s not because they’re not doing their jobs but because it’s just a tough problem.”
Part of the reason, he added, is because IP addresses are not precise enough, and de-duplicating and correlating numbers is a gargantuan task, especially in the current climate of people using not just a multitude of work-provided devices, but a number of their own.
That was what prompted Sysman and his cofounders Ofri Shur and Avidor Bartov to build the algorithms that formed the basis of what Axonius is today. It’s not based on behavioural data as some cybersecurity systems are, but something that Sysman describes as “a deterministic algorithm that knows and builds a unique set of identifiers that can be based on anything, including timestamp, or cloud information. We try to use every piece of data we can.”
The resulting information becomes a very valuable asset in itself that can then be used across a number of other pieces of security software to search for inconsistencies in use (bringing in the behavioural aspect of cybersecurity) or other indicators of malicious activity — specifically following the company’s motto, “Know Your Assets, Identify Gaps, and Automate Security Policy Enforcement” — even as data itself may seem a little pedestrian on its own.
“We like to call ourselves the Toyota Camry of cybersecurity,” Sysman said. “It’s nothing exotic in a world of cutting-edge AI and advanced tech. However it’s a fundamental thing that people are struggling with, and it is what everyone needs. Just like the Camry.”
For now, Axonius is following the route of providing a platform that can interconnect with a number of other security products — currently numbering around 100 — rather than building those tools itself, or acquiring them to bring them in house. That could be one option for how potentially it might evolve over time, however.
For now, the idea of being agnostic to those specific tools and providing a platform just to identify and manage assets is a formula that has already seen a lot of traction with customers — which include companies like Schneider Electric, the New York Times, and Landmark Medical, among others — as well as investors.
“Any enterprise CISO’s top priority, with unwavering consistency, is asset discovery and management. You can’t protect a device if you don’t know it exists.” said Arsham Menarzadeh, general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement. “Axonius integrates into any security and management product to show customers their full asset landscape and automate policy enforcement. Their integrated approach and remediation capabilities position them to become the operating system and single source of truth for security and IT teams. We’re excited to play a part in helping them scale.”
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Despite pandemic, gaming is well-positioned to withstand recession
Efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 have led to a global economic downturn, but the gaming industry is booming.
With hundreds of millions of people sequestered in their homes, game usage has spiked. And while the economic repercussions will persist after people cease physical distancing, gaming is positioned to fare well during a recession.
Video game usage increased 75% during peak hours
Video game usage during peak hours increased 75% in the first week many Americans began staying home, according to Verizon data. Game distribution platform Steam set a record for peak concurrent users (more than 20 million) on March 16 without any notable new releases driving demand. Gaming chat platform Discord saw its servers go down briefly last week even after the company increased capacity by more than 20% to handle surging usage.
According to Siamc Kamalie, manager of hedge fund Skycatcher, “average time spent per user on mobile games grew 41% during Chinese New Year in 2020 versus 2019, and was up 18% versus the week prior to Chinese New Year in 2020.” (Chinese New Year is when widespread stay-at-home orders began in China.)
All of the gaming industry professionals I’ve spoken to over the last week noted increased popularity of their games, though most were wary of sharing their strong performance publicly, given the unfortunate circumstances.
People don’t just turn to games for entertainment; especially when in-person interactions are restricted and most of the most popular games are multiplayer in one form or another — games also serve as social hangout spots.
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Local services marketplace Thumbtack lays off 250 employees
Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta announced in a blog post today that the company has laid off 250 employees.
Much has been written about the impact that COVID-19 and the resulting social distancing/shelter in place measures are having on small businesses (and the steps that internet platforms like Facebook and Yelp — which, after all, make money from small businesses advertising — are taking to help).
Similarly, Zappacosta said the local services that Thumbtack showcases in its marketplace are also seeing anything from a “dramatic decline” to an “outright collapse.” Apparently the company’s business has fallen 61% in San Francisco, 55% in Detroit and 50% in New York City.
Thumbtack raised a $150 million round of funding last year, but Zappacosta said, “No business operates with enough of a buffer to sustain prolonged revenue declines of 40%+ without making radical changes.”
Those changes include reduced marketing, a hiring freeze and 25% salary reductions for executives. (Zappacosta said he will not take any salary at all, starting today.) And it also includes big layoffs.
Laid off workers will receive a severance package with both “cash and equity components,” Zappacosta said. He also said Thumbtack is doing what it can to help its service providers, such as “building features that support more remote work with customers — like video consults for a sink replacement that would typically be done onsite.”
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Niantic is updating Pokémon GO and other titles to support indoor gaming
Niantic, the development company behind popular AR mobile games Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, is adapting its titles to support at-home gaming in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Typically, Niantic’s games have encouraged people to go outdoors, explore their world and connect with others in real life as they played. But with government lockdowns and home quarantines under way, it’s no longer safe to play these games as originally intended.
The company says it will now prioritize making changes to its AR titles to allow people to play inside and around their own homes.
For example, Niantic’s Adventure Sync function will now track your indoor steps as you do things like run on a treadmill, clean your house or make other indoor movements and activities. It’s also enhancing the games’ social features to allow friends to stay in touch virtually, and soon take on Raid Battles together while staying at home.
Instead of discouraging virtual movement inside the game, as Niantic has in the past, players will be able to virtually visit and share memories about their favorite real-world places. And this summer, Niantic will re-imagine its plans for live events to allow players to participate without having to leave home.
These updates aren’t just those made for the consideration of players’ needs during this time of crisis — they’re also necessary changes to ensure Niantic continues to operate both during the pandemic and beyond.
Niantic’s live events have driven big business to the cities that hosted them — nearly $250 million in tourism revenue in 2019, it once said. It also served as a mechanism to drive its own revenues and keep players engaged over time. The plan had worked — Pokémon GO has continued to grow, even though it’s not the hyped-up global phenomenon it was at launch. Last year was its highest-grossing year ever, a report from Sensor Tower found, as the game pulled in nearly $900 million in player spending in 2019. Much of the revenue was due to the game’s significant updates and real-world events, the report noted.
These latest updates aren’t the first changes Niantic has made in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. It had already modified gameplay in Pokémon GO to encourage users to stay inside — including by rewarding players who caught their Pokémon while inside, for example. It also just launched a new form of gameplay called the GO Battle League, which can be played from home, with reduced walking requirements and discounted select items so players wouldn’t have to walk as far to catch Pokémon, among other things.
In Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the company increased the amount of content that’s near players on the map, so they could progress in the game without traveling far. Potions were also tuned to support people playing from home.
And in both titles, gifts were adjusted to include more helpful content throughout each day.
In Niantic’s first game, Ingress, it has made a few changes, too. Ingress Portals are now tuned to encourage at-home play and it has reduced the need to interact with multiple Portals. Several other changes make it easier to play the game without having to walk around as much.
Niantic has not yet gone so far as to fully eliminate the use of outdoor walks as a means of gameplay, however. Instead, it still encourages people to get outside — in areas where it’s permitted by local authorities to go for walks.
Though Niantic had made earlier changes to its games due to the outbreak, today’s announcement represents a more formal strategy for its business. It also lays out a detailed roadmap of what Niantic has in store. Not all its new features are live. Instead, Niantic says they’ll roll out in the “coming days and weeks,” without committing to an exact time frame.
“We created Niantic with a mission to help people get outside, exercise, and explore the world, with the ultimate goal of helping people connect with others. Today we support a global community of hundreds of millions of people who look to our games for regular entertainment and an opportunity to get outside and connect with friends,” said Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke, on the company blog.
“We have always believed that our games can include elements of indoor play that complement the outdoor, exercise and explore DNA of what we build. Now is the time for us to prioritize this work, with the key challenge of making playing indoors as exciting and innovative as our outdoor gameplay,” he added.
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Amid concerns that startups could be left out of COVID-19 bailout, investors step up lobbying
The massive bailout package that the U.S. government passed last week to stave off an economic collapse from measures put in place to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic is giving out billions to American small businesses. But startups that received venture capital money could be left out.
So the nation’s investment organizations and lobbying firms are stepping up their efforts to get clarification around the specifics of the loan programs established under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Their efforts could mean the difference between some of those billions in loans for small businesses going to startup companies or a whole swath of companies left falling through the cracks.
There appear to be two issues for startup entrepreneurs with the different types of loans that companies can receive.
The first is the “Affiliation Rules” that the Small Business Administration (SBA) uses to determine who is eligible for loans. Under the rules, companies could be required to count all of the employees at every company their investors have backed as part of their employee count — pushing the individual companies above the employee size threshold.
“Regardless of the purpose of these rules for traditional 7(a) loans, allowing the rules to exclude some of our country’s most innovative startups in this new loan program is manifestly contrary to the intent of the legislation: to help small businesses keep their lights on and their employees working despite the double financial squeeze created by the economic and financial market downturns,” according to a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza by the NVCA and other startup investment organizations. “Without clear guidance enabling startups and small businesses supported by equity investment to access the loan facility, many of these startups may be rendered ineligible.”
These issues around affiliation and 7(a) loans aren’t the only ones with which startups may contend. Startups could also be eligible for Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL). These loans are part of a $10 billion program within the CARES Act that is also overseen by the SBA. However, these loans have to come with a personal guarantee if they’re over $200,000. And that requirement may be too onerous for startups.
EIDLs less than $200,000 don’t require a personal guarantee, nor do they require real estate as collateral, and will take a general security interest in business property, according to an article in Forbes. Borrowers for EIDLs can take an emergency cash grant of $10,000 that can be forgiven if spent on things like paid leave, maintaining payroll, increased costs due to supply chain disruptions, mortgage or lease payments or repaying obligations that cannot be met due to revenue loss, according to Forbes.
These loans apply to sole proprietors and independent contractors and employee stock ownership plans with fewer than 500 employees, Forbes wrote. The emergency loans are available to companies that don’t qualify for additional funds — and are based on self-certification and a basic credit score, Alex Contreras, director of Preparedness, Communication, & Coordination at the Office of Disaster Assistance for the SBA told Forbes.
While the EIDLs may be interesting, the biggest issue is the lack of clarity around affiliation rules, Justin Field, NVCA’s senior vice president of government affairs, tells me.
“These rules will make it more difficult for small businesses with equity investors to even understand if they can access the program,” he says. “It’s a tough situation… If you have these non-bright-lined rules it’s going to be tough for anybody that has a company that has minority investors.”
There could be significant implications for the U.S. economy if these startups are ineligible for loans, the NVCA wrote. Companies backed by venture investors are involved in the development of technologies of strategic interest to the U.S. in the long term and are currently working on tools to diagnose, track, monitor and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in the short term.
“Bottom line: not providing this critical support to startups now will cause both short-term pain and long-term consequences that linger for years,” the organizations wrote. “In 2019 alone, 2.27 million jobs were created in the U.S. by startups across our nation. According to the job site Indeed, 98 percent of firms have fewer than 100 employees and between small and medium sized companies, they jointly employ 55 percent of employees. When implementing the CARES Act, we urge the SBA to issue guidance that makes clear affiliation rules do not arbitrarily exclude our most innovative startups.”
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SMB loans platform Kabbage to furlough a ‘significant’ number of staff, close office in Bangalore
Another tech unicorn is feeling the pinch of doing business during the coronavirus pandemic. Today, Kabbage, the SoftBank-backed lending startup that uses machine learning to evaluate loan applications for small and medium businesses, is furloughing a “significant number” of its U.S. team of 500 employees, according to a memo sent to staff and seen by TechCrunch, in the wake of drastically changed business conditions for the company. It is also completely closing down its office in Bangalore, India, and executive staff is taking a “considerable” pay cut.
The announcement is effective immediately and was made to staff earlier today by way of a video conference call, as the whole company is currently remote working in the current conditions.
Kabbage is not disclosing the full number of staff that are being affected by the news (if you know, you can contact us anonymously). It’s also not putting a time frame on how long the furlough will last, but it’s going to continue providing benefits to affected employees. The intention is to bring them back on when things shift again.
“We realize this is a shock to everyone. No business in the world could have prepared for what has transpired these past few weeks and everyone has been impacted,” co-founder and CEO Rob Frohwein wrote in the memo. “The economic fallout of this virus has rattled the small business community to which Kabbage is directly linked. It’s painful to say goodbye to our friends and colleagues in Bangalore and to furlough a number of U.S. team members. While the duration of the furlough remains uncertain, please bear in mind that the full intention of furloughing is temporary. We simply have no clear idea of how long quarantining or its reverberations in the economy will last.”
Kabbage’s predicament underscores the complicated and stressful calculus faced by tech companies built around providing services to SMBs, or fintech (or both, as in the case of Kabbage).
SMBs are struggling right now in the U.S.: many operate on very short terms when it comes to finances, and closing their businesses (or seeing a drastic reduction in custom) means they will not have the cash to last 10 days without revenue, “and we’re already well past that window,” Frohwein noted in his memo.
In Kabbage’s case, that means not only are SMBs not able to be evaluated and approved for normal loans at the moment, but SMBs that already have loans out are likely facing delinquencies.
The decision to furlough is hard but in relative terms it’s good news: it was made at the eleventh hour after a period when Kabbage was considering layoffs instead.
The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in equity and debt, and it was in a healthy state before the coronavirus outbreak. The memo notes that the “board and our top investors are aware of the challenges we are facing and have committed to helping us through this period,” although it doesn’t specify what that means in terms of financial support for the business, and whether that support would have been there for the business as-is.
The shift to furlough from layoffs came in the wake of an announcement yesterday by Steven Mnuchin, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, who clarified that “any FDIC bank, any credit union, any fintech lender will be authorized” to make loans to small businesses as a part of the U.S. government’s CARE Act, the giant stimulus package that included nearly $350 billion in loan guarantees for small businesses.
While that provides much-needed relief for these businesses, the implementation of it — the Small Business Administration has already received nearly 1 million claims for disaster-relief loans since the crisis started — has been and is going to be a challenge.
That effectively opens up an opportunity for Kabbage and companies like it to revive and reorient some of its business. (Its USP was always that the AI it uses, which draws on a number of different sources of online data for the business, means a more creative, faster and more accurate assessment of loan applications than what traditional banks typically provide.) Kabbage said it is in “deep discussions” with the Treasury Department, the White House and the Small Business Administration to help expedite applications for aid.
While loans still make up the majority of Kabbage’s business, the company has been making a move to diversify its services, and in recent times it has made acquisitions and launched new services around market intelligence insights and payments services. While there has certainly been a jump in e-commerce, overall the tightening economy will have a chilling effect on the wider market, and it will be worth seeing what happens with other tech companies that focus on loans, as well as adjacent financial services.
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Anorak’s Greg Castle on early-stage investing during a crisis
As the venture landscape adjusts to the COVID-19 pandemic and seismic shifts in public markets, early-stage VCs are reassessing which bets they’re making, along with questions they’re asking of founders who are exploring bleeding-edge technology.
Anorak’s Greg Castle
Anorak Ventures is a small seed-investment firm that bets on emerging tech like AR/VR, machine learning and robotics. I recently hopped on a Zoom call with founder Greg Castle to talk about what he’s seen recently in seed investing and how the sector is responding to the crisis. Castle was an early investor in Oculus; his other bets at Anorak include Against Gravity, 6D.ai and Anduril.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: Has this pandemic affected the types of companies that you’re looking at?
Greg Castle: From my experience as an investor thus far, being reactive as an investor and looking at “hot” areas has a lot of pitfalls to be mindful of. I think a lot of the areas that excite me as an investor could benefit from what’s going on here, those areas including robotics, automation, immersive entertainment and immersive computing.
Just generally, do you feel like a recession is likely to negatively impact emerging tech more so than other areas?
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