Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling.

Each week on the show, we cover topics relating to building and growing startups that are ambitious, but use a sane approach. And this week's a little different. This is an episode I've been wanting to record for a few weeks, but I had recorded out several interviews that I wanted to get live. And I wanted to talk about this current crisis that we're facing. It's multifaceted. There's the COVID-19

health crisis. We're seeing essentially a bare market in the stock market. We very likely,

almost with certainty, are facing, you know, upcoming worldwide recession. So I wanted to record

this episode and I was thinking about how to do it. And then I got an email from James Kennedy, who's been a multi-time microcom

speaker, and you may know him from Procurement Express. And he emailed and said, my guess is the

community urgently needs a podcast on COVID-19. We haven't seen much change yet, but I'm worried

that this might be the calm before the storm. And so the way I'm thinking

about it today is as a startup founder, and I don't care if you're SaaS or you're a marketplace,

one-time sales, self-funded, indie funded, bootstrapped, venture funded. As a founder, what should your

mindset be and what should we all be doing to prepare? And I wanted to bring a guest on to kind of,

I can tend to be a little optimistic. I will say, it depends. My wife doesn't think so,

but I can be a little optimistic. And today's guest balances me out. I am not nearly as

bearish as Aynar Volset. And I think that that's a good thing. So Aynar, welcome back to the show.

This is your third appearance on Startups with the Rest of us.

Thanks for having me, Rep. Absolutely. So honestly, like Ainar is up to speed on a lot of the numbers.

He has a PhD in computer science, does a ton of data crunching and pays attention to all the news that's coming through. And so I actually go to him

when I'm trying to sanity check my assumptions about what's going on today and where we're headed.

And he weeks ago was saying, hey, this COVID thing's going to be a real thing. A lot of people

were saying that, but there was a lot of chaos of like, yeah, it's going to be bad. It's not

going to be bad. It's exponential and this and that. You know, there was, there was a lot of noise. And there were a few folks that I felt like, like, got this right. And Anner was, was on top of

that stuff. So I guess to start with, there's a lot to cover today. It's very likely going to be a

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